Topic: Boggarts - Have you seen one? (Read 168 times)

Hi All,
For the past few years I have become curious about Boggarts.
Not the ones from Harry Potter, but actual boggarts that are rumoured to reside around the United Kingdom.
I am wondering if anyone inside the UK has seen one, or if anyone anywhere else in the world has something similar or has similar folklore.

I used to live in an are which was a little Village, in the countryside.
Nearby was an abandoned county mansion of sorts with large derelict gardens.
Around this hall / mansion was a number of wooded areas. We used to camp out, take some sausages maybe, and cook over an open fire.
We used to take CB radios out into the woods and climb trees to put the antenna as high as possible. No mobile phones in them days.

The rumours that circulated the locals was of a Headless Horseman that roamed the area.
We would try and shit each other up (as kids do) but never actually saw anything in the woods.

This was 27 years ago (ish) I was playing in a remote area in the North West of England, near a fresh water lake.
I used to live in the area, and 2 miles from where me and my friend were playing was this old building. So in theory I was playing two miles from the haunted site.
We sat on a fence between two fields, neither field had horses in EVER, as we used to play, go fishing, skim stones across the lake nearby almost every summer.

I saw a mist this one day, about a foot of the ground,  it came rolling in across the field. It looked like a carpet of white, thick fog. It looked great! I said to my friend lets run into it.
I imagined the mist kicking up at my heals as we ran through it. Like the kind of fog that you may see on the floor of a nightclub.
You have to understand that this was at a time before mobile phones, phone games, and in a area where very little happened.
Kids today probably wouldn't 'play' like we did at that age.

As we ran into it, I heard the thundering of hooves. I turned to my friend and asked if horses were in the field?
He said he didn't know, we both look at eachother scared, feared getting trampled by horses.
The thundering of hooves grew louder so we turned to run back to where we thought the fence was.
We couldn't see anything, the mist had engulfed us within seconds of running into it, strange as it was only a foot high across the expanse of the field but it was now all around us.

A great horse ran between us, separating us, making horse neighing noises and on its back legs separated us and waved its hooves in the air.
I ran back into the field, fearing that I couldn't reach the fence in time, away from the fence.
My friend ran towards the fence. I continued to run into the field, realised that it may be best to try and head for the fence again, and turn to run back towards the fence.
By this time the mist was clearing, I could see my friend laughing at me on the fence, and then I got to the fence and the mist had cleared.
No horses in the field and all this happened within 2 minutes maximum, maybe even less than a minutes.

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I didn't really remember this very often, I probably thought about it a few times over twenty years. I could never understand what I saw. I always remembered the headless horseman rumour of the area. I never saw a horseman - only a horse. AND it was 2 miles away from the area that was supposedly haunted. Then I would forget it and get on with my life.

Then about 3 or 4 years ago I decided to do a google search and found an entry on Wikipedia and other websites that told of the folklore of the area. The folklore wasn't about a headless horseman. It was called a 'helpful horse' and was classed as a Boggart. I even saw an entry on Wikipedia detailing the exact thing I saw.

Strangely, this has now disappeared from Wikipedia. However it is still mentioned on some websites.

Other boggart stories have spiked my interest, such as Boggarts Clough in the center of Manchester UK near Cheatham Hill.

So I think it was a Boggart I saw, and very little has been done to research these phenomena. Does anyone else have any opinions on Boggarts?

Would be very interested in anyone's views, as I suspect that a bit of a conspiracy / coverup is going on.

Searching for boggarts on google conveniently spams the results with Harry Potter nonsense.

Its interesting how people don't talk of boggarts now, and are caught up in Ghostly phenomena and UFO's.
But when I dig deep into the history of UK and Ireland there are many stories of Boggarts.
Surely there are rumours of such things in other countries.

All the best

G