St John's Church at Boughton Green has documentary evidence dating back to 1201 and stood, close to a sacred spring dedicated to St John the Baptist, until the medieval village around it declined in the late fifteenth century and the church itself fell gradually into ruin; its tower and spire were remarkably still standing as late as 1773, well over two centuries after the surrounding settlement had effectively disappeared. A charter of 1353 established an annual three-day fair on Boughton Green to mark the nativity of St John the Baptist, an event that continued for centuries afterward, with wood and agricultural implements sold on the first day, wrestling and horse racing on the second, and cattle sales on the third, alongside a turf maze known as the Shepherd's Race that survived into living memory before the land was eventually ploughed over for ordinary farming.
In 1826 the notorious highwayman George Catherall, known as Captain Slash, was captured at Boughton Fayre after robbing a shoemaker, and was hanged in Northampton that July, a genuinely documented criminal case that gives this particular ruin an unusually solid anchor in real recorded history compared to most haunted graveyard stories.
His ghost is said to be one of several that haunt the ruins today, alongside sightings researchers have described without further explanation: a red-haired woman, a white-robed lady, a headless man, and the sounds of children heard among the broken stonework. One researcher who has studied UK historical sites has called the graveyard here one of the most haunted in the country, though as with many such sweeping claims the individual sightings beyond Captain Slash himself are not tied to specific named witnesses or dated incidents.
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