This village can boast of a vivid ghost legend recorded in the 1880s, the modern versions of which have developed hints of vampirism. The ghost…

Here, as at PIMPERNE, the ghost of a dog dragging a rattling chain is said to run invisibly through the village square, heading for the…

According to tales collected orally around 1970, something invisible, but which drags rattling chains, can be heard running wildly from Letton Hill to Pimperne; those…

The folklorist J. S. Udal, who collected much Dorset material in the late nineteenth century, published the following anecdote in 1922. There was once a…

The ancient hill-forts and groups of barrows strung out along the crests of the Purbeck Hills are the setting for repeated sightings of phantom armies,…

According to a strong local tradition recorded early in the nineteenth century, there was a violent encounter between deer poachers and forest keepers in Cranborne…

Writing in 1922, J. S. Udal records that it was thought in the 1880s that Bagley House near Bridport had long been haunted by a…

For several generations the owners of this manor house near Bridport (who, until recently, were the Pinney family) have declared that its luck depends on…

The Dorset dialect poet William Barnes (1801–86) spent his youth in this village, and in later life told his grandchildren how he used to believe…

In 1883, Edwin Guest argued that this large Iron Age hill-fort about two miles (3.2 km) west of Shapwick was the ‘Mount Badon’ where, according…