Passed Down the Cut

As the nights draw in, Steve Elliott considers the waterways’ tradition of supernatural storytelling – and why these old tales are worth keeping alive

Autumn is upon us, the nights are drawing in and Halloween is approaching. It’s a time of year when the waterways take on a rather different character. Tunnels seem a little darker, wooded cuttings more enclosed and a rural mooring can feel considerably more isolated once daylight has disappeared.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the waterways have accumulated such a rich collection of ghost stories over the centuries. But these tales amount to more than a few spooky legends attached to old tunnels and bridges. They were once part of the oral tradition of the waterways, passed between generations of working boaters and carried around the system along with coal, timber and other cargoes.

The trouble with an oral tradition, of course, is that very little of it gets written down. We know a great deal about the boats working families lived on, the cargoes they carried and the routes they travelled, but inevitably much less about the stories they told one another.

Tales from the cut

There are occasional glimpses. In the December 1977 issue of WW, former working boatman Tom Baxter recalled boaters swapping ghost stories whenever they gathered in pubs. Significantly, he maintained that these tales were generally associated with something that really had happened on the cut. A drowned boatman, a fatal accident or some other tragedy might, over successive retellings, acquire a supernatural dimension.

A surprising number of those stories have survived. There is the famous ‘Monkey Man’ of the Shropshire Union Canal, a large, black, hairy creature said to haunt Bridge 39 in Grub Street Cutting. When British Waterways appealed for canal ghost stories in 2002, a boater came forward claiming to have seen just such a creature staring down at him from the bridge during a holiday in the 1980s.

Elsewhere there are headless women, phantom working boats, drowned navvies and mysterious figures in tunnels. Harecastle has its ‘Kidsgrove Boggart’, while at Tyrley Locks the resident spirit is supposedly rather more useful, having been known to close lock gates after passing boats. If such ghosts exist, perhaps the Canal & River Trust could arrange for a few more.

Strange stories

There is also a fascinating supernatural thread running through the beginnings of the waterways revival too.

Tom Rolt, whose book Narrow Boat did so much to awaken interest in the declining canal system, was an accomplished writer of supernatural fiction. His collection Sleep No More: Railway, Canal and Other Stories of the Supernatural appeared in 1948.

His fellow Inland Waterways Association founder Robert Aickman was even more immersed in the genre. Today he is recognised as one of the finest writers of what he called ‘strange stories’, and later edited the first eight volumes of the influential Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories.

Then there was Elizabeth Jane Howard, another important figure in the early IWA, who collaborated with Aickman on the 1951 collection We Are for the Dark. Her contribution, the short story Three Miles Up, concerns two men whose canal holiday becomes increasingly unsettling – and is one of the relatively rare occasions when the strange atmosphere of the waterways found its way into serious supernatural fiction.

Perhaps it isn’t entirely coincidental that some of the people who responded most strongly to Britain’s neglected canals were also attracted to ghost stories.  

We rightly devote enormous effort to preserving the physical heritage of the waterways: boats, locks, bridges, warehouses and mileposts. Their less tangible heritage deserves remembering too.

This is an extract from an article that appears in Waterways World November 2026