Longdendale Lights

Like the luminous phantoms which haunt the river Dove, the Longdendale Lights have been around for countless centuries and the darn things just won’t go away. Teacher and musician Sean Wood once lived at Bleak House, an isolated grey stone building whose lounge window fronts directly onto the carriageway of the busy trans-Pennine Woodhead pass high up in the Dark Peak of north Derbyshire. The stark forbidding gritstone north face of Bleaklow - which faces his home to the south - are where Sean and his family have seen pulsating blobs of light which cavort above the fells. ‘Quite simply, there are bright lights which appear at the top end of Longdendale - there’s no doubt they exist but what they are I just have no idea,’. He was pointing towards Shining Clough, a rugged desolate mountain ridge which at nearly 2,000 feet above sea level dominates the southern horizon outside his home at the head of the valley. Sean and his family first saw the lights there in 1982.

‘It was about 9.30 on a November evening, when I walked into one of the front rooms at Bleak House to chastise someone for shining a torch through our window,’ Sean explained. ‘Of course there was no torch, nor indeed any person outside. However, the light filled the room with a chilly, moonlike glow. ‘The effect was heightened by the lack of street lighting at this altitude and when I went outside to investigate I saw a large pulsating ball of light directly above the house, and not too far from the aptly named Shining Clough. With the hair on the back of my neck bristling I went to telephone my near neighbours at the Crowden Youth Hostel. Guess what? They were outside watching the light in the sky too.’ 

This was just the first in a long series of unexplained luminous interludes which have plagued valley residents for as long as memory can stretch. ‘Two years after that I saw it again, beneath the skyline. In all I’ve seen them more than 30 times over the 16 years I have been living here,’ said Sean. ‘One of the times it was very very big, and between 50 and 70ft from the ridge, it was pulsing again and then stopping, moving back and forth and up and down. I’ve also seen three lights together, much smaller and together, like in a string, moving in an arch. I’ve seen these a few times, and the big ones a few times. There’s no doubt about the fact there are lights out there on those moors.’ Sean Wood is just one of dozens of Longdendale residents who have experienced the phantom lights which haunt Bleaklow Mountain and the Woodhead pass which runs below it. Jean Whitehead, the previous owner of Bleak House, saw similar lights hovering over the mountains and reservoirs. Nearly everyone who has lived in the upper part of the valley has either seen or knows someone who has seen them. The lights are just one strand of a rich tapestry of stories and legends associated with Bleaklow - a dark, high rocky plateau covered by a thick layer of peat and heather. The lights are so well-known they have become part of the folklore of the region, just another aspect of the ‘Otherness’ of the valley