Holy Trinity Church, standing on the bank of the Avon in Stratford-upon-Avon and famous chiefly as Shakespeare's own burial place, was also, considerably more recently, the setting for a genuine and still unsolved crime in 1954, when a woman named Olive Bennett was strangled nearby and her body, tied to a gravestone, was thrown into the river to conceal the killing. The case was never solved, and whoever was actually responsible for Olive's murder has never been identified or brought to any kind of justice.
Her ghostly figure is reported standing in the water near the churchyard and along the nearby towpath, a haunting rooted directly in a real, thoroughly documented mid-twentieth-century murder rather than in distant, unverifiable legend, which sets this entry apart clearly from most of the county's older, far less anchored ghost stories gathered elsewhere throughout this collection.
The crime itself sits outside this register's own paranormal remit in the strictest sense, and is described here only as the necessary background to the haunting that followed it, but the genuine, documented reality of Olive Bennett's unsolved 1954 murder gives her reported presence by the river a weight and immediacy that the great majority of Warwickshire's older, more thoroughly legendary hauntings simply cannot match.
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