This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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This week we recorded a catching up episode with Karen and Matt, who just got back from what sounds like a whirlwind trip to England. Along the way they went to Pluckley Village and I realized to my surprise that our interview with Haley Stevens on this topic was all the way back in 2017 when it was broadcast as episode #130!
I can’t believe that much time has passed – and so much else.
Let’s grab a hot tea, turn down the lights, and take a stroll down memory lane all the way to … THE MOST HAUNTED VILLAGE IN ENGLAND.

Every year, villages across the country are pitted against each other for any number of honours and awards, which has the best pub, the best cricket team, which is the best kept village.
In Kent, that’s a title which could easily be shared by a number of contenders.
Among them is Pluckley, the setting for the television series about life in idyllic rural England, The Darling Buds of May.
But as well as vying for the best kept village title, Pluckley lays claim to a more dubious honour.
Pluckley made it into the Guinness Book of Records thanks to its extraordinary collection of ghost stories.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Karen Stolzner.
And I’m Blake Smith.
As you heard in the introduction, the village of Pluckley is famous for its ghosts.
In today’s episode, we’ll be talking with skeptical ghost hunter Haley Stevens.
about the little village which claims to be the most haunted in England.
Hayley previously joined us back in episode 36 to talk about an alleged lake monster called Bonesi.
Links to her work will be in our show notes at Monstertalk.org.
Look for episode number 130.
Is Pluckley really the most haunted village in England?
Be sure to stay through to the end to get an update on that question, one that I found a bit surprising.
No worries.
So last time I think we were doing tire puns and talking about lake monsters.
So this time it’s ghost puns is the theme.
Yeah, we had an email a couple of weeks ago now from a listener, Paula Potenza, and she requested this particular topic that we’re going to talk about today.
So, yeah, Pluckley Village ghosts.
She was interested in that, and that’s something that…
It’s a topic I’ve been interested in since I was a kid.
I think we’ve talked about Usborne books before, the Supernatural series of books.
Is that how it’s pronounced?
I’ve been saying Osborne.
Could be Osborne.
I guess it doesn’t matter.
No, sorry.
I didn’t mean to apply it.
And there was a two-page spread on Pluckley Village and all of the alleged ghosts.
And so ever since reading that, I’ve always wanted to, and since doing the show, I’ve wanted to do an episode on this topic.
So we’re really excited about this.
That’s so cool.
I didn’t even know that.
I’ve got that book over there on my bookshelf.
I should go pull that up to prepare for this interview retroactively.
Yeah, you know how we’ve talked about the stories that scare the crap out of you as a kid?
This was one of those ones for me.
And I guess it’s not just one story.
There are
It’s believed to be about up to 16 ghosts or even more climbing still.
Yeah, more now, I think.
Yeah, they’ve definitely got some more contemporary ones that have kind of been added into that.
Because I think when I went into the World Brackets, there were 12, possibly up to 16.
And I think since then, it’s grown.
Yeah.
That’s cool, though, to keep the freshest ghosts.
It’s really important.
Yeah, it’s a place where modern ghosts go, you know.
Well, some fade over time, don’t they?
That’s one theory that they are.
The recordings of them play out and then they fade and eventually disappear.
So we need new ghosts.
Yeah, and there’s actually, there is a story in Pluckley of this soldier who was apparently hanged from a tree, and he haunted the woodlands, and then the woodlands got flattened and the trees gone, and now his ghost is gone.
So I think there’s an attachment theory there as well.
There is a whole folklore about how to get rid of a ghost, but I’d never heard of putting up a parking lot as being a…
What are the ways to cure it?
Well, if they can walk through walls, if you remodel a house, then he should be able to just appear through the asphalt.
Yeah, you would think so, yeah.
Unless you really, really like the tree, and now it’s been turned into a chair or something, and now he’s haunting the house, the chairs.
Yeah, he’s moved on.
Oh, wow.
What if they made paper from it, and all the paper was haunted?
Anyway, sorry.
