Haunted · Panoply

The 100mph Ghost

November 7, 2017·27 min·2 clips

Percy Lambert set the land speed record in 1913, promised his fiancée it would be his last race — and died on the same track weeks before their wedding.

Speed comes first, certainty later. Percy Pearly Lambert takes the land speed record at Brooklands by driving 100 miles in an hour while the horse still belongs to everyday life. The win does not last. A French team beats his time, and Percy returns to the steep banked track to take it back. Safety is barely there. Drivers sit on their cars rather than inside them, with no belt and not even a helmet between them and the track. His final lap goes wrong fast. On the 21st lap, a rear tyre bursts, the car somersaults, and Percy is thrown out with a fractured skull. The personal detail makes it worse. He had told his fiancée this would be his last record attempt, with marriage only weeks away. Mark comes into the story quietly. He is a young writer, a motorsport enthusiast, and not someone trying to sell himself as a believer. That restraint gives the story its pull. The host is less taken by the idea of a dramatic ghost story than by Mark's reluctance to tell it, even after writing a book about Brooklands. The legal comparison adds pressure without pretending to settle it. Asked whether many separate reports would deserve investigation, a lawyer calls the testimony a prima facie case. Proof gets slippery here. The episode does not ask the listener to give up judgment, but it does ask whether repeated witness accounts deserve more than a shrug. Then the mist rolls in. Mark remembers arriving at Brooklands at about 5.30 in the morning, with fog lying low across the track. He sees someone in white overalls walking along the track beyond the members' bridge, then the figure disappears into the fog. Only later does the easy explanation start to wobble. The museum was not open yet, and the idea of a worker setting up an exhibit feels less solid. The date gives it another twist. The sighting falls on Halloween, described as the anniversary of Percy's death, though Mark still answers the host with a cautious possibly. No verdict lands. The episode leaves speed, pride, danger, and witness accounts side by side, with the old racetrack carrying more than engine noise.

As heard by us

A steady ghost story where motorsport history and fog do the work.

The episode treats Percy Pearly Lambert's doomed run at the 100-mile-an-hour record as more than a curiosity. It ties Brooklands in 1913 to the later sighting of a white-clad figure in the fog, and it keeps both the metal and the myth in view without making a fuss about either…

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Why you'd press play

You want a ghost story tied to Brooklands' first 100 mph record, a fatal crash, and one misty sighting.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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