Mrs. Dreadful telling a ghost story
The “Penny Dreadfuls” of Sheffield, Mrs. Joanne and Mr. Darren Johnson-Smith, are leading the people of Sheffield through a history of scares and thrills with their weekly Steel City Tours.
Every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday Mr. and Mrs. Johnson Smith, who go by the considerably spookier surname of Dreadful, organise different tours around Sheffield offering either classic and traditional ghost stories or tales of a more gruesome nature.
Mr. Dreadful, the face of the tours, started the idea as a joke, six years ago. And ever since, the storytelling has taken place every week, engaging both locals and tourists who would like to find out more about the history and architecture of the Steel City.
The “three musketeers” involved in this experience – Mr. and Mrs. P. Dreadful and Steve Harrison, researcher and historian – guarantee that all stories are real and well documented.
Harrison, who has helped the Dreadfuls for five years, said: “People can go into the library to search for the stories. They are all there, in old newspapers articles, letters, journals.”
Mrs. Dreadful, who’s originally from Doncaster, added: “We don’t do anything [that’s] made up. We have to get at least three recent sightings and then we’ll use them. If not, if something comes up we’re not sure of, we’ll pull the story out, recheck it, have a look at the evidence,[and] if it fits , we’ll add it to the story, if it doesn’t, we’ll stick to the original.”
Special tours
The Dreadfuls also do special tours on architecture or historical crime and private tours. They have done school and scouts events and even weddings. Mrs. Dreadful said: “Weddings are great. We start from the Town Hall to wherever the reception takes place. It’s an unusual thing, but people like it.”
On one Halloween tour, they had 275 people eager to listen to gore stories and unknown horror in the history of Sheffield. They had to split into three different groups to satisfy the amount of people who came that night.
One of the most popular tours is on Wednesday. On Dreadfuls’ website, it is described as a tour “for the harder stomached listener, several of the stories on here are of a more gruesome nature.”
“Our record for turning a stomach of a listener is 7 minutes, so we give you fair warning about this mixture of gruesome and ghoulish.”
The organisers say most kids love the tours, yet the teachers are not so happy with it. However, children under 16 are not allowed to join the “Historical crime and murder tour” due to the sexual/prostitution related content.
History and entertainment
Although, Mrs. P Dreadful does not have any background in history or research, she has become a storyteller, a researcher and a historian. Her constant interest in digging up stories about Sheffield led to this.
Mr. Harrison said: “It’s amazing what you can find out if you ask “why?”. It’s the simplest question of all.”
The tours have both a historical and entertainment purpose. “It’s for people to know a little bit more about the surroundings,” Mrs. Dreadful added.
“It’s the storyteller’s job to give people a place of history, something that relates to them. We mix up the old and the new, and everything comes together. So everyone has a living history of where they are and what’s happening around them.”
The book
The tales collected over the years by the Dreadfuls were brought together into one book, called “Haunted Sheffield”. The two authors are working on their second book, as the first one seems to have been a success, and constantly on order at the libraries in Sheffield.
The research for the stories in the book goes from libraries and articles to people. “You find it, you research it, you go back enough,” Mrs. Dreadful said.
“We never get tired in finding stories. There’s always some new angle, something new being told. It’s like an onion.”
Dressed in a Victorian style, the two storytellers of Sheffield guarantee tales of haunted pubs and alleys, and crime and murder. But they also believe the history is laid out in the bricks of the Steel City.
All of the tours start at The Sheffield Town Hall Steps at 7.30pm and they last between two and two and a half hours.
The prices of all of the tours are £5 Adult, £4 Student/OAP and £2.50 for a child under the age of 13.
