Pengethley Manor sits on fifteen acres of parkland between Hereford and Ross-on-Wye and has operated in recent years as a working country house hotel under the name Brooks Country House. Its central ghost story concerns a girl called Harriet, said to have died in a fire that badly damaged part of the building in 1816, trapped helplessly by the flames with no means of escape available to her. Staff and guests describe her consistently as a playful rather than frightening presence, blamed for small tricks and gentle disturbances around the main building, as though she were still, in some sense, simply a child looking for company after all these years.
A second, apparently entirely unconnected figure is an elderly woman in a long black dress, seen walking across the very section of the building damaged by the 1816 fire and reported separately in both the reception area and the library. No name is attached to her anywhere, though the suggestion made locally is that she lost someone she loved dearly in the same fire that killed Harriet, two separate tragedies from the same fire perhaps explaining both hauntings at once.
Guests and staff have also reported footsteps echoing through empty corridors and furniture appearing to lift briefly off the floor, though these remain considerably looser, less specific claims compared to the two named hauntings that anchor the building's wider reputation, Harriet's playful mischief and the black-clad woman's grief standing as the manor's two clearest, most consistently told stories.
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