In 1954 Christina Hole, then secretary of the Oxfordshire Folk-lore Society, told the Bicester Rotary Club about an unseen elemental ghostly force on the road between Hempton and Deddington. In her version it blocked cyclists, and horses reacted to it, becoming nervous and bolting for no reason.
In 2020 Moira Byatt of the Deddington and District History Society told Dark Oxfordshire that she heard the sound of a horse passing her house at the crossroads and saw nothing. Neighbours knew it as the Hempton Horse Man, and members of a cycling club said they had been pushed off their bikes by something invisible at the same spot.
The two accounts differ: blocking versus pushing. Neither source says who the rider might have been or gives a cause. John Richardson's 1977 Handy Guide to the Oxford and County Ghost Stories is also cited. It is a recurring local report rather than a single event. The pin is an estimate for the crossroads.
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