Bramcote's Church of St Michael and All Angels is known locally as the Sunken Church because its ground level sits noticeably lower than the land around it, giving the churchyard an unusually atmospheric, hollowed-out setting that has long lent itself to ghost stories. The best documented of these comes with an unusually credible witness: a village police officer, whose professional role at least establishes that the report was made and taken seriously at the time, rather than surviving only as secondhand village gossip.
In 1978, the officer reported seeing a black-hooded figure moving through the churchyard, dressed in what he took to be an ankle-length dark coat with a three-cornered hat, giving it a monk-like appearance. He watched the figure until it came to a stop beside a particular gravestone, at which point he shone his torch directly at it, a natural instinct for any officer investigating a nighttime disturbance. Instead of illuminating a person, the beam passed straight through the shape and lit up the gravestones standing behind it, with no obstruction.
After word of the sighting spread through the village, an elderly local man came forward with an explanation rooted in older local memory. He recounted a story that, many years earlier, a female servant in the village had been killed by a coachman, who was so consumed by guilt over what he had done that he took his own life somewhere near the Sunken Church rather than face arrest for the crime. According to this account, the figure seen by the officer was not a monk at all but the coachman's own restless ghost, still lingering at the place of his suicide, his coat and tricorn hat consistent with an earlier era's dress rather than any monastic habit.
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