England's villages look peaceful enough on the surface. Church spires, cricket greens, thatched cottages, the occasional pub with a low beam and a friendly landlord. But scratch beneath that pastoral surface and you find something older and considerably less comfortable. England's villages have been accumulating their dead for a thousand years and more, and in the quietest corners of the country, some of them have never really left.
These are the most haunted villages in England. Leave the main roads behind. The best ones are never easy to find.
1. Pluckley, Kent
Pluckley holds the official title of England's most haunted village, a distinction awarded by the Guinness World Records in 1989 and one the village has never quite been able to shake. Situated in the Weald of Kent, it is a perfectly ordinary looking English village in almost every respect except that it is said to be home to somewhere between twelve and sixteen individual ghosts, depending on which account you read.
The most famous is the Red Lady, said to haunt the churchyard of St Nicholas Church, searching for the grave of her child. The White Lady, a different apparition entirely, is reported inside the church itself, and a Screaming Man has been heard at the site of a former brickworks where a worker fell to his death into a clay pit. A highwayman is said to haunt the crossroads at a location known as Fright Corner, and a phantom coach has been reported on the lanes approaching the village on dark nights.
The Screaming Woods, a dense area of woodland on the outskirts of the village, are considered one of the most unsettling locations in the area. Walkers report hearing sounds of distress from within the trees with no visible source, and the woods have attracted paranormal investigators from across the country for decades.
Pluckley's haunted reputation has made it a significant dark tourism destination. The village receives visitors throughout the year but October brings a particular concentration of ghost hunters and investigators, to the mixed feelings of the residents.
Visiting: Pluckley, Ashford, Kent. St Nicholas Church and the surrounding lanes are freely accessible. The Screaming Woods are on the eastern edge of the village. Respect the privacy of residents when visiting.
2. Eyam, Derbyshire
Eyam is not haunted in the conventional sense of unexplained apparitions and poltergeist activity. It is haunted by history, and the weight of what happened here in 1665 and 1666 is present in every stone of the village in a way that is difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore.
When plague arrived in Eyam in September 1665, carried in a parcel of cloth from London, the village rector William Mompesson made a decision that would define the community for centuries. He persuaded the villagers to quarantine themselves voluntarily, cutting off all contact with the surrounding area to prevent the disease from spreading into the wider Peak District. They remained isolated for fourteen months. Of the village's 350 residents, 260 died.
The plague graves are scattered throughout the surrounding fields and farmland, families having been buried where they fell rather than brought to the churchyard. The most affecting is Eyam Churchyard itself and the Riley Graves in a field outside the village, where Elizabeth Hancock buried her husband and six children over eight days in August 1666, carrying each body to the field alone because she could find no one to help her.
The village is extraordinarily well preserved and its plague history is documented in exceptional detail in the local museum. Apparitions have been reported throughout Eyam, particularly in the older cottages and near the plague graves, and the atmosphere of the village, particularly in the early morning or late evening, is unlike anywhere else in England.
Visiting: Eyam, Hope Valley, Derbyshire. Eyam Museum is essential. The Riley Graves are a short walk from the village centre and are freely accessible year-round.
3. Prestbury, Gloucestershire
Prestbury, a village on the outskirts of Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, makes a credible claim to rival Pluckley as England's most haunted village, and the diversity of its reported paranormal activity is remarkable.
The Black Abbot is Prestbury's most famous ghost, a figure in dark robes reported in the churchyard of St Mary's Church and on the path between the church and the old priory. He has been photographed on numerous occasions, with the same cloaked figure appearing in images taken by visitors who were unaware of the legend. The figure is believed to be the spirit of a medieval monk from the priory that once stood in the village.
The village also has a reported cavalier, a civil war soldier on horseback seen in the early morning on the lane known as Cleeve Road. A young woman called Joan has been reported in the Reform Cottage in the centre of the village, and a shoemaker has been seen and heard in one of the older properties near the church.
Cheltenham itself has a significant paranormal history, most notably the Cheltenham Ghost, documented in the 1880s by Frederic Myers of the Society for Psychical Research in what remains one of the most thoroughly investigated ghost cases in Victorian history. The regional concentration of paranormal reports around Prestbury and Cheltenham has made the area a significant destination for serious investigators.
Visiting: Prestbury, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. The village is a short drive from Cheltenham town centre. St Mary's Church and the surrounding lanes are freely accessible.