He just visits different libraries all across the world.
It’s out there, but very diluted.
And if you believe that, you are diluted.
I mean, diluted.
Sorry.
Anyway, I’m being cheeky.
I apologize.
I’m really on my sixth cup of coffee this afternoon.
We’ve had Hayley on the show before.
Exactly.
I was going to say, though, but we probably should have her do an introduction because we both know her as a colleague in this field of
what would we call it, spooky research, paranormal research.
Would you like to introduce yourself, Hayley, now that we’ve talked for 10 minutes?
Yeah, sure.
Well, my name is Hayley Stephens.
I write a blog called…
Hayley is a ghost.
There’s a podcast called The Spooktator that I host where we talk about weird topics and weird news stories and so on.
And I’ve been a paranormal researcher or a skeptic researcher, however you want to phrase it, since about 2005.
Well, in 2005, I was a ghost hunter.
Then in 2007, I became a non-believer and a skeptic.
And most people at that point, when they stopped believing in ghosts, would just stop investigating them.
But I’ve always been fascinated with ghosts and weird stuff, so I just carried on.
I was on this show before talking about lake monsters.
Yeah, I’m just really into…
spooky, strange stories and where I live in England, I live in the county of Wiltshire and it’s called Weird Wiltshire because, well not officially but it’s nicknamed Weird Wiltshire because of the amount of folklore and just bizarre stories associated with this county so I’ve kind of grown up here and here I am all these years later.
I’m jealous.
I should start calling it Creepy Kennesaw or something.
Yeah.
No, well, I think most of England is reputed to be haunted, isn’t it now?
It is.
We’ve pretty much got ghosts everywhere.
If not ghosts, then probably some kind of monster.
Well, it makes sense.
I mean, a lot of people were killed there.
Yep.
That’s also true.
That’s a fact.
That’s terrible.
So where is Pluckley?
Pluckley is in Kent, which is in the south of England.
Hmm.
So is it like east of London?
It’s to the southeast.
And Pluckley is just a little village of a very small population, isn’t it?
I don’t know how many people are there.
Do you have any idea?
I don’t know about the population, but I know that it is really tiny in that you can stand in the middle of the actual village and do a 360 on the spot and you just see the entire village.
So it’s got like a pub and a shop and maybe one other business there.
But then around that, it’s surrounded by farms and farmland and then you’ve got more remote businesses.
So there’s like a mill building.
It used to be a mill building.
There’s also another building which I think used to be some kind of, I don’t know if it was like a blacksmith or something, and it’s now a tea room.
So you’ve kind of got those remote businesses on the land, but the village itself is extremely small.
Wow.
So it’s just one of those little places where people are born there and don’t leave and spend their entire lives there and no one really ever moves there?
Yeah.
I don’t know.
I guess so.
I mean, most people, well, when you researched Pluckley and when you invited me on the show, I did start getting out the old ghost hunt books and the Peter Underwood books and so on, where they have all the old British ghost stories.
And in some of the books and indeed on some of the websites that talk about the ghosts of Pluckley, they sometimes refer to it as a hamlet because it’s that small.
So there is some debate about whether it’s a village or a hamlet.
And I suspect that a lot of the people that live there probably have, you know, generations of their family who have resided in Puckley.
I grew up in the British countryside, though, in a village which is called Hilperton.
And that was the same, you know, generations of the same family would live in the same village.
And you could trace our family history back through that village.
But then…
it kind of modernized a lot so a lot of people did move into the village and it got expanded so they they built on some of the fields so now the village I grew up in which used to be quite remote is now part of the pretty much part of the town next to it so I’ve never been to Pluckley mainly because if I ever did go to Pluckley it would be because of the ghost and I know that kind of annoys a lot of people that live there so I stay away but I suspect it could be the same that there is
this core of residents there whose families are rooted there, plus people who’ve moved in because it sounds like a very attractive place.
You know, it’s very remote and quiet.
It looks very nice.
