Phantasms of the Living, by Gurney, Myers and Podmore, includes an account written in 1882 by a Mrs J Bennett about 13 April 1860. She and her daughter Annie had been taking tea with Mrs Smith and Miss Moore, talking of their brother Preston being very ill, and were walking home through the village between the Vicarage field wicket and Mrs Newbould's house when they met Preston Moore, dressed as he always was in slouched hat, old frock coat, knee breeches and gaiters, with a long stick. He passed so close that they stepped aside. At Mrs Newbould's they were told he was dead. They protested that they had just seen him, and were told that he had died about half an hour before.
Mrs Bennett insisted it could not have been mistaken identity. In an interview with psychical researcher Eleanor Sidgwick she added that there was something forbidding about Preston Moore and that his sister was also thought odd.
A Staffordshire Advertiser article of 2 March 1901 claims Preston was not the first of his family to return. A local legend held that his father's shade had walked the road between Stowe and Weston until it was laid in a bottle and bricked up in the cellar of the Saracen's Head Inn, to stay there while holly and ivy are green. The father may have been the inn's landlord. Charlotte Burne's Staffordshire folklore is among the sources cited for the wider setting.
The 1860 case is a single witness account recorded about 22 years later, so it is tagged as a single report. The bottle story is local legend and adds the folklore element.
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