Underhill House's haunting traces to a genuinely documented personal tragedy rather than an anonymous or invented story. Alured Denne, evidently the owner or resident of the house, suffered the loss of a newborn child, and in the aftermath reported sensing what he described as an evil presence within the building itself, whether an actual paranormal perception or, as seems equally plausible given what followed, an early symptom of the severe depression that would go on to consume him. Over the following years his mental state continued to worsen, and in 1887 he took his own life, a death that the house's own subsequent reputation has closely bound to the evil presence he had reported years before.
The house's historical standing as, at one point, popularly dubbed England's most haunted house, a superlative claim this register also records for Pluckley and for Blue Bell Hill, places Underhill House within a small, competitive category of English locations that have at various points held that particular title, each generally through a specific period of intense local or national publicity rather than any permanently settled national consensus.
The haunting's continued currency is marked by a comparatively recent incident: in 2008, a sighting of a man accompanied by a horse in the vicinity of the old house renewed local concern that whatever had troubled Alured Denne more than a century earlier remained active on the site. No further detail about this 2008 sighting, its witness, or its precise circumstances has been traced in the sources consulted for this entry, but its recency gives Underhill House one of the more contemporarily reported hauntings in this Kent collection, a nineteenth-century tragedy whose reputation, by local account, had not yet finished generating fresh incidents even in the twenty-first century.
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