I would imagine if you’re living in a haunted hamlet, you have to decide whether you want to flee or not to flee.
It’s really tricky.
You smell a pun coming when she’s in Hamlet.
And, oh, wow, okay, I just got that.
Amazing.
Amazing.
But the thing with Buckley is that it’s relatively untouched, and that’s attracted quite a lot of…
films and TV shows and there’s a really popular I used to watch that when I was a kid and I had no idea until I was researching for this show that it was filmed in Buckley and it’s because it’s basically like taking a step back in time if you took away like the modern cars and the TV areas you probably wouldn’t be able to face
a year on where you were because, you know, they’ve got the old-fashioned windows and the original features and then the buildings are relatively untouched.
So I suspect as well that probably lends an air of…
not creepiness as such, but definitely kind of adds to the atmosphere when it comes to thinking about the ghost stories and the legacy there.
That it must be haunted.
Yeah, a lot of the photos remind me of a Hammer film.
I mean, a lot of them that I see online.
But I mean, I don’t know that they’re necessarily intentionally trying to be creepy, but it does have sort of a 1950s feel.
Yeah, and I suspect that’s possibly, I guess, I mean, when you think about the…
small communities in these villages and the folklore associated with them.
A lot of that probably inspired the stories that would have inspired the Hammer films.
A lot of traditional ghost stories are based in these sorts of communities and with Pluckley it’s one that’s not really changed very much at all.
Neat.
Do you feel like talking about some of the more famous ghosts that are alleged to be there?
There are absolutely loads of ghosts in Plucky.
Allegedly.
Yeah, allegedly.
I learned about Plucky.
You mentioned you were reading a book when you were a child and you came across Plucky.
It was the same for me.
When I grew up, I read the book.
by Peter Underwood and so on and there was also an episode of Strange But True and I kind of remembered I was I thought that I remembered seeing it on Strange But True and I actually found the episode on YouTube I don’t know if you guys have watched it yes
And they talk about there about how a lot of the ghosts seem to come from one family, which is the Dering family.
And they moved in during the Civil War.
And it almost feels as though their ghosts are everywhere in Pluckley.
And they haven’t left.
They’ve kind of left their ghostly legacy behind as well as the historic legacy too.
So isn’t there the white lady and the red lady and they’re both meant to be Lady Derings?
I think, yeah, I think it really depends on which sources you read.
But I think there are even claims that there are two white ladies.
So some people say that the white lady haunts two different places or that it’s two separate ghosts.
But one of the white ladies haunts the church where she is buried.
And again, I think this lends…
a voice a bit to the folklore aspect of these stories in that it really depends on which source you go from.
There are different claims about the ghost.
So one of the claims that’s made…
about the white lady is that she’s one of the Derring family, and she died quite young, and apparently she was extremely beautiful, and her husband was heartbroken, and he couldn’t face the idea of her body decomposing.
So they sealed her body into an airtight coffin.
and then put that inside another airtight coffin.
And depending on where you read, there’s another coffin and another coffin, so there’s a number of coffins, one sort of thing.
Yeah, and there’s another one that says there are three coffins and then an oak tomb.
Yeah, and apparently she is seen walking through the churchyard.
She was buried with a rose, I guess, snow white, like snow white, like to her chest, and she’s seen walking with the rose in her hands around the churchyard.
And then the Daring Manor, which they were awarded or given by King Charles II for their efforts during the war, there’s a white lady that’s said to roam there too.
And between the two wars, it was used as a U.S. embassy.
And there was a guy who was there who worked at the embassy.
He held a vigil there.
apparently one Christmas Eve, and he had his gun out because, you know, if you’re going to go looking for ghosts, having a gun is really useful.
And he allegedly saw the white lady appear before him and he shot her.
And, of course, the bullet went through her and she vanished through a panelled wall.
And I read this story on a ghost website.
I’d never heard this story before.
and it’s alleged that the panelled wall that she went through might have led to a tunnel which had a supposed link to the church, so there was a link between the house and the church.
