This is also the reason for the reputation of one of the UK’s most famous haunted pools: Dozmary Pool on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. Here the spirit of (the typically wicked) John Tregeagle was laid to rest, ordered by the ghost-layer to remain there until he had emptied the pool with a limpet shell (which had a hole in it to make the task doubly difficult).

John Tregeagle, incidentally, is one of the few ghosts to have given evidence in a court of law. A swindler who had borrowed a sum of money in a transaction witnessed by Tregeagle, insisted after Tregeagle’s death that no such loan had been made. Brought to court by the lender, he swore: ‘If Tregeagle ever saw it, I wish to God Tregeagle would come and declare it!’ To his dismay, the spirit returned from beyond the grave to denounce him (and then wouldn’t go away, hence the need to bind him in Dozmary Pool).

In North Wales, the spirit of another supposedly wicked character, the 16^th century squire Sir John Wynne, has found itself trapped in a pool formed below the celebrated Swallow Falls at Betws-y-Coed. Wynne’s spirit must remain in its watery prison until Doomsday ‘to be punished, purged, spouted upon and purified for the foul deeds done in the days of his nature.’

The Parliament-arian Captain Thomas Round was another villain of the first degree, if tradition is to be believed: he is said to have murdered his first two wives, cheated his neighbours and while ‘helpfully’ guiding a blind widow’s hand as she wrote her will, succeeded in making her write his name instead of her chosen beneficiary. He suffered for this particular act of villainy, however, for the spirit of the angry woman returned to plague him, giving him no peace morning, noon or night. At last, in despair, he drowned himself in a pond near his home in Upton-on-Severn, Worcestershire.

Since then, his ghost became a trouble to the neighbourhood. Various attempts were made by clergymen to ‘bind’ his spirit in the pool where he had done away with himself, but with uncertain success. His ghost is said to still be seen lurking round the fateful pond and also wandering along the banks of the River Severn.

Bodies of still water have often been used by unfortunates to drown themselves in but rather than wicked squires, they are usually wronged young girls. But the subject of female apparitions haunting pools and ponds is the subject for a subsequent article.

Text and photo of the Swallow Falls at Betws-y-coed © Richard Holland 2012

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 A correspondent calling himself ‘W.A.R.’ describes a folk remedy carried out on a man with toothache and another on a person suffering from whitlow, a painful swelling of the tips of the fingers caused by infection from a herpes virus.

What really interests me is the reference to the ‘pryf’ as the cause of both or indeed any disease. In modern Welsh this translates as ‘insect’ but it might I suppose mean any small organism, which would of course include a virus. ‘Bug’ is a more literal translation and is a familiar term in colloquial English. However, the description offered by a witness who claimed to have seen the ‘pryf’ extracted from a finger is even more literal – and bizarre. The extract follows:

‘I remember some years ago being in the company of an old man, a native of Anglesey, since dead. In the course of conversation he stated that he well recollected going in his younger days with a farm labourer, who was suffering intensely from toothache, to an elderly woman in Anglesey, who, he said, was locally noted for her ability to cure this affliction. The sufferer was released from his torture, and “never afterwards suffered from toothache”. I asked the old man if he could describe the process by which the cure was supposed to have been effected.

‘He told me that the woman first took a round piece of iron, hollowed out in the middle, and placed it in the fire until it became red hot. This was taken out, and in the hollow she placed a handful of seeds (my informant telling me it resembled carrot seed), and over all was inverted an earthenware jar. After waiting some time the woman took up the jar, which was now found to be blackened on the inside. Boiling water was poured into it, and the sufferer from toothache had to place his face over the jar and inhale the steam.

‘My informant added that before they left the cottage the old woman took a needle and pricked from the surface of the water in the jar a minute spec, which she asserted was the “pryf”, which was the cause of the toothache. The mention of the “pryf” brings to mind that in other connections and notion prevailed amongst some of our country folk that many forms of disease were due to some living organism. For instance, I might mention the painful gathering on the fingers which I have often heard in Carnarvonshire terrmed in colloquial language “dolur diarth” [which translates as “sore stranger”] – a whitlow, I presume.

‘There have been from time to time many persons with a reputation for curing this affliction, and on more than one occasion I have heard it stated that the finger had been successfully treated by means of the specific remedy of which the local “specialist” only was supposed to know the secret, the latter extracted the “pryf”, and that then nothing remained but to heal the sore.

