It was approaching midnight on a hot evening in July of 1977 when Richard Stroker, aged 31, experienced the paranormal.
As Stroker walked along the narrow pathway of Fulfen Slade he was startled by a man’s pained scream and the hooves of a galloping horse.
Fearing he would be trampled on, Stroker leapt from the pathway into hedgerow. “But nothing came,” Stroker tells me 45 years later, “I was alone.”
Now 76, Stroker describes the events of that evening with vivid detail, as if they had happened just yesterday.
“As I stepped back onto the pathway, the air grew cold, and I felt an unnatural presence,” Stroker continues. “And that’s when I heard the whisper in my ear, as if somebody was right behind me.”
“Sir, I have lost my chap. Will you help me find it?”
Stroker spun around but found nobody there. Terrified he was being stalked by a pervert, Stroker ran as fast as he could to the nearest phone box and called the police, who found no evidence of a horse or it’s rider.
He didn’t know it at the time, but Stroker had encountered The Dickless Horseman of Fulfen Slade.
The Horseman is said to be the ghost of a civil war soldier, who bled to death after his manhood became detached. Every once in a blue moon, the Dickless Horseman rides up and down the Fulfen Slade searching for his lost member.
There are two prevailing theories of how the Dickless Horseman become separated from his manhood.
In one version, he lost his member in a love tryst, after his wife found him with another woman. The wife sliced off his custard launcher and threw it into the Slade.
Another version says he lost his appendage during elaborate and misguided self-play, involving a hangman’s noose and a scythe while under the influence of Saffronium.
“Up until my encounter I didn’t believe in ghosts,” Stroker tells me. “But now I do, and I hope to never encounter another.”
Joan Carpenter, July 2022
Richard Stroker is still haunted by his encounter with the paranormal