It’s spooky season again, the perfect time to tell a ghost story. This one shows up in the second Tommy and Tuppence novel, and it may have been based on a popular legend.
Partners in Crime is a series of short stories. Tommy and Tuppence are now a young married couple playing at being detectives by trying on the personas of fictional characters, including Hercule Poirot himself.
Tommy was imitating Father Brown to investigate a jewel robbery, so he is dressed in a cassock at the beginning of the story “The Man in the Mist.” Tommy’s old friend, Marvyn “Bulger” Estcourt, sees the Beresfords having cocktails at the Grand Adlington Hotel and introduces them to the actress he is with, Miss Gilda Glen. He also gives them directions to the train station, down Morgan’s Avenue.
“Morgan’s Avenue?” Miss Glen started violently, and stared at him with startled eyes.
“I know what you’re thinking of,” said Estcourt, laughing.”The Ghost. Morgan’s Avenue is bounded by the cemetery on one side, and tradition has it that a policeman who met his death by violence gets up and walks on his old beat, up and down Morgan’s Avenue. A spook policeman! Can you beat it? But lots of people swear to having seen him.”
There doesn’t seem to be a real Grand Adlington Hotel, but I did find references to an Adlington Hall, where the fictional jewel robbery took place. In fact, I found two Adlington Halls, both near Manchester in northwest England. Neither Adlington village has a Morgan’s Avenue.
England does have a few lanes and streets called “Morgan,” but the most Morgan-named places seem to be in Cardiff, Wales, where the David Morgan family established a well-known department store in the late 1800s.
Following the Wales clue led me to the story of Hosea Pope, which one website called “one of the most famous urban legends in South Wales.” Pope is not from either Adlington or Cardiff, but from Aberbeeg, about twenty-four miles north of Cardiff.
I read Pope’s story in the September 2, 1911 issue of The Barrier Miner, a newspaper in Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia. The article starts by saying their information comes from the July 23 issue of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, a London publication, which was reporting an incident in Wales from the week before. That’s a long way to keep the facts straight!
Apparently, the thirty-three-year-old Pope was the sole man on duty on July 14, 1911. At some point during the night, he scuffled with an inebriated James Wise. I read differing accounts of what happened during the scuffle. A bloody stone was found near Pope’s body, and some say that was the murder weapon. Other accounts say Pope’s head wound was superficial and that he died of a pre-existing heart condition. I also found this quote from Clive Emsley, author of Hard Men: Violence in England since 1750, who wrote:
On the night he died, it appears that he had taken it upon himself to march a local nuisance to some dark part of the town and teach him a lesson. His wily opponent, however, got the better of him.
At any rate, Pope was found dead on the road. Wise was convicted of manslaughter and served time in prison.
Since the the 1950s, people have reported ghostly sightings along a three-mile stretch of A4046 between Aberbeeg and Cwm. Some folks say that they passed an old-timey policeman in helmet and cape patrolling the road. Others claim that while driving A4046, they suddenly saw Pope in the rearview mirror, sitting in the back seat, staring at them in silence. One public bus driver heard the bus door open and looked up to see a figure in the aisle for just an instant before it disappeared.
Of course, Partners in Crime was written in 1929, not in the 1950s, but it seems the ghostly patrol officer sightings did start fairly soon after Pope’s death. By the 1950s, Pope’s ghost was already a familiar old legend.
The sensational newspapers of the time often printed ghost stories, including those about policemen who haunt their former beat. We’ll never know which one inspired Christie when she was writing “The Man in the Mist,” but the timing of Hosea Pope’s story makes him my pick as the Morgan’s Avenue Ghost.