‘One woman I once overheard asserted that when a husband was undergoing this primitive cure of “dolur diarth” she saw the “pryf” being extracted, and that it actually “crawled on the table” and was “something like a centipede”.

Text © Richard Holland 2012

In the 1950s writer Joan Forman was working in the village school in Goodhurst, Kent. During the first few days of the summer holidays, she was sleeping alone in an old part of the school. One night she awoke to find a weird creature crouching in her room. It was the size of a corgi but had large, lemur-like eyes that seemed to emit a glow. It turned its eyes to her.

‘I think it was the most revolting gaze I ever had to endure,’ she writes, ‘for what emanated from that thing was an atmosphere of extreme malevolence and obscenity. With all its exudation of evil it was at the same time mocking.’

It held her in its thrall until the first rays of dawn were upon it, when it vanished like a ghost.

In his book Realm of Ghosts Eric Maple describes another case of a malevolent and bestial apparition that occurred at a very old farm known as Devil’s House on Wallasea Island among the marshes bordering the River Crouch. A labourer working in the barns heard his name called several times and felt a cold sensation come over him, followed by on overwhelming urge to kill himself. In a trance, he picked up a length of rope, fastened one end round his neck and walked towards a ladder with the intention of fastening the other end to a beam. He said he heard a voice saying, ‘Do it, do it, do it.’

Looking up, he saw an ape-like beast crouching on one of the beams. It had black hair and slanted glowing eyes. The sight of the thing broke his trance and he fled from the barn.

A particularly weird case was recorded in The Powers of Evil by Richard Cavendish. It involved a couple Cavendish referred to as ‘the Smiths’. One evening in 1940, as she was chatting to her husband, Mrs Smith said, quite out of the blue: ‘It will come over the hill when it comes’. Afterwards she had no recollection of saying this, even though her husband insisted that she had.

Shortly afterwards she became nervous about being in the house after dark. About three months later she awoke her husband one night and told him that the thing from over the hill was nearly upon them. They heard one of the outside doors opening and a heavy, wet tread upon the stairs. As the Smiths clung together, the door swung open and a hideous thing waddled in. It was bloated and naked with skin blotched green, purple and yellow. It had a head that almost came to a point at the top, long earlobes that nearly reached to its shoulders, webbed feet and a thick bull neck. It crossed to the window and vanished.

Mrs Smith later recalled: ‘It was horrible and the absolute essence of evil… I have never experienced anything so dreadful before or since and I hope I never shall, God willing. I still experience the same horror when I talk about it or write about it as I am doing now. I have never been able to discover why I saw it and I have never been able to find out what it was.’

What is going on here? Can these creatures really generate fear? Some seem to be outlandishly horrific in appearance, almost as if by design. Such creatures rarely cause physical damage but push fear to intense levels.

Could we be dealing with some kind of inter-dimensional predator that somehow feeds off or is charged by fear? Perhaps the dimension these predators inhabit was given a name millennia ago which today we are still all familiar with – Hell.

Text © Richard Freeman 2012

1. TOWER OF LONDON: City of London

One of the most anciently inhabited sites in Britain and a fortress even before the castle we see today was built by the conquering William I, the Tower has seen a great deal of life and also of death – much of it cruel and bloody.  It’s no wonder ghosts are legion here.

The busiest ghost of the Tower of London is unlucky Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded on the orders of her husband King Henry VIII in 1536.  Anne haunts the White Tower, the King’s House, Tower Green, and the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, where she is buried. Sometimes she walks around without her head, as in 1864 when a terrified sentry thrust his bayonet into her headless apparition before passing out with the shock.  Many years later, in 1933, another sentry fled from a headless white figure which floated towards him. 

Anne Boleyn is just one of a veritable Who’s Who of celebrities said to haunt the Tower. They also include Lady Jane Grey and her equally unfortunate husband the Earl of Dudley, Catherine Howard, the Countess of Salisbury, the Earl of Essex, the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Hastings, Viscountess Rochford, the little Princes of the Tower, Sir Walter Raleigh, St Thomas Becket and Guy Fawkes. Also reported is the floating head of Henry VIII himself, the man who caused so many to be imprisoned or executed at the Tower and created so many ghosts (see also Hampton Court Palace).

