Month: December 2021

Porlock is the setting for a tale of ghost-laying reported by the Somerset folklore collector Ruth Tongue in the 1960s, the ghost being that of…

In August 1977, the road linking this village to Frome, three miles (5 km) away, became famous in the press as the setting for an…

A little way outside the village, on the Crowcombe road, is a wooded bank called Walford’s Gibbet, in reference to a murderer’s fate in 1789.…

At a crossroads outside the town, on the Dowlish road, is a spot marked on the map as Mary Hunt’s Grave, where people occasionally lay…

A farmhouse in this village, Higher Chilton Farm, displays a skull in a cabinet on a high shelf in its hall, facing the main door…

An anecdote from the mid nineteenth century given by Charlotte Burne illustrates the differing ways in which a paranormal occurrence could be explained. A man…

One of Charlotte Burne’s elderly informants told how a certain squire in days long past fell to his death from an upper window of Millichope…

On the outskirts of this village there is, or was, a pool which was believed to be bottomless, and was known as the Black Pool.…

In Kinlet church is a monument to Sir George Blount, who died in 1581; it was a focus for many tales about him in the…

Here, not far from Ellesmere, another tale of traditional exorcism was current in the late nineteenth century. By praying incessantly for three days and three…