It’s all very mysterious, and it could have been, and maybe it was.
Now, there’s also another phantom at the churchyard called the Red Lady, who’s also a daring, and the story associated with her is that she is searching for her lost baby, and she’s been seen in the church.
I think she’s been seen outside the church, but she’s also been seen inside the church.
And people report hearing knocking noises and bangs and flashes of light in the stained glass windows that border around.
So people will be outside of the church and they’ll see strange flashes of light coming from within the church through the windows.
I think that story is a lot like the hitchhiker urban legends that you hear.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across stories of women supposedly haunting cemeteries and churches and other places looking for a child, a stillborn child or a baby.
You hear that one a lot.
Absolutely.
It’s probably worth mentioning that…
Ghost stories involving lights in windows and lights in graveyards are so easy to actually replicate.
I mean, light hitting windows and light hitting white marble tombstones at night, you can get light sources from weird places, and it creates really creepy effects, especially if you’re expecting a ghost.
That doesn’t mean that explains anything here.
I just find it fascinating because it comes up again and again in the kind of research we do.
In the Strange But True episode that talks about Pluckley, they interviewed the current reverend of the church.
And the previous reverend, he was convinced that there were ghosts everywhere and he was doing exorcisms and so on to get rid of the spirits, which apparently didn’t work.
And the current reverend, or I say current, at the time that Strange But True was aired, he was the current reverend.
And his name was Michael Higgs.
And he was a skeptic.
And he said to the camera, and I’ve written it down here,
There were one or two rumours before the war, but after the war it seemed to take off.
I suspect it had something to do with the tourist trade.
I accept that some people have seen something strange, but what is it?
I think it’s wrong to jump to conclusions.
One should have a more analytical approach to why you’ve seen something and what it could be, which I was really impressed with.
And then he said, the only ghost who exists in this church is the Holy Ghost.
I was like, oh, damn, you were doing so well.
But, yeah, I think…
I think he’s also saying kind of the same thing as you, Blake, that there are just so many alternative options for why people are seeing weird lights in a church, but also why people are hearing knocking noises in a relatively old church.
I think it’s just part of the building, really.
I think it’s interesting that these stories flourished after World War II, and I’m trying to understand why that’s the case.
And I’m wondering if it’s because of the devastation of the war and people losing so many people that there was a hope that there’s life beyond death, and maybe that’s why there was an increase in the belief of ghosts and afterlife.
I think so.
After World War I, it certainly boosted spiritualism.
It did.
It did.
And after World War II, what we found was when you look at polls of public opinions and attitudes towards paranormal ideas, you see a rise in the belief in the afterlife and ghosts or however people want to term it.
And more recently, I think there were polls done in 2005 and then I think around 2015.
that kind of asked the same questions.
And it showed that there had been a sort of rise very recently in paranormal belief.
I don’t think that there has been a drop since World War II.
I think it’s probably just more acceptable now for people to talk openly about believing in ghosts, about being thought of as weird.
But I think after World War II and after World War I, definitely, there was a huge surge in the amount of people who turned to spiritualism or at least spiritual ideas about an afterlife just because of the grief and the devastation they had faced.
And also, I think there’s a role to play in the shift in religious attitudes.
So very traditionally in the UK and elsewhere in the world, of course, but in the UK, our ancestors, I mean, my mum has ancestors in Lancashire.
And, you know, back then, if you didn’t go to church and you didn’t pray for your soul, you were potentially a witch.
And when my mum grew up, there were people who were hanged for witchcraft, the Pendle Witches.
My mum grew up in the crest of the hill, the Pendle Hill, where the witches were said to do their magic and so on.
And so there was this big shift from suddenly being afraid of the spirits to actually accepting them.
And I think that probably had a lot to do with why these stories were suddenly kind of embraced in a way and almost promoted.
But at the same time, I think there’s also an element of the tourist trade.
So, you know, there is definitely a penny, pretty penny that could be made from having ghosts.
