The Vale parish in the eighteenth century had a non-resident rector who put in a curate. The man he chose was a French priest who had turned Protestant and been licensed by the Bishop of Winchester. By the parishioners' account he drank and misbehaved, and one day he was simply gone. Afterwards the poor box in the church was found forced and empty.
The haunting that followed was a very specific one. Mysterious noises were heard in the parsonage in the dead of night, "as of someone walking through the rooms and dropping money as he went". Nobody doubted that the thief had died and that his ghost had been sent back to the scene of his crime, trying to repay the widows, orphans and old pensioners he had robbed.
The ending came in MacCulloch's own time. During alterations to the parsonage the workmen found a few small coins under the floor of one room. Remembering the story, they were convinced these were part of the stolen money, "dared not retain them", and took them to the rector asking that they be given to the poor. The rectory is a private house near the Vale church, so the map point is approximate.
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