Lux Ferre

To see one’s own ‘fetch’ or ‘wraith’ (or ‘astral body’, in the language of paranormal studies) has always been regarded as a death omen. John Aubrey, in his Miscellanies of 1696, has

Spectral animals and birds are common in British folklore, but it is fairly unusual for them to be interpreted as the ghosts of specific individual creatures that died in known circumstances. Among

In Hampton church is the imposing funeral monument of Mrs Sybil Penn, who died on 6 November 1562 of smallpox. She is shown lying full-length beneath a marble canopy supported on pillars.

In the main corridor of University College stands a handsome glass-fronted case containing the mummified body of one of its founders, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who objected to Christian burial. He

In this district (which gets its name from the fact that garlic was formerly sold there) stands the beautiful church of St James Garlick Hythe. A legend has grown up over the

According to a report from 1900, a ghost used to be seen here and there in the neighbourhood of Stainsby House. It also appeared in the ‘ash plantin’ afore you go down

At South Ferriby, on the Humber, in the nineteenth century, ‘there used to be something at a house’. This something came every night until the old man and his daughter who lived

In her collection of Lincolnshire folklore in the archives of the Folklore Society, Mabel Peacock gives a tradition from Snakeholme current probably in the later nineteenth century. She writes: A.G., a Lincolnshire

A well-known phantom in the neighbourhood of Brigg was an apparition called the Lackey Causey Calf (causey = causeway). Sometimes described as headless, it was reported by Mabel Peacock in an unpublished

According to old writers, such was the medieval prosperity of Boston that when, during the proclamation of a tournament at fair time, a band of marauders dressed as monks fired the town