The Highworth Historical Society records that on a Friday in April 1907 J. Graham Arkell, his brother and sister and a friend, Dorothy Ludlow, were at the organ of St Michael and All Angels when Miss Ludlow cried out, asking what the figure was by the south door. They saw a man leaning forward as if interested in the singing. What struck all four at once was that he had no ordinary face, only a grey blank with sunken dark shadows where the eyes should be. The figure disappeared behind a pillar with a jerky movement of the arms.
A lady decorating the font beside the same door saw nothing and said nobody had come into the church. The sun was shining and the door was open to bright light at about 11.30am, so the witnesses felt they could not have mistaken an ordinary visitor. The Society for Psychical Research obtained a written statement from Arkell within a week, signed also by Laura Arkell, Dorothy Ludlow and J. Noel Arkell, who later became Sir Noel Arkell. Arkell confirmed his account again in 1938, and the vicar at the time, the Reverend J. K. Stephens, said he did not think it was a hoax because the lady at the font would have seen it.
The local society adds a later report. In November 1936 the verger, Ivor Hawkins, was lighting up for choir practice at about 7.45pm when a medium height figure in a long white robe glided up the centre aisle and passed through some curtains near the west door without parting them. He could make out no features. Reports of a phantom in the churchyard are said to be similar: a figure that moves from window to window as if trying to get in, with the same blank grey face. One witness compared the face to a heap of vacuum cleaner dust. The signed 1907 statement makes this a better attested story than most, but the account here comes from the society's transcription, not from the original SPR papers, which were not checked.
Comments