Lux Ferre

To Calgarth Hall, once the home of the Philipson family, was attached one of the oldest and best-known traditions of screaming skulls. What may have been the earliest form of the story

About the end of the seventeenth century, says Jeremiah Sullivan, in Cumberland and Westmorland, Ancient and Modern (1857), a man well known in the neighbourhood of Appleby as ‘Old Shepherd’, who had

The manor house here is built on the site of a former monastery, and like others of similar history is said to be haunted by a monk. The story of this monk,

In 1681, Joseph Glanvill published his treatise Saducismus Triumphatus, ‘Saduceism Defeated’ – meaning by ‘Saduceism’ the doctrine of the Sadducees mentioned in the New Testament, who denied that there is an afterlife.

In 1930, the local writer Edith Olivier described various apparitions to be seen in and around Stourton. On New Year’s Eve, on a road near there, one might encounter a headless horseman

Ralph Whitlock’s book on the folklore of Wiltshire includes a macabre tale which his informants said had happened about a hundred years earlier, i.e. in the 1870s. The wife of a wealthy

A sinister story was collected by the folklorist Kingsley Palmer in 1969 about a skeleton nicknamed ‘Molly’ kept in Pythouse, a mansion near Semley: Molly is the remains of a female who

In 1922, the writer Alfred Williams, describing the countryside of this area, mentioned a story of ghost-laying which provides a humorous variation on this popular theme. At one time, it is said,

In 1901, J. U. Powell reported to Folk-Lore that people of this village were telling vivid tales about how the ghost of a prominent member of the local gentry had been laid

Here there is a ghost legend about a Captain Thomas Bound, a supporter of Cromwell, who died in 1667 and was remembered as a wicked man, very cruel and covetous, and hard