Haunted England- Page 8

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Revd John Gunn, rector of the parish of Irstead, set out to record ‘The traditions of a single Parish, retained in the memory

London’s most famous gallows was the large triangular structure in the district of Tyburn, at what is now the junction of Bayswater Road and Edgware Road, colloquially known as ‘Tyburn Tree’ or

One of the standard traditional motives ascribed to a ghost’s apparition is that it has come to warn a living acquaintance to prepare for death. A very detailed account of such a

‘A wonderful modern ghost-story’, wrote Charles Harper, ‘obtained much publicity at the close of December 1913 … The principals were said to be people of the highest social position.’ It is presumably

A booklet of 1842 entitled The Islington Ghost describes the strange happenings which were said to have followed the burial in 1517 of a wealthy landowner, Richard Cloudesley, who had been a

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