And I suspect, I’m not, this sounds quite cynical, but I suspect that people who maybe had a newfound belief in ghosts and were talking about the kind of the ghost folklore of their area realised that it could attract people into the area.
And from my understanding, that has always split the people of Pluckley because some people want to embrace it and other people see it as something of a nuisance, really.
Just to give context, though, when you’re talking about witches being hung, this was not recent, right?
No, no.
It’s a step back.
I don’t want people to get the wrong idea about England.
Maybe a couple hundred years ago?
Yeah.
It was in the 1600s.
I know that I couldn’t give you an exact year.
I know it was definitely the 1600s.
And yeah, and people were extremely superstitious back then.
And so the Pendle Witches was quite an infamous trial in the UK.
There were others too.
And obviously today, elsewhere in the world, people are still persecuted as witches and so on.
But this was back in the 1600s.
And I think, you know, in later years, there was definitely a shift.
But back then, people were extremely suspicious of anybody who was a bit of an outsider, really.
So everybody was a bit scared of the spirits around them.
So there definitely were folklore stories, because obviously that’s…
how traditionally stories and information was passed on between communities and generations of families.
But there was definitely a different attitude to them back then.
Back then, it was something to be feared.
And then I think the country suffered such devastation during the world wars that…
they actually became almost sources of hope that maybe if these ghosts still wander in our village all these years later, that there is something more to life and, you know, people who died in the war could still be around somewhere.
It’s all quite sad, really.
Sure.
Absolutely, but yeah, it definitely sounds plausible as a theory.
And I was just wondering, in all of the research that you were doing, did you come across a TV show called Haunted Finders?
Oh, my gosh.
Wow.
Yes, I did.
That was absolutely terrible.
They have a reputation, let’s just say that.
And I don’t want to kind of slander anybody on your show.
That would be extremely rude of me.
But let’s just say that their shows are questionable.
I would agree with you there and the reason that I was raising it.
I was watching it last night and just hoping that there might be some interesting information about the history of Pluckley and the folklore of Pluckley, but no, it was all about the stakeout and all about recording EVPs and all that sort of stuff.
It’s incredible.
It’s absolutely incredible for all the wrong reasons.
Yes.
I’ve seen…
Basically, in the UK in very recent years, we’ve had all sorts of weird folklore stories emerging, like contemporary folklore.
So we’ve had a surge in people seeing black-eyed kids, people reporting Slenderman in the UK, which is just really weird.
And it really fascinates me.
So I’ve been blogging about it and researching it, and we’ve spoken about it on the Spooktator and so on.
And these guys always pop up.
So wherever there’s some kind of…
headline news going on.
There they are, like, in the woods with their night vision cameras and their ghost box, which I think it does, like, direct voice communication rather than you record and have to play it back.
But yeah, it’s all very silly.
There’s several different models of those.
There’s the one that’s basically a randomly tuned radio.
The Frank Sparks.
Yeah.
The Ghost Sparks.
The one that I hate the most, I think, is the one that randomly selects words.
That’s the obelisk.
You can also get it on your phone.
So when I used to have an iPhone, I had an iObilis, because there’s always an app for that.
And…
And yeah, you could just leave your phone running and it would just shout random words at you, which were allegedly from… Well, the idea behind the… Let’s just go down this weird rabbit hole.
The idea behind the Ovilus is slightly different from the Ghost Box and the Franks Box, which are kind of the same thing.
The Ovilus claims that basically it detects different levels of electromagnetic fields.
And these…
Different levels of electromagnetic fields all connect to certain words in the database on these devices.
And so if the EMF rises slightly, it means a different word, and then the device…
records the emf and then it triggers the words that’s associated with those different readings and and that’s why these random words get thrown out but if that were true would you be able to reliably provide the same kind of emf input and would you expect to get roughly the same words back out the other end i just that sounds suspicious to me it seems like throwing a random generator in there would be a lot easier than trying to tune it to some sort of emf detector
That’s very skeptical of you, Blake, I have to say.
Yeah, I know.
