Who was this man standing next to the empty gallows?

I don’t believe in ghosts. Well, probably not.

We’d seen the rocky outcrop from the car, an island of stone rising from the valley floor close to the village of Litton in the Peak District.

“That’s where we’re going to walk tomorrow,” said my dad. My brother and I, and my friend Ed, peered closely from the back seats, wondering if the rock was climbable.

That night, I saw the place again in my dreams. It was dusk and the air was cool as I approached it. While the sides of the rock were steep, there was an easy way up and I reached the top without incident.

Perhaps 40m at its longest point, and 15 wide, the stack’s plateau was covered with stubby grass.

At its furthest end, gaunt against the sky, was an empty gallows. A little closer, standing between the gibbet and me, was an old man.

He looked at me, and I at him. The wind howled.

I was, I freely admit it, a little unnerved by my nighttime vision. I told my mother about it as we prepared to leave the holiday cottage the following morning; she raised a dubious eyebrow.

We initially trekked south from Wardlow village, turning left when we reached Monsal Dale and left again into the densely wooded Cressbrook Dale.

Eventually the foliage thinned, to the extent that the sides of the valley were more likely to have white limestone bursting forth from them than green trees. Rounding a corner, the rock – Peter’s Stone to name it – faced us, just as it had in the dream (though the weather was more clement now).

I hesitated for a moment but Ed and my brother had raced ahead and I didn’t fancy explaining my reluctance to follow them.

A pathway wound to the top and, while I was startled momentarily by the sight of a sheep’s skull, there was nothing else of note to see. Short grass; but no gallows. Three young boys; no old man. The air certainly felt chillier on top of the rock but that stood to reason given how exposed it was.

I felt oddly relieved as we came to the end of the walk half an hour later.

“You know,” said my mother as we arrived back at the cottage, “it’s funny you should have had that dream. Had you read about that place?”

I hadn’t, I told her.

“Hmm. It’s just that there did used to be a gibbet on Peter’s Stone.”

Gulp.

In fact, I discovered later, it was the site of Derbyshire’s last gibbet, on which the dead bodies of executed criminals would be displayed as a warning to others.

One of the last to be gibbeted there was Anthony Lingard, a murderer, whose skeleton remained clapped in irons for a full 11 years after his body had first been installed on the rock.

His remains were said to have been removed only after complaints about the gruesome noise made by his bones rattling in the howling wind.

Was it Lingard I’d seen in my dream, or a peculiar amalgam of imagination and coincidence?

It had to be the latter. After all, ghosts don’t exist...