Author: Lux Ferre

Originally in the churchyard of St Peter’s, now inside the church, is the massive marble base supporting a huge pyramid flanked by urns which marked…

The extraordinary career of the historical Geoffrey de Mandeville inspired many strange traditions concerning him both in the Middle Ages and long after. There are…

Hyde Hall in this parish was said to be haunted by the ghost of Sir John Jocelyn, the third Baronet. Tradition said that, during his…

Here from the twelfth century up to the Reformation stood the priory of St Trinity-in-the-Wood, founded in about 1145. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries,…

The present mansion of Knebworth House replaced an older house begun in the last decade of the fifteenth century, its mainly Elizabethan fabric dated over…

‘Old Keeper Mayling’, who died a very old man, sixty years before Vicars Bell published Little Gaddesden (1949), was a lively raconteur who used to…

A number of ghosts have appeared at Hitchin, including the Ancient Greek poet Homer, who, according to the poet George Chapman (c.1559–1634), appeared to him…

Hatfield House, home of the Cecils, used to be haunted by a family ghost, James, sixth Earl of Salisbury. It was his mother’s fault, as…

In 1751, John Butterfield, publican of the Black Horse at Gubblecote, managed to rouse a mob against an old woman named Ruth Osborne, of Long…

Sissavernes, earlier Sissavens, Farm at Codicote probably gets its name from a historical lord of the manor, William de Sisvierne, mentioned in 1166. In the…