Longleat
A story reported by V. S. Manley in his book The Folk-Lore of the Warminster District (1924) claimed that there had once been a Marquis of Bath who returned to haunt Longleat House after his death and made himself so troublesome to his widow that she called upon twelve parsons to come to the house to lay him in the Red Sea. This much is common in folklore, but the remainder of the procedure is unusual. In Manley’s words:
A sheepskin was procured, into which the Marquise was wrapped, and in a cradle they laid her, and carried her to her room. The twelve parsons sat around a table and waited. At midnight the ghost appeared and stood among them. Each parson in turn asked the ghost what troubled him. It begged to be allowed to touch the hem of his wife’s garment. They told him this was impossible, because she was wrapped in lamb’s wool. Then they walked through the house reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards, which proved effective in ridding the place of the ghost.
It is an enigmatic tale. The protective power of the sheep’s or lamb’s fleece is clearly related to the religious symbolism in which these animals stand for innocence, as at HEYTESBURY; the Marquise is also laid in a cradle, like an innocent newborn babe. But what was the ghost’s intention towards his living wife? Would he have murderously attacked her? There are Danish legends in which a revenant begs to touch his wife’s hand but she, forewarned, holds out her kerchief, which he rips to pieces. Or is he amorous? Katy Jordan, retelling the story in the year 2000, says the lamb’s wool ‘protect[s] her from the ghost’s advances’. Sexuality in ghosts rarely features in British sources, most of which have been filtered through the respectability of nineteenth-century informants and collectors, but can be deduced from some accounts of the undead, as for instance the twelfth-century writings of William of Newburgh, who mentions a dead man entering the bed where his wife was sleeping. Or is his gesture meant as a humble plea for her prayers, rather as the ghost of Sir John Popham at WELLINGTON, Somerset, had his fate alleviated by the prayers of his pious wife? It is, alas, impossible to get past the collector to question the informant, so the questions must remain unanswered.
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SOURCE:
Haunted England : The Penguin Book of Ghosts – Written by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson – Copyright © Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson 2005, 2008