Carnfield Hall's ghost story has the unusual distinction of being one where a genuine piece of buried family history eventually caught up with a much older, unexplained reputation. For at least a hundred years, the hall's north-east bedroom was known within the family and among staff to have a haunted feel to it, without anyone being able to say why. That changed only relatively recently, when research into the family's own history turned up an old family tree recording that a former squire of the hall, Robert Revell, had been murdered in his bed by two of his own servants, a piece of history that had simply dropped out of local memory over the generations between his death and its rediscovery.
Alongside the Revell bedroom, Carnfield has a scatter of other reported phenomena tied to different parts of the house. Descendants of nineteenth-century servants have described three children dressed in eighteenth-century costume, two girls and a boy, seen playing ball on the south lawn before fading away into the dusk, an image with the gentle, slightly wistful quality of many child-ghost sightings rather than anything overtly frightening. When the current residents first moved into the hall in February 2011, they reported a run of unexplained noises, thumps and doors shutting, most strikingly a faint sound of harpsichord music heard coming from an upstairs parlour with no instrument being played. Guests and residents alike have also described furniture in various rooms seeming to have been shifted, and footsteps crossing the drawing room with nobody present to have made them.
The hall now operates in part as a venue for organised paranormal investigation, drawing on this accumulated set of reports, and its own residents describe it, without much apparent exaggeration, as one of the most consistently active locations that visiting investigators have covered.
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