Ghosts are ubiquitous! This guide has 62 tours, which incorporate over 280 towns and villages, and more than 800 sites. Directions are given in each tour to enable the investigator to find the sites. Map references have been included using Ordnance Survey Maps, together with the map numbers, to enable the investigator to find the haunted sites. The purpose of the guide is to enable the enthusiast to seek and observe. There are notes of interest and history notes as the counties are awash with fascinating stories and legends. So decide which tour you are going to tackle first. You may wish to meet the phantom army at Thundridge Church ruins, the screaming woman in Water Lane, Bishop’s Stortford, the Witchfinder General, Mathew Hopkins at Manningtree, or maybe the ghostly monks carrying a coffin at Belchamp Walter.

From a spectral horse and carriage heard galloping along Church Street to unexplained sightings of the market town’s mysterious Grey Lady, this collection of hauntings from Bishop’s Stortford is guaranteed to make your blood run cold. Featured here are reports of a shrieking woman in Water Lane, the ghost of a Victorian child at the Black Lion pub, an ominous black shape in the graveyard of St Michael’s church, and even a phantom army from the days of Cromwell, among many others. So draw the curtains, dim the lights, choose your favourite chair and immerse yourself in a journey into the realms of the supernatural.

The belief in the reality of demons and the restless dead formed a central facet of the medieval worldview. Whether a pestilent-spreading corpse mobilised by the devil, a purgatorial spirit returning to earth to ask for suffrage, or a shape-shifting demon intent on crushing its victims as they slept, encounters with supernatural entities were often met with consternation and fear. Chroniclers, hagiographers, sermon writers, satirists, poets, and even medical practitioners utilised the cultural ‘text’ of the supernatural encounter in many different ways, showcasing the multiplicity of contemporary attitudes to death, disease, and the afterlife. In this volume, Stephen Gordon explores the ways in which conflicting ideas about the intention and agency of supernatural entities were understood and articulated in different social and literary contexts. Focusing primarily on material from medieval England, c.1050–1450, Gordon discusses how writers such as William of Malmesbury, William of Newburgh, Walter Map, John Mirk, and Geoffrey Chaucer utilised the belief in demons, nightmares, and walking corpses for pointed critical effect. Ultimately, this monograph provides new insights into the ways in which the broad ontological category of the ‘revenant’ was conceptualised in the medieval world.

Presents a history and critique of a selection of the famous ghost stories from different countries, organized by such common themes as spectral armies, phantom women in white, haunted houses, screaming skulls, crisis apparitions, and ghostly lights.

Lord Halifax's Ghost Book - A collection of 'true' ghost stories collected by Lord Halifax, a Victorian English Viscount with an interest in the supernatural. Most document hauntings in the great houses of Britain, but there are interesting and eerie detours into prophetic dreams and ghostly warnings from beyond, and even an account of a vampiric cat!

This fascinating book, enriched by archive photographs from private collections, contains a terrifying assortment of true-life tales from Hertford and its surrounding villages.Featuring stories of unexplained phenomena, phantoms and poltergeists - including a blood-soaked policewoman seen in a mirror, the numerous ghosts of Haileybury College, and spectral Cromwellian soldiers - discover what lurks in the shadows of this historically rich county town.Drawing on historical and contemporary sources, and accounts which have never before been published, Haunted Hertford is sure to enthral everyone interested in the supernatural history of the area.

This is the first comprehensive study of one of the most important aspects of the Reformation in England: its impact on the status of the dead. Protestant reformers insisted vehemently that between heaven and hell there was no 'middle place' of purgatory where the souls of the departed could be assisted by the prayers of those still living on earth. This was no remote theological proposition, but a revolutionary doctrine affecting the lives of all sixteenth-century English people, and the ways in which their Church and society were organized. This book illuminates the (sometimes ambivalent) attitudes towards the dead to be discerned in pre-Reformation religious culture, and traces (up to about 1630) the uncertain progress of the 'reformation of the dead' attempted by Protestant authorities, as they sought both to stamp out traditional rituals and to provide the replacements acceptable in an increasingly fragmented religious world. It also provides detailed surveys of Protestant perceptions of the afterlife, of the cultural meanings of the appearance of ghosts, and of the patterns of commemoration and memory which became characteristic of post-Reformation England. Together these topics constitute an important case-study in the nature and tempo of the English Reformation as an agent of social and cultural transformation. The book speaks directly to the central concerns of current Reformation scholarship, addressing questions posed by 'revisionist' historians about the vibrancy and resilience of traditional religious culture, and by 'post-revisionists' about the penetration of reformed ideas. Dr Marshall demonstrates not only that the dead can be regarded as a significant 'marker' of religious and cultural change, but that a persistent concern with their status did a great deal to fashion the distinctive appearance of the English Reformation as a whole, and to create its peculiarities and contradictory impulses.