Other ghosts include a procession of ‘knights and ladies pacing up and down’ and a group of men seen by a World War One sentry carrying a body with its decapitated head beside it on a stretcher. Then there is the strange, bear-like monster that scared a guard to death before vanishing, and the mysterious glowing column of light that appeared one night in the Jewel House.

Other ghostly phenomena are more nebulous, such as the feeling of suffocation that comes over some visitors passing a certain window; ‘the queer and distasteful atmosphere’ which made Colonel Carkeet James suddenly run away in an uncontrollable panic; a mischievous spook that drags ‘Beefeaters’ out of bed in the Well House; and the force which creates a choking sensation in a room in the Queen’s House on Tower Green (as recently as 1994 the wife of the then governor found herself being pushed out of this room by an unseen presence).

Even this list does not exhaust the ghostly phenomena reported from the Tower of London. I my opinion it well deserves its top spot in this chart of the most haunted places in Britain.

[SOURCE: Haunted Houses by Charles Harper; Ghosts of London by Jack Hallam; Ghosts of Old England by Terence Whitaker]

Text: © Richard Holland 2011. Illustration by Charles Harper, 1909

2. PLUCKLEY: Pluckley, Kent

It might seem a cheat to list an entire village, but Pluckley is celebrated as the most haunted in England and boasts at least a dozen ghosts – local investigator Neil Arnold thinks there may be as many as eighty! However, since the ghosts are spread out over a few square miles, Pluckley makes our runner-up spot rather than number one.

A phantom coach and horses trundles down the village High Street in the early hours of the morning. It is occasionally seen – the coachman is said to be headless – but more often heard, as the thump of hooves and the jingling of harness.

The Red Lady haunts St Nicholas Church, mainly inside but she has been glimpsed in the graveyard, too. She glides around with a mournful expression on her face. The church is also haunted by a little white dog. The two pubs are haunted and so is the Blacksmith’s Tea Rooms (formerly The Spectre Inn!). A Tudor lady has been seen gliding through Rose Court. Greystones, on the Bethersden Road, is haunted by a friendly monk and a little girl who died after eating ivy.

At The Pinnock there is the ghost of an old watercress seller who burned to death when her clay pipe fell among her clothing. At the suitably named Fright Corner a highwayman was ‘pinned like a butterfly’ to an oak tree by the sword of an intended victim who proved more than his match, and he is doomed to suffer his grisly fate over and over again.

The ghost of a young man in a suit of Victorian cut has been known to make a nuisance of itself at Elvey Farm. It moves objects around, slams doors shut and makes various crashes and bangs around the house. The unpleasant smell of burning wool has also been detected here for reasons unknown.

A White Lady may still haunt the site of her former home, Surrenden Dering, which was destroyed by fire some years ago. The estate’s woods were formerly haunted by a colonel who hanged himself from one of the trees, but these have now been largely cut down. Another area of woodland is known as the ‘screaming woods’ because of the eldritch cries heard emanating from it, but this should not be confused with the site of a former brickworks where the bloodcurdling scream of a man who fell to his death into a deep pit can still be heard.

[Source: Paranormal Kent by Neil Arnold; Discovering Ghosts by Leon Metcalfe; Our Haunted Kingdom by Andrew Green.]

Text c. Richard Holland 2011 Photo by Stephen Nunney, Wikimedia Commons

3. HAMPTON COURT PALACE: Richmond-upon-Thames, Middlesex

This magnificent 16^th century palace complex is famous – or rather infamous – for its ghosts with royal connections. Its best-known ghosts are those of two of Henry VIII’s unlucky queens, Catherine Howard and Jane Seymour, and Edward VI’s nursemaid, one Mistress Penn. However, Hampton Court also made headlines around the world in recent years thanks to remarkable footage of a still-unexplained figure which showed up on a security camera recording opening and closing a door during the night.

Catherine Howard’s is the most disturbing ghost at Hampton Court. She has been heard to shriek down a gallery to the door of the chapel, an echo of her terror following her arrest for supposed infidelity. The heartless King remained at his devotions and refused her entry to the chapel and she was dragged away. The young queen was barely 20 when she was beheaded in 1542. An artist making a sketch of the gallery was once startled to see a disembodied female hand, encrusted with jewels, appear in front of his picture. He hurriedly drew it and the rings were later shown to have been identical to those formerly worn by Catherine.

