Southcote Manor was a moated house on the western side of what is now Reading. It was pulled down in the 1920s. Berkshire History records that the stories told about its ghost did not agree with one another.
Some said a headless phantom walked there, and the name of Sir George Cobb, said to have drowned in 1762, was sometimes attached to it. Others spoke of a friar, and others of a lady on a white horse who crossed the drawbridge at midnight. The source says the evidence points to the principal spirit being Sir John Blagrave, who built the house and died in 1611, with the apparition appearing about fifty years after his death.
The mixed accounts are a reason to treat this as a layered local tradition rather than one event. The pin is a settlement estimate because the manor no longer stands.
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