Mystery of the Cyclist on the Cliff

Her 10 year old son Donald and his friend John Short, were outside, their eyes wide with shock. "Mum," gasped Donald, "we've just seen a lady fall over the cliff"

Wiping her hands on her apron, Elsie hurried to a neighbour with a telephone. Within 10 minutes, the local policeman and a half dozen fishermen were scrambling down the cliff to the beach on the Devon-Dorset border. They found nothing. The two boys recieved a severe telling off from the police sergeant for letting their imagination get the better of them.

"But we didn't," said Donald Crowther, tearfully, to his mother after the officer had gone. "John and I both saw the lady fall. She was wearing old fashioned clothes and riding a funny old bicycle.We saw her swerve off the cliff path and crash down the cliff on to the beach. I swear we didn't make it up, mum."

"A few hundred yards away, we saw a woman in dark clothes coming towards us, riding a bicycle. She looked like something from the turn of the century and both my wife and I took particular notice of her. Then, as she approached us, the machine appeared to get out of control and swerve into the long grass separating the path from the cliff edge.

We watched, horrified, as she neared the edge of the sheer drop and then toppled over. We ran to the edge and looked down, expecting to see her lying below. We could see nothing."

Again, police and rescue services scoured the beach. Again, there was no sign either of the accident victim or her bicycle.
In the next six months, the phantom accident was seen three more times, by a commercial traveller, a vicar and a doctor. Local newspapers took up the story and, eventually, word reached a noted psychic investigator of the time, the Rev Harry Balfour. In November, he travelled from his home in Brighton to spend a fortnight talking to people who had witnessed the ghostly tragedy. All the descriptions were basically the same- a woman in her thirties, dressed in the clothes of the 1900s, riding a heavy, old fashioned bicycle. She had dark hair, partly covered by a hat and veil and pale, almost luminous , skin.
Two days after his arrival, the elderly clergyman climbed slowly, with many stops to catch his breath, up the cliff path to where the phenomenon had been seen.

In a magazine article he wrote about his experiences, he claimed that, as he was sitting on the cliff-side seat, he was suddenly aware that he was not alone. he said: "Although the day was clear and bright, I was suddenly enveloped in some sort of shimmering mist. Looming out of it came the figure of a woman, walking slowly and holding the hand of a boy aged about five. She was in her 30s and dressed in deepest black. She came quite close and I saw that her face had a tragic, beseeching look. As I watched, the image of the woman and child faded away until I was once more alone on the cliff-top."
Mr Balfour's report was greeted with some scepticism in the press. Some critics implied he had made up the incident to boost the sales of his books.

It was three years before Mr Balfour was able to provide what he regarded as the definite answer to those who cast doubt on his honesty.
In the summer of 1938, he received from a correspondent a cutting from an 1895 Devon newspaper. It gave details of what it described as a "tragic accident" involving a Bella French, who had fallen to her death from a cliff while cycling.

Mr Balfour wrote: "An engraving of the victim acompanied the report and, once again, I saw the tragic face framed in dark brown hair, the face of the woman I had seen on the cliff-top."