Henry Trigg was a churchwarden of St Nicholas's Church and a grocer in what is now Stevenage's Old Town, and by most accounts an unremarkable figure in life. It was his death, and more specifically his burial arrangements, that secured his lasting local fame. The eighteenth century saw a well-documented and genuinely disturbing trade in stolen corpses, dug up from fresh graves to supply the anatomy schools of London's expanding medical profession, and Trigg, evidently more anxious than most about the prospect, took an unusually elaborate precaution against it.
In his will, Trigg specified that his body was to be placed in a robust lead-lined coffin and suspended in the rafters of his own barn, at the rear of his shop, rather than committed to the ground where grave robbers could reach it. The barn was to be kept locked, with the key sealed inside the coffin alongside him, on the confident theory that he would need it to let himself out when he rose from the dead, which he predicted would happen within thirty years. His brother, the Reverend Thomas Trigg, carried out these instructions to the letter following Henry's death in 1724, and the coffin was duly hoisted ten feet up into the barn rafters amid considerable local excitement.
Trigg's resurrection never came, but his fame did. The barn became the Old Castle Inn in 1774, turning his suspended coffin into an unlikely local tourist attraction, inspected over the following century and a half by landlords, archaeologists and curious visitors, who noted that his remains were remarkably well preserved, hair still visible on the skull as late as an 1831 examination. That preservation did not last. Souvenir hunters gradually stripped the coffin of its contents over the decades that followed, a carpenter reportedly making off with a tooth and some hair during repair work, and soldiers stationed in the town during the First World War said to have swapped out some of his bones for horse remains to keep the attraction convincing. By 1999, when NatWest Bank owned the building, whatever fragments remained were quietly buried, leaving the coffin itself empty but still in place.
The building, now a Grade II listed former bank and now a dental practice, has attracted its own ghost reports over the years, most notably in 1964, when a worker carrying out renovations described seeing a man in an overcoat walk straight through a brick wall. Other accounts describe a general sense of being watched or an unexplained presence in the building, though none of this rises to the level of documentation attached to Trigg's original burial arrangements, which are unusually well recorded for an entry in this register, resting on his own will, the physical survival of the coffin itself, and repeated documented examinations across more than two centuries.
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