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Byard’s Leap
The hamlet of Byard’s Leap is named for a local story about a witch called Old Meg, who lives in a cave from where she terrorises locals and curses their crops. She is challenged by either a villager, a knight or a retired soldier called Black Jim, who promises to slay her. He requires a…
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The Black Lady of Bradley Woods
The ghost of a crying woman in a black cloak and hood, the Black Lady, is said to roam these woodlands. Her harrowing tale is as follows…
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Tom Otter
A horrifying true story that fed macabre imaginations and thus became also a legend. Tom Otter, Nottinghamshire native and navvy working in Lincoln, made local woman Mary Kirkham pregnant in 1805. He already had a wife and child back home, but the authorities who forced them to marry in a ‘knob-stick wedding’…
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The Bolingbroke Hare
In the seventeenth century, stories abounded that a hare at Bolingbroke Castle was a transformed witch who had once been imprisoned there. In many accounts, the hare in question is white…
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The Vanished Bugler
It used to be received wisdom that a subterranean passage ran between Kirkstead Abbey and Tattershall Castle, nearly three miles to the south.
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The Lindsey Leopard
Sightings of the Lindsey Leopard have mainly been in the north, hence the name. Big cat sightings (or imagined sightings) are common in other places too, of course, but there does appear to be credence to some of these sightings, which began in the 1990s…
Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project 