Venture out to the Wolds on a sunny summer day and the beauty of the gentle rolling hills and picturesque valleys will captivate you. However, the threat of werewolves, vampires, and dragons isn’t usually the first thing on your mind.
Despite this, East Yorkshire’s Wold Newton Triangle is teeming with tales of supernatural beings and strange occurrences.
While many tales of local folklore may be familiar, it’s the sheer number of these stories in such a compact region that raises eyebrows.
The village of Wold Newton lies at the heart of this enigmatic zone, with the North Sea marking its eastern border, stretching from Gristhorpe and Filey Brigg up to Flamborough and Bridlington along the A165 coast road.
The mysterious zone extends south alongside the old Woldgate Roman road from Bridlington towards Stamford Bridge and York.
Map of the Wold Newton Triangle
(Image: Charles Christian)
With such an abundance of myths and legends concentrated here, no other place in England can boast such lore. One of the more chilling accounts involves werewolf encounters.
Take, for instance, a misty night back in the 1960s when a lorry driver, journeying along a secluded road through the Wolds, spotted a pair of glowing red eyes in the darkness before a “wolf-like creature” lunged at his windscreen, reports Hull Live.
Charles Christian, an author, shared with the Hull Daily Mail in 2015 that the Wold Newton Triangle is a hotbed for strange occurrences. “That part of the country was once infested with wolves,” Mr Christian, who penned ‘A Travel Guide To Yorkshire’s Weird Wolds’, revealed some of the area’s most terrifying tales.
“Up until the 18th century, there was still a wolf bounty for anyone killing them. It was known for the wolves to dig up corpses from graveyards. From that sprung the idea that they are supernatural beings, who took the form of werewolves.”
The legend of a werewolf named Old Stinker – a large, hairy beast with red eyes and foul breath – is one such tale.
Old Stinker made headlines as recently as 2016 following reports of a sighting at Barmston Drain in Hull, well outside the triangle, indicating that fears persist. A woman claimed the creature was carrying a German Shepherd in its mouth and stood at a towering 8ft tall.
“When I was a child, I remember someone saying they would not drive along the road from Flixton to Bridlington after dark because of those fears,” Mr Christian recalled.
“When people would glimpse what they thought was the rear lights of a car in front, it would instead reveal itself to be the red eyes of a wolf.”
The issue was acknowledged as far back as AD 937 when King Athelstan permitted the construction of a hostel to offer travellers refuge from these attacks.
Anyone travelling through those parts would be especially cautious during Wolf-monath – January’s ancient Saxon name, a time when wolves, deprived of easy livestock prey, might resort to hunting humans. “You were more likely to be eaten then than at any other time of year,” Charles said.
Nearby the rise known as Saxton Hill, an inn named Spital Ho was erected in North Yorkshire with the sole purpose of shielding sojourners from the ravages of lycanthropic beasts.
Rumours had it that the wolves of Spital Ho possessed such cunning that some whispered they were once humans who had gained the frightful capability to metamorphose into lupine forms under the cloak of darkness.
Let’s swap werewolves for another eerie legend – the tale of a wailing cranium. Burton Agnes Hall, constructed by Sir Henry Griffith between 1601 and 1610, became the consuming passion of his youngest daughter Anne Griffith.
Painting of Anne Griffiths, of Burton Agnes Hall, whose screaming skull is in hidden somewhere in the hall
She watched over its construction each day, besotted with the edifice. Tragedy struck when Anne was violently assaulted by ruthless highwaymen, leaving her fatally wounded and clinging to life.
Upon her deathbed, Anne made a morbid request to her sisters: to entomb her head within the walls of Burton Agnes Hall. She warned them starkly that any effort to separate her skull from her beloved home would inflict such a furor within the household that its occupants would be driven forth.
Yet, after Anne passed away, her sisters were too dismayed by her bizarre plea and, concluding it to be mere fevered fantasies, decided instead to lay her to rest in the local churchyard.
Eerie occurrences at Burton Agnes Hall ceased abruptly when workers exhumed Anne’s body and placed her skull in the house. The strange phenomena returned with a fury when a sceptical maid tossed the skull into a manure wagon, the horses freezing until it was retrieved.
Any attempts to rid the house of the skull led to bizarre incidents. Initially kept in a hall cabinet, the skull was eventually secreted away by an owner who built it into the hall’s structure sometime in the early 19th century; its precise location is unknown today.