Like, can’t you just accept that these words are what the ghost is trying to say?
I mean, come on, obviously.
Of course I can accept it.
I just don’t believe it.
The ovulus, my husband always says it sounds like a birth control pill or something.
It does, yeah.
It does, absolutely.
On this episode of Haunted Finders, they had recorded, just used a little recording tool, and they had an EVP saying, yes, yes.
So if you saw that, you’d know what I’m talking about.
But it sounded much too clear.
It sounded to me like it was a prank.
Well, let’s just say that it wouldn’t surprise me.
Prank box.
Prank box, yeah, exactly.
But, yeah, there’s definitely a good chance that that’s what it was.
I thought what was particularly interesting and the reason I actually brought them up is that they wanted to do a stakeout in the woods, the screaming woods.
I think, I guess we’ll talk about that in a minute.
The main character, I don’t remember his name, but he said, we just can’t do that because there are so many ghost hunters out here, so many tourists and visitors that it’s just too noisy.
So we’re not going to have the silence that we need for an investigation.
So I just thought that’s interesting.
So even though we were talking about people not really moving to Pluckley, it’s the kind of place you’re born into, it seems like there are a lot of tourists who go there.
There are.
Ghost hunters.
There are.
Yeah, and it’s not just your… Because back when I first got involved in ghost hunting, it was pretty much just a case of, you know, maybe you’d have one or two teams in the county and we would just go to places maybe on a Friday or a Saturday when we all had the day off of work and nowhere really charged.
The only places that charged were places that had been on Most Haunted.
And at that point, Most Haunted had only had about two or three seasons, so it wasn’t that many locations.
So…
But now, there are so many events.
I don’t know if it’s the same in the US, but in the UK, it seems as though ghost hunting events are popping up everywhere.
There’s one not very far from my home in a place that I had no idea was meant to be haunted.
I like to think that I’m the sort of ghost geek who would know.
I know all the local haunts, and I mean literal haunts.
That’s never come onto my radar.
So these events just crop up everywhere.
And Pluckley is one of the most popular ones.
So there was an event later this year.
I had a quick search on Twitter before we started talking, and I just put Pluckley in, and it came up with all these tweets from ghost hunting event companies who’ve got events.
And it seems as though there are pretty much events going on there every month, possibly even every weekend.
And, you know, it can start, like, there’s one that I saw where you pay £50 and you go to the Black Horse Inn, which is the pub in the village, and then in the evening you go out into the Screaming Woods.
And I can’t imagine living in such a beautiful little village and just knowing that every weekend there are these groups of people just wandering around your village and you have no idea what they’re doing or what they’re getting up to.
I can just imagine how annoying.
Yeah, very good for business, but also quite annoying, I would imagine.
Yeah, yeah.
I guess I don’t know how much it comes into property issues and strangers wandering around your farm or whatever, but places like Sedona, Arizona, have completely embraced that sort of not based in reality, but boost tourism kind of approach.
So has Roswell, New Mexico, although Roswell’s a really big town.
By the way, Goddard did his rocket test.
There’s legitimately interesting… Not that UFOs aren’t interesting, but there’s actual interesting American history that’s happened besides just UFO stuff.
I’m curious, though, because a lot of these ghosts, when I’m just reading the description of the encounters, they sound much more like urban legends or folklore than specific cases, right?
Yeah, well, there are some names, you know, like the Derrings.
There are some ghosts that seem to have actual names, but a lot of them are like urban legends.
Yeah, I thought maybe we should talk about that a little bit, how to distinguish between an urban legend.
Like, for example, I noticed that they seem to be color-coded a lot, these legendary ghosts.
The red lady, the white lady, the gray lady.
Oh, yeah.
I don’t know why that is.
It’s like there’s a Crayola box of ghosts out there.
But I haven’t seen purple, but I bet if I Googled it, there probably is one of them as well.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I mean, there’s a blue boy at Applehampton Hall here in the UK, and there’s also a green lady.