4. Borley, Essex
Borley is a tiny village in Essex, little more than a handful of houses and a church, and it would be entirely unknown were it not for Borley Rectory, once described as the most haunted house in England and the subject of one of the most controversial paranormal investigations in history.
The rectory was built in 1863 and demolished in 1944, but during the intervening decades it generated a volume of paranormal reports that attracted investigators from across the world. The psychical researcher Harry Price conducted extensive investigations at Borley during the 1930s, documenting hundreds of reported phenomena including apparitions, unexplained writing on the walls, objects thrown by unseen forces and the phantom of a nun seen repeatedly in the gardens.
Price's investigations were later questioned by fellow researchers who suggested some of the phenomena may have been fabricated, and the debate over what genuinely occurred at Borley Rectory has never been fully resolved. The controversy is part of what makes Borley so significant in the history of paranormal investigation.
The rectory is long gone but the village church of St Mary's has its own substantial paranormal history, with investigators reporting cold spots, unexplained sounds and apparitions in the nave and churchyard.
Visiting: The village of Borley is accessible to visitors though nothing remains of the rectory itself. St Mary's Church stands across the road from the former rectory site.
5. Abbotsbury, Dorset
Abbotsbury is a village of golden stone cottages on the Dorset coast, famous for its swannery and its sub-tropical gardens and considerably less famous for its paranormal history, which is nonetheless substantial.
The village grew around Abbotsbury Abbey, a Benedictine monastery founded in the 11th century and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. The remains of the abbey are still visible in the village, and the tithe barn, one of the largest surviving medieval tithe barns in England, stands in remarkable condition at the village's edge.
The ghost of a monk has been reported in the abbey ruins and in the lanes surrounding the tithe barn for centuries. A white lady has been seen on the road approaching the village from the east, and the swannery, which has occupied its position on the Fleet Lagoon since the middle ages, has its own reported activity particularly around the older buildings on the site.
The hilltop chapel of St Catherine, which stands alone above the village on a ridge with views across the Chesil Beach and the sea, is considered the most atmospherically charged location in the area and has generated consistent reports from visitors who describe feeling an unusual sense of presence within the small building.
Visiting: Abbotsbury, Weymouth, Dorset. The abbey remains, tithe barn and St Catherine's Chapel are all freely accessible. The swannery and subtropical gardens charge admission. The walk to St Catherine's Chapel from the village takes approximately twenty minutes.
6. Hutton-le-Hole, North Yorkshire
The North York Moors contain more than their fair share of haunted villages, and Hutton-le-Hole, one of the most beautiful villages in Yorkshire, is among the most consistently reported.
The village sits in a shallow valley on the southern edge of the moors, its whitewashed cottages arranged around a wide green through which Hutton Beck runs in a series of small cascades. It looks like a postcard and feels, in certain lights, like a place that has not quite caught up with the present century.
The surrounding moors have generated paranormal reports for as long as records exist, and the village itself has several reported presences. A grey lady has been seen near the old hall, and the road out of the village towards Lastingham is considered one of the more active stretches of lane in the area by investigators familiar with the North Yorkshire paranormal landscape.
The nearby village of Lastingham itself is worth visiting for its remarkable crypt church, one of the oldest in England, where the sense of age and accumulated history is profound even by Yorkshire standards.
Visiting: Hutton-le-Hole, York, North Yorkshire. Freely accessible year-round. The Ryedale Folk Museum in the village is excellent. The moors are at their most atmospheric in October and November.
7. Mapledurham, Oxfordshire
Mapledurham is one of Oxfordshire's best kept secrets, a village on the banks of the Thames west of Reading that has remained largely unchanged since the Elizabethan era. It contains a working watermill, a 15th century almshouse and Mapledurham House, a large Elizabethan manor that has been in the Blount family since it was built in the 1580s.
The house and village were the inspiration for Kenneth Grahame's Toad Hall in The Wind in the Willows, and the setting alone is sufficient to explain why. The house is also reported to be haunted by the figure of a priest, associated with the concealed priest holes built into the structure during the Elizabethan period when Catholic priests required hiding from the Protestant authorities. A woman in grey has been reported in the grounds, and the churchyard of the Catholic chapel adjacent to the house is considered particularly active by investigators.
Visiting: Mapledurham, Reading, Oxfordshire. The house and watermill are open on selected Sundays and Bank Holidays between Easter and September. Check opening times before visiting.
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