A tour of the graveyard of St. Nicholas Church in Pluckley, England. Photo / Andrew Testa, The New York Times
Pluckley is said to count at least 12 spirits among its 1,000 residents. Come October, ghost hunters arrive in droves to a place where even nonbelievers concede they’ve had eerie encounters.
Whether or not you believe in the phantom coach and horses, the screaming man, the “watercress lady” engulfed in flames or the legend of the highwayman killed at “fright corner,” it’s hard to ignore ghost stories in Pluckley, England.
In this quaint, ancient settlement of about 1000 souls, 80km southeast of London, at least a dozen otherworldly spirits are said to occupy St Nicholas Church, its graveyard, Pluckley’s pubs and other buildings. If that’s not enough, the “screaming woods” – supposedly the source of terrifying nocturnal shrieks – are nearby.
A small industry has blossomed around the supernatural, but some in the village wish the ghost hunters who descend on Pluckley in large numbers around Halloween would find other haunts.
“We’ve had 2000 people arriving in the village – there would be hundreds on every corner where there is supposed to be a ghost, and they would trash the churchyard, light fires,” said James Buss, owner of the Dering Arms, one of Pluckley’s pubs (haunted, of course).
When a train arrives on Halloween at the nearby rail station, Buss will sometimes turn off the lights, lock the doors and pretend the Dering Arms is closed until the crowd heads farther up the road, toward the sign that urges drivers to “slow down or you will upset our ghosts”.
Others in Pluckley welcome visitors, particularly when they spend money. For £16 (about $35), they can take a tour most weekends led by a guide dressed as a spectral highwayman who recounts stories of strange apparitions and grisly murders.
As darkness falls and the wind whistles through the village graveyard – said to be haunted by the White Lady, a beauty who perished tragically young, and the Red Lady, whose baby died at birth – visitors line up against the metal fence by the burial ground for a seance under the moonlit sky.
Asked to comment, Janet Gwillim, the churchwarden of St. Nicholas, politely declined, adding in an email, “The only ghost we have in the church is The Holy Ghost!”
But at the Black Horse, a pub considered the centre of paranormal Pluckley, Samantha Camburn, who recently took over the establishment with a business partner, is starting to believe that the beamed building, which dates from the 1470s, is haunted.
One morning, when Camburn and her niece entered the bar, “That chair was moving, sliding,” she said, pointing to a seat in a corner. “Not massively, just a little slide.”
One object that came with the pub was an old, remarkably ugly dollshouse reputed to belong to a ghostly child. As unsightly and unwanted as it may be, its spooky provenance means Camburn, 48, is taking no chances in getting rid of it.
“It’s horrible, I’m not going to lie,” she said, “but I’m not going to move it.”
Pluckley’s age and rural ambience provide what is perhaps the perfect backdrop for such tales. Ancient enough to feature in the Domesday Book, a survey of landholdings compiled around 1086, its church has seen nine centuries of history. With no street lighting, nighttime here can be distinctly eerie.
“People prefer old ghost stories,” said Neil Arnold, the author of several books about haunted Britain. “A ghost story of a guy vaping hasn’t really got the same atmosphere.”
The villagers in Pluckley have passed the haunted tales down since the early 20th century, embellishing and distorting them along the way, Arnold said.
About half of the stories are rooted in documented incidents – usually murders, grisly deaths or suicides. These include the “screaming man,” whose legend began after a fatal accident at a brickworks.
But folklore can be complicated, Arnold said, describing how he had set out to investigate the origins of the myth that Satan can be summoned by dancing around Pluckley’s “devil’s bush”.
The dance must be completed backward, 13 times, at midnight under a full moon, Arnold said, “and you have to be naked, unfortunately”.
Arnold has found the bush to which the tales refer, but not in Pluckley – rather, about 10 miles away. The devil, as far as he knows, has yet to appear.
By the light of day, some of Pluckley’s reputedly scariest spots don’t elicit so much as a shiver, including the bridge where a woman who sold watercress is said to have set fire to herself while smoking a pipe and drinking gin. The nearby spot where a highwayman supposedly suffered a gruesome death is an unremarkable road junction. There is no specific place, frightening or otherwise, to try to spot the phantom coach and horses said to roam the village.
Pluckley’s ghostly reputation was spread by books such as Pluckley Was My Playground, a memoir written in 1955 by Frederick Sanders, and later by a local broadcaster, Desmond Carrington. Then, a mention by Guinness World Records in 1989 as Britain’s most haunted village consolidated Pluckley’s supernatural status.
Sceptics include Chris French, an emeritus professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, who said the main factors influencing ghost sightings are whether the witness already believed in the supernatural, as well as the context and location.
“When you’ve got a place like Pluckley, with the reputation it has now got,” French said, “any kind of anomaly, no matter how trivial or how easily explained in other terms, is going to be seen as evidence of a ghost because that’s what people want.”
Pluckley residents can give firsthand testimony of this phenomenon. Sitting at the bar in the Black Horse, Andy Gooding, 53, who moved to the village in March, recounted waking up one morning to discover that a table placed on a rug was not as he had left it.
“The coffee table was upside down with its legs sticking in the air, which panicked me a little,” Gooding said, instantly assuming this was the work of a Pluckley poltergeist. “It actually turned out it was my partner who had deliberately turned the coffee table the wrong way to get rid of the folds in the rug.”
At Elvey Farm, a bed-and-breakfast once featured in a TV show about the supernatural, the ghost is said to be Edward Brett, who shot himself after falling on hard times.
Elvey Farm’s owners, Nick Leggett, 64, and Sonja Johnson, 59, prefer not to exploit that story in their marketing. Still, their guests often confess to being ghost hunters.
A sceptic about the supernatural, Leggett admitted to one uncomfortable experience in the property’s dark, unlit old house. “I just felt a presence,” he said. “My hair went all up on end; it was a strange experience. I didn’t smell anything, I didn’t see anything, I just felt something.”
At the Dering Arms, Buss, who has lived in the area for 40 years, described the hype around ghosts as “generally a load of rubbish”.
Not all of the customers at the pub’s upscale restaurant have agreed. One refused to use the downstairs bathroom because that meant passing the spot where she once saw a ghost in Victorian shooting dress.
Buss is “not a believer” and can explain away 99% of odd events, he said, but “every now and then, there is something I can’t,” such as mysterious knocks that woke him up twice in one month.
Still, he is not afraid to upset any supernatural spirits. “We are supposed to have a ghost in the corner there,” he said, gesturing to an empty space to his right, adding that he recently put the chair she supposedly sat on up for sale in an auction.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Stephen Castle
Photographs by: Andrew Testa
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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