Sir Thomas Vaughan of Hergest Court, remembered locally as Black Vaughan, lived through one of the most treacherous periods in English history, fighting first for the Lancastrians and then switching to the Yorkist cause during the long, brutal see-sawing of the Wars of the Roses. That switching did not save him. He was killed and beheaded at the Battle of Banbury in 1469, his life ending in exactly the kind of violent, sudden defeat that the wars specialised in producing.
Legend gave his death an extraordinary coda. His own black bloodhound is said to have carried his severed head from the battlefield all the way back to Hergest Court, and Vaughan's spirit is said to have returned afterward in the company of, or perhaps as, a great black hound that terrorised the surrounding area so thoroughly that local people became genuinely afraid to leave their houses after dark, a fear serious enough to have real, documented consequences for trade and farming across the district for years.
Twelve local clergymen were eventually said to have carried out a formal exorcism, reducing Vaughan's own spirit down to the size of a fly and sealing it inside a snuff box, which was then weighted down and sunk beneath a stone in the lake at Hergest Court, a suitably elaborate ending for a suitably elaborate haunting. The hound itself proved far harder to lay to rest, and became fixed in Herefordshire folklore as a harbinger of death specifically for the Vaughan family, said to appear before any death in the line right up until the Vaughans themselves finally died out in the nineteenth century. The story is often mentioned today alongside Arthur Conan Doyle, who some believe drew on it while developing The Hound of the Baskervilles after spending time in the area, though no evidence beyond the shared theme of a monstrous black hound actually supports the connection, and Doyle's fictional beast bears little real resemblance to the one described in Hergest's own local tradition.
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