Dean Village's ghost story is one of the more narratively complete accounts in this batch, with a beginning, an escalation and something resembling a resolution, which is unusual for this kind of folklore. As told, a Mrs Gordon moved into a flat by the bridge in the village with her daughter sometime in the nineteenth century, glad to find the rooms directly above hers unoccupied and holding nothing but old, disused furniture. Her contentment did not last: she began waking at night to shuffling footsteps and banging overhead, and found herself increasingly dreading time spent in her own bedroom. On one occasion it was not sound that woke her but a distinct sense of another presence in the room; lying frozen, she heard footsteps climbing the stairs from below, followed by the same shuffling she had grown used to hearing from above.
The haunting reached its climax on what the story presents as its final occurrence: waking again, Mrs Gordon looked toward her bedroom doorway and saw a man standing there, his manner sinister and distracted, holding in his hands something that looked like a bundle of rags. That was enough for the family, who moved out of the flat shortly after. What sets this account apart from most similar Old Town ghost stories is the coda: Mrs Gordon is said to have made her own inquiries into the building's history afterwards, and traced the figure to a retired seaman who had previously lived in her own flat, an alcoholic man described as disturbed, at a time when a family with a young baby occupied the rooms above him — a detail that, whether accurate or embellished after the fact, gives the haunting an unusually specific and faintly tragic backstory rather than leaving it as an anonymous figure in a doorway.
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