Ghost
The Whistling Ghost
She whistled, and the ships went down.
Stand where it happened
- What's there
- Old hilltop church above harbour town
- Legend from
- 1630s inquiry; Scott's Rokeby notes
- Best time
- Stormy weather
- Tone
- Eerie
She promised to come back. Then the ships began to sink, and someone was whistling.
Mrs Leakey was an old widow of Minehead in the 1630s, kind and well liked in life, whose only son traded by sea with Waterford. She warned friends they would not like her company after death. They did not. Her ghost appeared by night and day, at home, in the fields and on the quay, calling for a boat. Whenever her son's ships neared the shore her whistle was heard and storms wrecked them, until he was ruined. Walter Scott later retold the story in a note to his poem Rokeby.