Jane Seymour died shortly after giving birth to Edward VI in 1537. Her ghost has been seen emerging from the Queen’s apartments with a lighted taper, making her way to the Silver Stick Gallery. She usually walks on the anniversary of her son’s birth, October 12. Staff have been known to quit after encountering the ‘tall lady, with a long train and a shiny face’.

Sibill Penn caught smallpox at the same time as the young, future Queen Elizabeth I. Elizabeth recovered but Mistress Penn did not. Her ghost was frequently seen hundreds of years later when her tomb was moved during alterations to the Palace.

The ghosts of two arguing men haunted the Fountains Court until a pair of skeletons was discovered buried two feet beneath the courtyard. Crowds of ghosts wearing ‘old-fashioned clothes’ have also been seen patrolling the palace grounds.

In 2003 the ghosts of Hampton Court Palace hit the headlines again when CCTV security cameras near Clock Court recorded an extraordinary figure pushing open a fire door. On the first day’s footage the door was shown being thrown open but for no apparent reason. On the second day the doors were thrown open again but this time by an alarming figure that has since been nicknamed ‘Skeletor’. A third day’s recording also showed the door opening but no apparition was this time visible.

It has been claimed that the video is a hoax and that the supposed ghost is an attendant dressed in period costume, but this wouldn’t explain the door forced open by an invisible agency. The Hampton Court website still treats the incident as a genuine mystery.

[Source: Haunted Houses by Charles Harper; Ghosts of Old England by Terence Whitaker; www.hrp.org.uk 2011. The ‘Skeletor’ video can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sjzjyfPJqA]

Text © Richard Holland 2011. Photo © hrp.org.uk

4. GLAMIS CASTLE: Glamis, Angus

So famous is Glamis for its ghosts, the current custodians have got fed up with its haunted reputation and are trying to play it down. The legend of the Monster of Glamis, probably an unfortunate deformed child who was kept hidden away due to the shame of the ancestral owners, the Earls of Strathmore, is the best-known but there are no ghost stories associated with it.

Nevertheless, there are ghosts aplenty, including the Grey Lady, thought to be Janet, Lady Glamis, who was burnt as a witch in 1537; a negro servant who has been seen on a particular seat inside the castle; ‘Jack the Runner’, who races through the park; a man with a long coat fastened at the neck; a tall man in medieval armour; and a woman without a tongue who runs through the grounds pointing to her bleeding mouth.

Legend has it that Glamis is also haunted by the wayward Earl Beardie who can be heard playing dice with the Devil. The ‘huge, bearded man’ who terrified the children of Lady Granville by leaning over their beds at night is also thought to have been the well-named Beardie.

Over the years a great deal of ghostly activity distinct from the traditional ghosts has been reported, including shadowy apparitions on the stairs and a door that wouldn’t stay shut even when furniture was piled up against it.

[Source: Gazetteer of Scottish & Irish Ghosts by Peter Underwood; ‘My Top Ten Haunted Castles’ by Janet Bord, Paranormal Magazine, issue 35]

Text © Richard Holland 2011. Photo © glamis-castle.co.uk

5. SANDFORD ORCAS: Sherbourne, Dorset

Antony Hippisley-Coxe describes Sandford Orcas as a ‘history-drenched manor’ and Marc Alexander named it as the most haunted house in England. Both authors visited the house, which is right on the Somerset border, in the 1970s and were taken on a tour by the then owner Colonel Claridge, who was convinced that his home was possessed of more than a dozen ghosts. He saw at least one of them himself: an unkempt-looking woman who started walking across his lawn without a by-your-leave but who instantly vanished when he approached to remonstrate with her.

Other ghosts seen here include a ‘very nice old lady’ who likes to visit children when they’re sleeping in the house. She may be the same ghost who has appeared on a staircase in a red silk dress from the Georgian period – an identical dress was found packed neatly away in a former priesthole. Several of the bedrooms are haunted by, in turn, a lady in a green gown, a man in evening dress with ‘an evil-looking face’, an equally malevolent-looking priest and a Moorish servant who, centuries ago, killed his master while he slept by pressing a wire across his throat.

