Bellamour Old Hall at Colton was built by Herbert Aston in 1638. A newer Bellamour Hall was put up beside it by Lady Mary Blount for her son, and that later house was taken down in the 1920s. Part of the old hall survives as a ruin. A 1960s attempt to knock it down is said to have been halted by a run of accidents, and the hex is attributed to Lady Mary Blount herself. The journal of Miss Mary Bagot of Blithfield also mentions treasure supposedly hidden among its stones.
The best documented haunting comes from the family of the estate head gardener, George Morrall, who lived in the old hall in the late 19th century. His son Harry later told a local newspaper that his twin sister Charlotte, born there in July 1882, woke on the evening of 15 September 1905 to see someone in flowing black robes with a beautiful face beckoning to her. She saw the same figure exactly a year later, and between visits sometimes heard footsteps on the floorboards. Harry never saw the figure but heard it pacing the corridors and once watched the latch of his bedroom door lift before whatever it was changed its mind.
The twins were told by a member of the Bagot family that a man had been murdered in the house in 1698 and that his widow became a nun. Cries have also been reported from a nearby meadow where the foundations of a medieval chapel lie, and a stone head and bones were found there around 1921. In 1963 the owner invited a psychic from Birmingham, who described a lady with a cross and a man with a Bible, and little else.
All of this reaches us at second hand through newspaper reports and a local history blogger, and the murder story in particular is a family tradition with no record found. It is best treated as a single, reasonably well dated family account wrapped in older local legend.
Comments