Sissavernes, also recorded as Sissifernes, occupies an unusual place among Hertfordshire's ghosts in having his story preserved not as prose but as verse, in a poem written around 1820 by William Nobbs, the parish clerk of Welwyn. According to the tradition Nobbs was drawing on, Sissavernes was a farmer from Codicote who swore he would never leave his own land, and whose family or neighbours honoured that vow, after a fashion, by burying him on a hilltop rather than in the churchyard, itself a form of unsanctified burial that, per the county's broader folk beliefs about ghosts, would have been expected to leave him restless.
Restless he apparently was, though in a distinctly mischievous rather than menacing register. Nobbs's poem describes him getting up to "such pranks" that no other ghost had the power to match, feeding the horses of the district and kissing the local maids, playful behaviour that in one telling turned fatal: a maid, perhaps named Beck, resisted his advances, and he broke her neck. The surviving verses, addressed to "Sissafernes, where many a tale was told", read as much like a piece of comic local folklore performed for entertainment as a genuine record of a haunting anyone believed in literally.
No specific hilltop burial site survives today that can be confidently identified with the story, and the tale is recorded here as dubious rather than merely traditional, both because of its obviously exaggerated, entertaining tone and because the darker turn in the narrative, in which a ghost's harmless flirtation becomes manslaughter, reads as the kind of narrative flourish poems of this period were prone to adding for effect rather than a detail anyone genuinely claimed to have witnessed.
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