And Longleat House, which is in Wiltshire, on the Longleat Estate here in Warminster, they have a grey lady, and grey ladies are just everywhere in the UK.
You’ve got the brown lady as well.
The brown lady, of course.
Why can’t they stick to Roy G. Biv?
They’ve got to go off the gray scale.
Where’s the orange lady, damn it?
It’s almost like a collection card thing.
You just have to collect all the different colors of the ghost and then they all level up or something.
But there is one theory that ghosts of different colors indicate the strength of the ghost in the…
they fade over time and then they go away.
Are you suggesting there’s a spectral spectrum?
Well, this is the name of this episode.
I’ll write that down.
I’m not saying it’s true, obviously.
But I have heard that mentioned, and I’ve also heard it mentioned.
I think I was told this when I was still a fledgling ghost hunter, that the colours of a ghost indicated its mood.
But I was also told that about orbs in photographs.
If you get a pink orb, it’s meant to be happy, and a green orb means that it’s at peace and so on.
One of those mood rings.
Yes.
It does, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and I don’t know if there’s any truth in that.
Though the book by Owen Davies called The Haunted, I don’t know if you guys have read that, it’s a really good book, and in there he mentions how white ladies, the circumstances in which they were often reported…
kind of had like a crossover with fairy folklore.
So they were often reported around water and they were quite ethereal beings.
And so he kind of points out that there was that kind of crossover between those two types of folkloric stories.
But, yeah, I really don’t know the actual purpose of the different coloured ghosts.
Just, yeah.
Yeah, I think it’s kind of become a tradition now, really, and it sounds plausible to people who believe in ghosts that, oh, there’s a white lady, there’s a red lady.
It just sounds familiar and like a stereotype for ghosts.
Ghosts definitely do have stereotypes as well because whenever you hear about the grey lady or the white lady or the red lady, they’re always melancholy and very sad and mournful and they’re looking for their lost love or their lost child.
There’s never a happy grey lady that I’ve heard of.
Maybe there is one that I’m overlooking.
But it always seems as though the women ghosts are searching for something, whereas the men, the male ghosts tend to be reliving something dramatic or they’re angry and violent and they’re going to throw something at you and they stomp around the house and so on and you hear their boots on the wooden floorboards.
So I have found that when people report seeing ghosts, sometimes when it has a tie to folklore and you can trace it back through the folklore of the area, you do find that there are these
these huge stereotypes it goes and it’s really creepy in a way that we kind of stereotype our dead people but there’s some really good points and I do love some of the names of these haunted parts of Pluckley though they’re just very poetic poetic
Screaming woods, and they just sound haunted.
And there’s a place called Devil’s Bush as well, and this Devil’s Bush, they don’t know where it is, or at least the…
Books and the websites I read don’t know where this devil’s bush is, but apparently if you dance around it either 13 times or three times, the devil appears and will grant you a wish, which sounds a little bit like Aladdin, but who am I to point that out?
Yeah, or going to Marie Laveau’s tomb.
Yeah, I was going to say that the folklore ghosts, to me, seem to pick up these…
particular acts that you can perform to generate the ghost, right?
So, you know, if you stand on a certain bridge at a certain time, you’ll see this, or if you go to a certain point, you’ll see these lights.
We have a local legend here near my house where there’s a statue, and they believe if you go exactly at midnight and say certain words, that the statue will come to life and speak to you and answer questions.
Yeah.
So far, no.
But, you know, we can keep trying.
But, I mean, that ostention factor, you know, to get people to come out and actually try to, you know, reproduce this, ties really nicely into the tourism business.
Legend-tripping.
Yeah, but it also…
it’s like it gives it a little more verisimilitude or something where you could say, no, no, it’s true, and here’s all you have to do to see it for yourself.
Yeah, and if you go there and you do it and you don’t see it, it’s because you’re closed-minded and you just need to open your mind.
Yeah.
Well, that would… Oh, I wish I had known that.
I’d explain that.
