In the early afternoon of 27 November 1944, an underground munitions storage depot at Fauld, hidden within the gypsum workings near Hanbury, exploded when somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 tonnes of ordnance detonated at once, an event now generally described as the third largest explosion in history up to that point, surpassed only by Halifax in 1917 and later by Heroya in 1946. The blast killed at least 70 people, utterly destroyed a nearby farm and reservoir, and left behind a crater that remains a genuinely striking scar on the landscape today, stretching roughly a quarter of a mile across in places. The exact cause was never conclusively established, though careless handling of a detonator by a depot worker is generally accepted by historians as the most likely trigger for the catastrophe.
The crater has since become a magnet for anomalous accounts rather than settling around any one specific, developed ghost story: visitors and locals have reported cries and what is described as an eerie disembodied voice near the site, impressions that turn up regularly in general listings of haunted Staffordshire locations, though always presented in fairly vague terms without named witnesses attached to any individual account.
The explosion itself is exhaustively documented as one of the great disasters of wartime Britain, a matter of thorough historical record rather than folklore. The paranormal claims attached to the site since are, by clear contrast, far thinner and considerably less substantiated, and they are recorded here only as an honestly labelled addition to what is, at its core, a well-established and genuinely tragic piece of real historical record.
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