From the Tewkesbury Yearly Magazine. June 1836.
For several weeks, about this period, some idle vagabond, dressed in various hideous garbs, occasionally secreted himself in the plantation which runs parallel with the lane leading to the Lower-Lode Ferry, with the foolish intention of frightening the passers-by. He generally selected the evening "for playing the ghost;" and his usual plan was, when he saw females approaching, to leave his lurking-place, suddenly start into the road, and keeping at a proper distance, endeavour by strange and ludicrous gestures to terrify them; before his victims reached either end of the lane, where they might have an opportunity of giving an alarm, or if a man accidently came in sight, the ghost, as Skakespeare says, "Started, like a guilty thing,Upon a fearful summons"
Several women from the country were seriously frightened, and for some time few females could be found sufficiently courageous to pass the road alone. The current belief was, that the ghost of a man who, it was said, had many years before been murdered there, regularly paid a nocturnal visit to the scene of his horrid death. If however "the spirits of the dead may walk again," there was no authority for imagining that any murder had ever been committed in that vicinity. Several men at length determined to lie in wait and entrap the pretended ghost; but it would appear that he became apprised of their intention, and by abandoning his wicked and dangerous freaks, escaped the summary punishment and exposure which he justly deserved.