A chapbook printed in 1703 and entitled A Gloucestershire Tragedy gives a lurid account of a scandal and crime which had supposedly just occurred at…

According to Winifred Beaumont in The Wormingford Story (1958), local tradition says that during the Danish incursions an English nun, who was a chieftain’s daughter,…

Sir Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, who had a castle on Bury Hill, was the arch-villain of the reigns of Stephen and Matilda (Maud).…

According to Peter Haining, the Revd Sabine Baring-Gould, writing in 1904, was the first to record a local belief that the figure of a Roman…

Rochford Hall was once owned by Sir Thomas Boleyn, also of BLICKLING HALL, Norfolk. According to a persistent tradition, it was the birthplace in 1507…

According to local legend, ever since his death in 1739, the ghost of the highwayman Dick Turpin, born at Hempstead, visits Loughton three times every…

Great Hawkwell Wood at Hockley was once notorious for its ‘shrieking boy’. In the wood was an oak tree known as ‘the double tree’ as…

The remains of Hadleigh Castle, built in about 1231, once had an eerie reputation. In his History of Rochford Hundred (1867), Philip Benton says that,…

Richard Baxter, in his Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (1691), gives an account of a phantom bell at Colne priory, the foundation of which…

At Dagenham Park, near Romford, it was said in the early nineteenth century that the ghost of James Radcliffe, Earl of Derwentwater, walked the gallery…