Even more frightening is the huge, hulking ghost of a brutal rapist who, between ten and 11 o’clock at night, passes from the gatehouse to the former servants’ quarters where he knocks on doors. The sounds of bodies being dragged about can also be heard. On one occasion a young woman sleeping in this part of the house was awakened by being hurled to the floor – and she felt fingers round her throat. Then there is ‘The Screamer’, the nickname given for the unearthly wails that emanate from a room at the back of the house, a room where a madman was kept locked up for years.

Less alarming are the apparitions of a little girl in black seen at the foot of the stairs and a friendly fox terrier which appears in the Great Hall on the anniversary of his death, wagging his stump of a tail. The gatehouse is haunted by the unhappy spirit of a man who hanged himself there; a woman in Elizabethan dress haunts the courtyard; and spectral monks have been seen in the grounds. The ghostly sounds of a spinet and intermittent poltergeist activity have also been reported from Sandford Orcas.

The house remains in the Claridge family and they open its doors to the public on a regular basis.

[SOURCE: Phantom Britain by Marc Alexander; Our Haunted Kingdom by Andrew Green; Haunted Britain by A. Hippisley Coxe]

Text © Richard Holland 2011 Photo © Richard Walker (flickr.com/photos/richwall100)

6. Woodchester Mansion, Nympsfield, Gloucestershire

Woodchester Mansion is a vast and beautiful house which proved so vast and beautiful that it was never completed – the money ran out in 1873. This majestic Gothic folly has been rescued from oblivion and is open to the public, with many cultural events taking place here. The most frequent events seem to be ‘paranormal nights’. Woodchester gained its haunted reputation fairly recently, but the organised ghost hunts held here over the last couple of decades have placed it firmly on the paranormal map.

Thanks to the commercial ghost hunts there are seemingly hundreds of reports of things going bump in the night in the old house and any number of possible orbs and strange mists captured on digital cameras. If all the reports are to be taken at face value Woodchester might very well deserve the top spot in this roster of haunted sites.

One investigation which goes some way to affirming the mansion’s reputation (and there are no doubt others) was carried out by the Ghost Club. Then General Secretary Robert Snow recalled his alarming experience in an upstairs corridor with several colleagues: ‘We all heard a strange sound coming towards us. I can only describe it as sounding like a combination of a heavy wooden box drawn across a rough floor, a jet aircraft and an express train. As it approached it grew louder until it was absolutely deafening by the time it reached us. I was leaning against a wall, which was vibrating and so was the floor. I shone my torch but could see nothing to account for the noise: a thorough investigation had revealed no intruders.’

Weird glowing writing had also manifested on a wall in a ground floor room during the same investigation.

According to researcher Anthony Poulton-Smith there are several ghosts in the vicinity of Woodchester Mansion, possibly as many as 16. They include monks, a Roman soldier, two World War 2 airmen and several coaches or horsemen.

[SOURCE: Paranormal Cotswolds by Anthony Poulton-Smith; ‘A Life Among Ghosts’ by Robert Snow, Paranormal Magazine issue 30].

Text c. Richard Holland 2011 Photo courtesy of Robert Snow

7. THE SCHOONER HOTEL: Alnwick, Northumberland

This 17^th century hotel has become a magnet for ghost hunters in recent years, and with good reason – there are lots of them and they are very active.

The best known ghost of The Schooner is that of a woman who is believed to have done away with herself following the devastating news that her husband had died while working overseas. According to the local legend, Eleanor dispatched herself in a particularly horrific manner: by stabbing herself in the abdomen with a long-bladed knife, killing not only herself but her unborn child instantly. Her bloodcurdling screams are said to still be heard to this day.

Other ghosts include a small girl, a man who murdered his own family in an upstairs room and a parson who was killed in the unlikely manner of being struck in the head by an exploding beer tap.

During his many investigations at The Schooner, paranormal investigator Darren Ritson has seen doors open and close by themselves, heard disembodied footsteps and other inexplicable noises and on one notable occasion encountered an ‘overwhelming presence’ that pursued him near the back kitchen.

[Source: In Search of Ghosts by Darren W Ritson (2007); Ghost Taverns by Michael Hallowell & Darren W Ritson (2009); Ghostly Northumberland by Rob Kirkup (2008)]

Text c. Richard Holland 2011. Photo c. Schooner Hotel