Allies writes that in his youth he often heard old people in the parish of Leigh speak of a spectre they called Old Coles. At dead of night he would ride as swift as the wind along the stretch of public road between Bransford and Brockamin known as Leigh Walk, in a coach drawn by four horses with fire flying out of their nostrils. The coach invariably went right over the great barn at Leigh Court and on into the River Teme.
The spirit was finally laid, the story says, by twelve parsons in a neighbouring pool at dead of night by the light of an inch of candle. Since he was not to rise again until the candle burned out, the candle was thrown into the pool to make sure.
Allies went to Nash's History of Worcestershire to look for a real Coles. He found the Colles family, tenants of the Pershore Abbey manor at Leigh and later owners, and suggests the legend may refer to Edmund Colles the younger, who was loaded with debts and sold Leigh and the manor of Suckley to Sir Walter Devereux. His guess is that the ruined man's spirit was supposed to haunt the seat of his former prosperity. That is Allies's theory, not an established fact, and the story carries no dated sighting. The laying by twelve parsons is a motif found in other English ghost stories, and Allies himself prints a Devon version beside this one.
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