Another enigmatic site within the so-called triangle is Rudston, claimed to be England’s longest continually inhabited village with history stretching back 3,500 to 4,000 years.
All Saint’s Church in Rudston
At its heart lies a towering monolith, worshipped by the ancient Beaker people and shrouded in dark legends, including one that describes it as a demonic thunderbolt flung by the Devil at a nearby church.
Locals were known to circle the monolith adorned in animal skull headgear. “In its day, with everyone living in single-storey dwellings, it would have been like seeing the London Eye,” said Mr Christian to the Hull Daily Mail.
“It was a focal point in the way Stonehenge was, it was such an important ritual site.”
The Gypsey Race, a mysterious watercourse flowing through the Wold Newton Triangle to the sea at Bridlington, has long captivated the Ancient Britons. “Because it runs through chalk, and it rises with heavy rain, one day there would be an empty bank, and the next day a torrent,” explained Charles.
“As the Ancient Britons didn’t know much about geology, they thought of it as a mystical phenomenon – the Waters of Woe.”
The Gypsey Race chalk stream and East Gate bridge at Rudston
(Image: Dr Patty McAplin)
He added: “It is an element of people being wise with hindsight, but it was said the waters would run the year before a major disaster.”
Charles noted that the Gypsey Race flowed before significant events such as the start of the English Civil War, the beheading of King Charles I, the Great Fire of London, and both World Wars. “Of course, it could be coincidence, but it is more fun to think there is a connection.”
The tales of the Gypsey Race have intrigued many, including authors like William Parvus, born in Bridlington, who later became known as William of Newburgh.
A monk who penned the History of English Affairs until his death in 1198, William was among the first English writers to describe revenants – the living dead.
“Some of them were like vampires, others like zombies,” Charles remarked. He recounted a story of two villagers from the north who tracked down one of these creatures, drained its blood, dismembered it, and then burned it.
One of the eerie beings William described emerged from his grave and attempted to climb into bed with his understandably distressed wife. After that, the creature began to roam in broad daylight.
“He thus became,” wrote William, “a serious nuisance.”
Of course, fairies also feature prominently in the myriad of fantastical stories surrounding the Wold Newton Triangle. An ancient East Yorkshire burial mound near Burton Fleming is fabled to be a haunt for inebriated fairies.
Willy Howe, which dates back to between 2,400 and 1,500BC and is believed to be a burial mound, yielded no bodies during partial excavations in the 19th Century. However, it’s speculated that the mound may still hold undiscovered archaeological treasures, including an unmovable chest of riches and a gift from a fairy bride.
The barrow also serves as the backdrop for a folk tale recorded by William of Newburgh in the 12th Century, which recounts an encounter between an unwitting man and a group of fairies. According to the chronicler, the man stumbled upon the reveling fairies at night, who invited him to drink with them.
Instead, he poured away the drink and absconded with the cup, prompting a chase by the fairies. The cup reportedly ended up in the possession of King Henry I, the fourth son of William the Conqueror, who reigned over England from 1100 to 1135.
Just last year, Historic England struck a deal with the landowner to clear the undergrowth and establish new pathways.
Historic England has plans to install signs along the new paths and an information panel at the late Bronze Age barrow, complete with a drawing of its original appearance. A particularly dramatic tale hails from North Yorkshire, where it’s believed a dragon once terrorised the locals in Filey.
The villagers tricked the dragon into eating a sticky cake called parkin, which forced him to jump into the sea to clean his teeth. Seizing the opportunity, the villagers ambushed and drowned the dragon.
Legend has it that the rocks near Filey Brigg are the fossilised bones of this dragon. But why are the small villages of Wold Newton and Rudston at the centre of this curious triangle?
There are two possible explanations.
Wold Newton was hit by a meteorite in 1795, one of the largest to strike England. A monument now marks the event in the village.
Monument marking the meteorites that landed in Wold Newton in 1795
The warm, smoking rock weighed 56lbs and is now housed at the Natural History Museum in London. The second explanation relates to ley lines, which, despite scientific scepticism, many believe in.
Rudston is considered one of the most mystical locations in the country due to being the endpoint for five ley lines.
Ley lines, straight alignments drawn between various historical structures like standing stones, are believed to mark ‘earth energies’ or potent magnetic fields. Some enthusiasts even suggest they possess psychic power or are connected to extra-terrestrial and UFO encounters.
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