Rectory Lane in Datchworth carries what is likely the darkest of the village's several ghost stories, rooted in a documented eighteenth century tragedy of institutional neglect rather than crime or misfortune of the more usual kind. In 1769, a young boy stumbled upon a horrifying scene in a Datchworth poor house: the emaciated remains of James Eaves, his wife, and their infant son, left in conditions vile enough that it is widely believed the family was simply allowed to starve to death, whether through deliberate cruelty or catastrophic institutional failure is not established in the sources for this entry. The only survivor was their eleven year old son, found crawling among the bodies of his own family, himself reduced to skin and bones and, understandably, completely out of his mind.
When the family's remains were finally removed, the cart carrying them travelled down the route that is now known as Rectory Lane on its way to burial. It is that journey, according to local tradition, which the lane has echoed with ever since. Travellers report a spectral cart, guided by a solemn figure of a man dressed in black, moving slowly down the lane, with the pale, limp and lifeless limbs of what is believed to be the Eaves family visibly hanging from its sides as it passes.
A second, apparently unrelated ghost is also reported along the same stretch: a headless horse, seen galloping the length of Rectory Lane before vanishing, its connection to the Eaves family tragedy, if any, left unexplained by the tradition itself. Between the two, Rectory Lane has earned a reputation locally as somewhere better avoided after dark, a reputation that, unusually for this register, rests on a genuinely documented and specifically dated historical tragedy rather than vague or undated local rumour.
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