The killing of a curate at the altar during Mass is a genuinely dramatic and specific enough claim, right down to the stated date of 27 December 1357, that it reads more like garbled local memory of a real medieval act of violence than a generic invented ghost story, even though no source consulted for this entry supplies a contemporary legal or ecclesiastical record confirming the precise details.
Penfound's own reported double life, an ordained curate secretly tied to the same pirate gang that ultimately killed him, gives this haunting an unusually morally ambiguous central figure compared with the more straightforwardly innocent murder victims recorded elsewhere in this register, his death reading as much like a falling out among criminals as a religiously motivated attack.
The parish's second, entirely separate case of a priest meeting a violent end, Simon Morton's execution at Stratton in 1549 during the Prayer Book Rebellion, is recorded here for context rather than as part of the same haunting, since nothing found for this entry connects Morton's death to any reported ghost, though it does show Poundstock as a parish with more than one genuine brush with fatal religious and political violence within two centuries.
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