Taken from Newsletter Issue 5 - September 2003

It was at the Devil’s Elbow one September night in the 1950s that a veteran railwayman, John Davies, had a bizarre encounter as he returned to his cottage along the twisting road from Glossop into the valley. Mr Davies, possibly the oldest resident of Longdendale at 88, has lived here since 1929 and kept a meticulous diary which is a mine of local information.

On the night in question he was riding a motorbike home with the sky lit up by a full harvest moon when he felt an irresistible urge to stop. As he pulled up he was amazed to see an object “like a big black slug sliding across t’road and up t’moor making a funny gritty noise like feet on wet gravel...as it came slowly across the road in front of me I could see it was completely black and really peculiar like a huge whale”, he told me. “It had a head like a whale and white eye, with a black pupil going round and round. It had disappeared and I went to have a look but it had gone. I’ve been over there thousands of times but never seen anything like that before.”

Two friends of Mr Davies have independently encountered a similar uncanny presence which both felt was undoubtedly evil at the same deep clough leading upwards to Torside Castle. One, returning from Manchester late at night, “felt” it following him slowly along the road, but he was so frightened he could not bring himself to look over his shoulder. The other spent frantic minutes striking matches so he could see the terrifying black shape sliding along in the dark valley below Ogden Clough, before he “lost his bottle” and broke into a run.