The horse with the tangled mane

A spooky story for Halloween – and it’s true!   We first saw Bella at a meat market, she was on her own in a pen and looking very sorry for herself. She was 13hands, 3 years old, a coloured cob with pretty markings. The most outstanding thing about her was her superb mane, it was thick and long and she kept spinning round and tossing it.
It was a battle to buy her, the meat man was bidding on all the cobs. We managed to outbid him, £160 and Bella was coming home to the sanctuary and not the slaughterhouse which was the other outcome.
Bella wasn’t an easy pony to handle though, she was what was called ‘wick’ – a sharp and feisty filly, always on edge and jumping at every little thing. She could gallop like the wind and outrun every other horse on the place. The plan was to let her settle in her own time, she had no malice but was too tricky for anyone inexperienced to handle.
We fetched Bella in every night, stabling her was part of the socialising process. She had a feed, a rack of hay and a soft straw bed. Hopefully she was forgetting whatever had happened in her past to make her so jumpy and nervous.
Usually she was waiting at the gate, she liked the feed and was always ready to come in. It was Autumn and around Bonfire night, one evening she wasn’t waiting as usual, she was nowhere to be seen. I wondered if a firework had spooked her so I set off down the field to find her. Not a sign of her anywhere though. I alerted all the staff and volunteers and we searched further, eventually reporting her missing, thinking that she must have broken out somehow and ……. busy roads, horse thieves, well, I didn’t want to speculate where she was or what had happened to her.
I went out several times, shouting Bella till I was hoarse. It was pitch black, no moon and my torch was like a searchlight.  All the other ponies were in and the stable doors firmly bolted, they seemed unconcerned and were munching their hay placidly.
I was up at first light and grabbed the car keys, ready to look further afield. She could have run for miles and be anywhere.
When I turned the corner into the stable yard, I stopped dead in my tracks. There she was – Bella was in her stable, her head over the door. She whinnied softly to me as I raced up and hugged her. Then it hit me – Bella was in but the door had been shut the night before, now it was firmly bolted on the outside. .There was no way she could have fastened herself in.
Had she jumped in to her stable? It was possible but ……would have taken some doing. Bella had never shown any inclination to jump anything in the months we’d had her.
Had someone found her and brought her home, putting her in the stable for safety? Mmm. Our dogs would bark if a pin dropped and we hadn’t heard a sound from them all night. I couldn’t see them letting someone on the yard, let alone opening and closing stable doors.
As I stroked Bella I realised she felt damp, her coat was streaked with sweat, it was drying but still stiff and greasy. She had to have been ridden hard to get in such a state. I looked at her hooves, they were ragged, she was limping and foot sore.
Her mane was the most puzzling of all, it was completely knotted. Not just little tangles, it was a mass of thick knots, impossible to undo. Her lovely mane now hung in heavy clumps.
What had happened overnight? It was a complete mystery. No one rang to say they’d found her and brought her back. The police, who we had alerted, had no reports or sightings of her.
Bella was subdued, we had to cut her mane off and it took a month for her sore feet to recover but apart from that she was alright.
We never discovered what had happened to Bella on the night she went missing – except that when she disappeared it was the evening of Halloween and All Soul’s Day when she came back.  An old fella who lived in the village told me his own theory.  He said that he’d seen this happen before and that the witches had been riding her! They pick the fastest and most spirited horse for their Halloween races.
Whoever took her it was a mystery that was never solved – it’s a true story and exactly how it happened.  Bella lived in the sanctuary for many more years, in time she became plump and placid and never went missing again. We always locked her stable door whenever it was Halloween though, just in case.

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