Lux Ferre

Daniel Defoe recorded a curious tale current here in the 1720s: They have a story in this city, that whenever a bishop of that diocese is to die, a heron comes and

Chanctonbury is a high spot (883 ft; 269 m) along the ridge of the South Downs, just east of the village of Washington, and its Ring was originally the name given to

There was an honest miller in Chalvington in the 1750s, ‘the only honest miller ever known’, according to M. A. Lower, writing in 1854. This man, finding success in business impossible, in

In 1771, a certain Jack Upperton of Burpham, together with another man, attempted to rob a post-boy who was carrying mail across the Downs from Steyning to Arundel, in Blakehurst Lane on

About a mile (1.6 km) outside the town stands Clopton House, originally an Elizabethan mansion but remodelled in the eighteenth century, which is reputedly haunted by the ghosts of several family members

T. F. Thiselton-Dyer, a late Victorian writer on the supernatural, drew attention to the fact that the journal Ackerman’s Repository in November 1820 carried an account of an unusual legal case which

Two separate tales of haunting are told of Ragley Hall, in the parish of Arrow, and its park. First, as reported by J. Harvey Bloom c.1930, there is the claim that a

W. P. Witcutt noted in the journal Folk-Lore in 1944 that from 1922 to 1929 the attic of the manor house here was reputedly haunted by a phantom known as Plantie’s Ghost.

A complex and persistent tale of haunting is set in and around the now-demolished Little Lawford Hall, for a long time the seat of the Boughtons – a family with the sinister

Many traditions about ghosts have been collected from this village by various writers between c.1930 and 1980, including J. Harvey Bloom, Alan Burgess, Roy Palmer, and Meg Atkins. One report concerns the