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Borley Rectory, Essex
Borley Rectory was called 'the most haunted house in England'. It was built in 1863 by the Rev. H.D.E. Bull, and destroyed
by fire in 1939.
It was built on the site of a monastery, and legend has it that a monk was planning to elope with
a nun from a nearby nunnery, but they were caught, the monk was hanged and the nun was bricked up alive.
It was said
that the nun's ghost walked on July 28th, each year. One such July 28th, in 1900, three of Rev. Bull's daughters saw the
nun gliding along a path, which had been called the 'Nun's Walk'. When they went to get one of their sisters they approached
the figure who then vanished.
Several others saw the nun, including a Mr. P. Shaw Jeffrey, former Headmaster of Colchester
Grammar School, and Rev. Harry Bull, who became rector at Borley after his father's death in 1892.
But it wasn't
only the nun, other strange things happened at Borley.
In 1928, Rev. Guy Eric Smith became rector, and he claimed to have
heard loud ringing of the doorbell, footsteps, whispers, saw lights switched on, and even saw a ghostly coach and horses.
In 1930 Rev. Lionel Foyster came to Borley, and even worse things happened to him and his young wife. Objects appearing
from nowhere, things thrown about, and even his wife being thrown out of bed on more than one occasion.
Borley Rectory
was sold to a Captain Gregson in December 1938, and in February 1939 the place was gutted by fire, and completely demolished
four or five years later.
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Pluckley
(known as the most haunted village in Kent.)
One haunting is of a beautiful woman, Lady Dering who died several hundred years ago. Her husband had her dressed in a rich
gown with a red rose on her breast, and her coffin was airtight and made of lead encased in two more lead coffins and an oaken
one, hoping to preserve her loveliness. It is said she walks in the churchyard, on certain nights still dressed in her finery
and with her red rose. The story of this for many years was a closely guarded secret as it was suggested she was as wicked
as she was beautiful.
Two other members of the Dering family, both women are also said to haunt in Pluckley.
Among the many other ghosts of Pluckley, there is also a ghostly monk, a miller who walks at the full moon, a schoolmaster
who is seen swinging from the tree where he hanged himself, a phantom coach and horses, a soldier who walks through Park Wood,
and the most recent, a woman in the church, in modern dress.
The Peak District.
The Peak District is one of the most haunted regions of the British Isles. Here is just a tiny
selection of some ghostly goings-on there.
Across the road from St. Peter's Church, Hope, Derbyshire, the oldest recorded Christian place of worship in the northern
Peak District, is the Traveller's Rest public house. It is home to the ghost of a woman dressed in black.
Legend
has it a young woman died falling down a staircase, escaping from a drunken labourer on Christmas Eve, hundreds of years ago.
It is rumoured that the ghost glides along an upstairs corridor of the inn each Christmas Eve, holding a bunch of keys in
her hand.
In 1974 the landlord, Con Sullivan, told a local newspaper he had "a feeling that something is going
on here. There is a 'presence' all the time, and it frightens me."
Highlow Hall, Hathersage, has been described as "reputedly the most haunted house in Derbyshire".
The first
record of a haunting there is from the fourteenth century when it is said the scheming Nicholas Eyre wooed two sisters for
their inheritance. When the elder sister found out she fled the hall and was never seen alive again. Her ghost is said to
have appeared to Nicholas and put a curse on the Eyre family.
Another ghost seen there is a 'white lady' thought
to be the ghost of a lady murdered in an upstairs bedroom. Another 'lady in white' was seen in the yard at 2 one morning,
and a lady visitor to the Hall saw a ghostly figure of a man.
One winter's evening early in the 1960s, a young couple were riding a motorbike and sidecar along the moorland road linking
Fox House near Hathersage, with Sheffield. They were flagged down by a girl in a leather jacket with a crash helmet, who
asked for a lift to an address in Sheffield. Before they got there, though, the man realised his pillion passenger had vanished.
They returned to Fox House but found no trace of the girl.
After reporting it to the police the couple checked out
the address the girl had given. The door was answered by the girls distraught mother, who told them her daughter had been
killed only a few days before, in a motorcycle accident on the same stretch of road where they had picked up their female
hitchiker.
For more information, and more pics, please visit my personal website!!
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