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Tall Stories - Museum Archive - August 2016


Carrots Holden

One was told by Eddie Collins who ran Potters Museum in Bramber before it closed and moved to Arundel.  Potters Museum was the museum of stuffed animals and other strange and bizarre objects but his story had nothing to do with that.   

This story concerns Eddie's near neighbours who lived in a pair of cottages, the loft of one running over the rooms of the other cottage below.  On one occasion the lady of the household - the one with the loft - had gone there to find something when she slipped and crashed through the ceiling onto the bed of their neighbour's best bedroom.  She thereupon called for help but the owner of the bedroom was out of the house at the time.  The owner, apparently, was paranoid about people creeping round the house and kept all the upstairs doors locked.  There were people in the house who heard the lady's cries for help but, because of the locked doors, they couldn't get in to provide assistance for their neighbour who had crashed through the ceiling onto the best bed - and she couldn't escape.  After a little while, they managed to break the lock and get in.  But by then the lady's husband, who had been having a bath, had appeared at the hole in the ceiling with a towel wrapped round his middle.  He was in the process of trying to haul his wife back through the hole in the ceiling but there was a point when the hands lifting her up could lift no more.  She was suspended in mid air.  At that point the towel began to slip from round her husband's loins and he made a grab at it to preserve his modesty - so he thereupon let go of his wife and she crashed back down onto the best bed.  It was only at this point that they all realised that the simpler solution - now that the lock had been forced - was to walk downstairs and let the fallen lady re-enter her house through her own front door.

Some stories tell of Steyning people who are no longer with us but whose peculiarities are remembered.  We believe it was Tommy Carr who for every carnival held in the town dressed up as a toilet with the seat round his middle and a chain attached to his head.  And we are assured that "Carrots" Holden, who had been a winner of the Easter Monday 15 mile race on more than one occasion in his youth, later took to coming over all faint whenever he passed a pub - of which there were at least eight on the route.  We were also told that "Carrots", who worked as a coalman, would strip completely naked to shovel coal from the railway trucks down at the Station.

From time to time we are asked whether there were ghosts in Steyning.  Brian Picking was a ghost.  He had been athletics training in a black tracksuit and was walking back through the churchyard with a couple of friends, at a time when there were no lights to illuminate the church, but there was a scary owl in the elm trees alongside it for sound effects.  When the next bunch of lads passed by he slowly pulled a white towel up over his face and frightened the life out of them.  Brian and his friends thought this was a great lark and the next night did it again.  The word had got out and more people turned up to see 'the churchyard ghost'.  The Argus got hold of the story and on the third night hundreds turned up.  Eventually The Daily Mail got hold of the story but by then Brian and his friends were themselves a bit scared and had given up 'ghosting'.

The Museum is working to record these and many other stories before memories fade.

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