Whitby

09 - 12 July 2024

Julie and Anthony arrived in Whitby on Tuesday the 9th of July. The ruin of Whitby Abbey dominates the view on the way into town. In the photo above, our Air B&B is the first building on the right, across the river. Our rooms are just to the right of the balcony.

Whitby is a wonderfully, creepy little town. It has two excellent ghost tours, and we attended one the first the night we arrived.

Dracula re-enactment at the Whale bones.

Dr Craven’s Ghost Tour started at the Whale Bones monument on the East Cliffs. The views were pretty amazing across the town to the West Cliffs. Whitby Harbor points due North, which is pretty unique. The locals brag that in the summer you can see the sun come up over the ocean in the East and go down over the ocean in the West. That is assuming you ever see the sun in Whitby.

Our ghost tour guide, Dr Craven, was a pediatrician before he retired. Now he leads ghost tours 4 nights a week.

Robert Lennard, the man who built the house above invested his life’s savings into bringing Norwegian architecture to Whitby. It did not catch on, and he hung himself off of the double doors on the building.

The house has a reputation for being haunted so the current owner put this marker up, hoping to increase his rentals.

Julie used the GhostTube app to view the building and got interesting results.

This tunnel is on the path up the hill to the East Cliff. Dr Craven told a story of a young lady walking with her boyfriend who encounter a talk dark stranger walking behind her in the dark tunnel. The stranger disappeared when she got to the end. Her boyfriend followed her and the stranger touched him on the shoulder. He screamed. When you go through the tunnel, you are supposed to scream to scare the spirits away. Julie and Anthony were game.

For fun Dr Craven ran the 199 steps up to Whitby Abbey 199 times. He moved fast and was hard to keep up with.

Julie telling Anthony to stop taking pictures so the ghost tour does not leave us behind.

Below: More random pictures Anthony took on the ghost tour.

On Wednesday, Julie and Anthony took the Hop on Hop off bus to avoid climbing up and down the hills. Our first stop was the Whitby Museum, home of the Hand of Glory.

The Whitby Museum is a proper Victorian Museum. Apparently Victorians hoarded everything, and eventually they would gather all of their strange and interesting natural science and engineering related stuff, put the stuff in a building and call it a museum. Anthony LOVED it.

Plesiosaur Skeleton

Ichthyosaur Skeleton

Crocodile Skeleton

Narwhale Skeleton

Yes, that is some guys desiccated hand.

The Tempest Prognosticator was the most fascinating item here, even better than the HoG

After the museum, we hopped the bus from the East Cliff to visit the Whitby Abbey on the West Cliff.

Saint Hilda is a key figure in the history of Whitby.

Saint Mary’s Church. Many of the graves here for sailors lost at sea and are empty. Bram Stoker used this in his book, Dracula.

We got off the bus at various other stops around Whitby, here are some photos from our day.

Our Air B&B is on the right side of this duplex.

In 1696, Parliament established a tax on each window in your house. Bottle Windows were the response, providing light across multiple stories with a single window.

On Wednesday night, we attended the Finding Dracula tour, starting from the same spot as the ghost tour.

Bram Stoker wrote bits of Dracula looking out this window facing the Abbey. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are set here, using the summer houses on the East Cliff and the Abbey and Saint Mary’s Church on the west.

From 1890 to 1896, Bram Stoker summered at No 6 on this circular row of houses.

Above, left Captain Cook sans seagull. right you can see the beginning of the 199 steps from the abbey into town.

Lucy Westenra uses the screaming tunnel to visit Dracula

Headed back to the Air B&B we stopped by a pub to watch England beat the Netherlands to qualify for the European Championship. It was fun to watch with Brits.

Thursday Morning, Julie and Anthony walked from the town up the Western Cliff to the Abbey where the car is parked, it seemed like much more than 199 steps. Here are some views from the climb back into the town. We drove back to York to catch the James Herriot Tour of the Yorkshire Dales.

We first stopped at The World of James Herriot in Thirsk and toured the museum. It included some of the sets from All Creatures Great and Small.

We stopped to view the Kilburn White Horse. This limestone chalk figure was cut into the hills in 1857, not an iron age monument.

The English have erected more than 5000 miles of dry stone fencing in the Yorkshire Dales. These fences were erected in response to a transition from a communal farming system to a centrally owned land where farmers pay the land owner. You can see the fences in nearly all of the photos we took of the Dales countryside.