Easington Hall stood in Easington Village until its demolition in 1887, and in the years before it finally came down, the house had built a considerable local reputation as, by local reckoning, the most haunted house anywhere in the county, a claim that has outlived the physical building itself by well over a century. Among the stories attached to it, milk stored in the dairy was said to turn to blood without any explanation anyone could offer, a specifically grim and visceral image compared to the vaguer footsteps and cold spots reported at most other haunted houses in this collection, and at least one overnight guest reported hearing what sounded unmistakably like the footsteps of many beasts, tramping repeatedly up and down a staircase throughout the entire night.
One particularly detailed account describes a maid who heard groaning coming from somewhere down in the cellar, and who, putting her ear directly to a hole in the floor to listen more closely, heard three hideous groans in succession that badly frightened her, an experience specific and physical enough that it has survived in unusual detail compared to most secondhand accounts of this vintage.
The story notes, with exactly the kind of eerie coincidence these old tales so often carry, that a Colonel Overton died at Seaton in Rutland, over eighty miles away from Easington, on the very same day the maid heard the groaning drifting up from the cellar floor. Because the hall itself no longer stands, having been demolished in 1887, none of this can be checked against the actual building today, and the story survives purely through older written folklore collections rather than through any living tradition still tied to a physical, visitable place.
Comments