During repair work on St Mary's Church in the late nineteenth century, workmen made a genuinely grim discovery: a mummified human heart concealed in a recess in one of the church walls, its origin and the reason for its careful placement there never satisfactorily explained by anyone at the time or since, a real and physically documented find rather than a piece of invented legend.
Local tradition holds that a monk began to be seen in the church from around that time onward, the sighting apparently connected in the minds of those who reported it to the disturbing discovery of the hidden heart, as though uncovering it had somehow woken or released something that had lain quiet within the wall for generations. The figure was said to have been captured on film in 1964, though no copy of that photograph appears to be widely reproduced or independently verified today.
The heart-in-the-wall detail is the kind of story that is hard to invent and easy to embellish, a real and strange physical discovery with a haunting attached to it after the fact rather than existing as a ghost story before the workmen ever found anything unusual in the wall.
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