Top 10 Terrifying British Legends

A popular local legend throughout Staffordshire, the Tale of the Chained Oak tells of a curse put on the miserly Earl of Shrewsbury after he refused a donation to an old beggar. Enraged, the beggar declares that with every branch that falls from a nearby oak tree, a member of the Earl’s family would perish. After the curse comes true, the Earl demands his servants chain up the oak to stop further falling branches. The Chained Oak can still be visited today, and it’s the inspiration for the ‘Hex’ rollercoaster at the nearby Alton Towers theme park.

#9: Black-Eyed Children of Cannock Chase
Residents of Cannock Chase have reported sightings of these dark entities since the early 1980s. White as a sheet with pitch black eyes to match, the children can be found wandering near wooded areas, often trying to lure in their would-be victims. One of the more frequently sighted children is a young girl – known to cover her face until passers-by get close enough for her to reveal her cavernous, black eyes. The Four Crosses Inn is an especially popular haunt, having hosted lots of ghostly activity in the past.

After the locals of Highgate, London, began reporting a variety of supernatural sightings in and around Highgate Cemetery, the site soon became a hotspot for enthusiasts of the occult and paranormal. As more and more sightings of grey spectres, ghouls and demonic entities continued to spread across the community, rumours of a vampire buried at the cemetery began to take shape. This whipped up a media firestorm, with locals blaming the vampire for the strange activity taking place there. Public hysteria eventually culminated in a vampire hunt on Friday 13th March, 1970.

Imagine driving on an empty country road in the middle of the night, when suddenly you find your car jerked from left to right by a pair of disembodied hands clutching the steering wheel. Well, that’s exactly what the residents of Dartmoor claim happens on the B3212, a stretch of road in Devon that’s seen an unusually high rate of road accidents over the years. While many have supposedly perished at the hands of this entity, the survivors of these encounters swear by their existence, keeping the unsettling legend alive.

One of the most widely sighted phenomena in the UK, Black Shuck is an extremely large canine creature, often described as demonic - with fiery red eyes and an ominous black mist that follows in its wake. Supposed sightings date as far back as the early 12thcentury, making Black Shuck a classic piece of British folklore. The most famous recorded incident came in 1577, when the creature is said to have killed a man and child in a Suffolk church, collapsing the steeple and leaving only scorch marks behind.

If you’re in the English countryside, stay clear of unattended bodies of water. Otherwise you risk becoming the latest meal for the gruesome Jenny Greenteeth, a water-dwelling hag known for pulling its victims – often children – into the depths of its watery lair. With green skin, long black hair and razor-sharp teeth, this ghoul was inspiration for Meg Mucklebones in Ridley Scott’s 1985 classic “Legend”. And while it’s likely a folk tale to keep curious children away from unsafe waters, that doesn’t change the fact that Jenny Greenteeth is utterly terrifying.

Although the London Underground has spawned many tales of ghostly goings-on and spectral sightings across its 150-year history, one of the most frequently recurring spirits is the Crying Girl, who resides in King’s Cross. After a fire killed 31 people in King’s Cross back in 1987, many people have reported a lonely girl sobbing in the otherwise empty station, before disappearing when they attempt to console her. Other encounters have been more subtle, with passengers claiming to hear her disembodied weeping echo throughout the building, as well as a smell of smoke.

The Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset are supposedly home to the aptly named Wookey Hole Witch, a crone said to have made a pact with the devil as a means of exacting vengeance upon her unfaithful fiancé. Not content with her satanic revenge however, the witch continued to terrorise the citizens of Wookey Hole for years to come. A monk eventually managed to turn the witch to stone, and the resulting stalagmite has since become a tourist attraction - with many believing it to be the petrified remains of the dreaded hag.

Rumoured to be cursed after the brutal murder of a young couple took place on the site, Epping Forest’s suicide pool is one of the most mysterious places on this list. With black, stagnant water and no visible sunlight, the pool supposedly radiates evil. The most sinister thing about it however is its ability to draw in passers-by, which often results in their suicide. While the exact location of the pool isn’t known today, the numerous bodies reportedly recovered from Epping Forest over the past few hundred years speak for themselves.

When the tube was first built back in the mid-19th century, a combination of population increase and underdeveloped hospital care resulted in a lot of dead bodies and nowhere to store them. This is where the legend of Whitechapel’s corpse train started, with residents of London believing that there was a secret line installed on the tube that ferried bodies to empty sections of the underground. The existence of Whitechapel’s corpse train is still debated today, and may be partly responsible for the plethora of ghostly tales tied to the tube.