North of Clipsham, tucked into its own stand of woodland, Stocken Hall is a house that has led two very different lives: a Grade II* listed Georgian mansion with earlier and later work behind its neo-Elizabethan touches, and, for three decades in the mid-twentieth century, the site of HMP Stocken's open prison farm before it reverted to private use and, eventually, residential apartments. Neither its architecture nor its prison history was ever the reason it turned up in ghost-story collections, however; that reputation rests on three older and more traditional hauntings, recorded together in Antony D. Hippisley Coxe's Haunted Britain.
The best attested, or at least the most often repeated, is a hanged man seen in the parkland: a figure in a brown smock with something pale over his face, hanging from the bough of an old oak tree, so insubstantial that the fence rails behind him were said to be visible straight through his body. Local tradition holds him to be a sheep-stealer gibbeted on the estate, and one particular sighting, witnessed by three people together one December afternoon, is supposed to have taken place on the 22nd of the month, a date subsequent visitors have returned to without ever seeing him again.
The second figure is a young woman, dressed in black with touches of white, who passes by with her head bowed or is glimpsed vanishing down a corridor, said to be the ghost of a girl who was strangled in the hall's attic at some unrecorded date. The third and, according to the sources, most frequently encountered of the three is considerably less grim: a small white dog, seen by a number of different people over a period of roughly eighteen months, in the habit of vanishing the moment someone opened a door to let it in or out. One account describes a resident and her daughter feeling the dog brush past them on the stairs, invisible but distinctly felt, followed by what witnesses called a burning chill. None of the three stories carries a firm date, a named witness beyond secondhand report, or independent corroboration, and Stocken Hall's private status means none of them can easily be checked against the house itself, but the three-ghost tradition has been stable enough in print to count as a genuine, if thin, piece of local folklore.
Comments