And speaking of bridges, isn’t there a…
Another ghost there called the Watercress Woman or Watercress Lady or something?
Have you heard about that one?
No, I haven’t heard about that one.
I’ve heard about there’s a traveller who allegedly was drowned or drowned in the river or a pond, but I haven’t heard of the Watercress Ghost, no.
Okay, I read about that one.
You did?
But I think that may be the same as the… Because sometimes they say gypsy.
And by the way, I’m not even sure if gypsy is like a…
I think people want to say, is it Romany?
Yeah, I think it’s derogatory nowadays.
Yeah, yeah.
So I don’t mean it to be derogatory, but that’s what the legends were calling her.
Yeah.
But yeah, she sold watercress as… Oh, okay, I see.
And she drank a lot of gin, apparently.
Yeah, well, as one does.
As one does.
I mean, when you’re holding…
The watercress business is very stressful, and it does tend to promote drinking.
There’s just so much competition these days.
There were also accounts of her story where she fell asleep smoking her pipe and burned to death.
Yeah, it sounds like a crossover of stories thing, because that’s a newer one.
That one’s not in all the books I read when I was a kid, so it could be one of the newer stories.
No, it’s not in the Peter Underwood books, so I don’t believe it.
Yeah, well, there you go.
If Underwood didn’t say it, then it’s not true.
But I know there’s a website, I can’t remember what it’s called now, but on there they spoke about her falling asleep in a pipe.
But again, you know, and what you mentioned as well, Blake, about, you know, knocking on a door three times or standing somewhere at midnight to see a ghost, it kind of draws people in now.
But at one point, I suspect it was actually a warning, you know, don’t go out of your house after midnight because that’s when the ghosts come out.
I know that when I first got into ghost hunting back in 2005, around then, we were always told to stop ghost hunting at three o’clock because that was when the demons could come through any portals that you could open.
And apparently that, I didn’t know at the time, but that had references because the number three is… Holy Trinity.
Yeah.
And, you know, the cock crow three times and so on and so forth.
But, yeah.
Yeah, actually, Paranormal State, that’s when they always did their seances type things.
That show was very heavily influenced by Catholicism, I think, because Ryan.
So they went for it.
What badass is?
Oh, yeah.
I believe it’s in the pilot episode or the first episode they talk about their reasoning behind that, but it does tie into Christianity.
some of the themes there.
Which one?
Yeah.
That’s, uh, it was from, um, it was on, I think A&E.
It was, um, it’s from, uh, they were in Pennsylvania State University and they were a ghost hunting club on campus and they got a TV show deal.
Ryan.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I cannot remember.
Kind of young, you know, college age kids going out and doing these investigations and poor Ryan is, uh, uh,
falling on hard times.
So, um, yeah, he seems like his life is having some problems, but, um, I kind of hate it.
It had chip coffee on it as well.
And, um, well, I don’t know chip personally.
I’m sure he’s a delightful person to hang out with, but he, uh, I don’t care for the way he, uh, exploited children for his, uh, children of the paranormal thing.
And the show clearly used fake, you know, incidents, uh, to like, it clearly, uh,
sweetened the audio, and did deceitful cutting and edits.
And there’s some cases where people who were there have published pretty brutal takedowns of what actually happened on set compared to how the edited product came out.
Like Fact or Faked and most of the other shows.
Yeah, even worse than that.
I could put some links to that in the show notes, and I shall make a note to do so right now.
Pardon me for just a second.
Well, talking about, you know, ghost hunting television shows, did you know that Most Haunted went to Pluckley and did an episode from there?
I haven’t seen that one yet.
They did this whole kind of series, which was…
They should.
Yeah.
I mean, it’s the most haunted city.
Their show’s called Most Haunted.
How could they not?
That’s true.
But they did the series…
Sorry.
No, sorry, carry on.
I was going to just ask, is it the most haunted?
Because it seems like there are other potential claimants for that title as well.
Blake did some research.
Let’s finish the Most Haunted story and then we’ll talk about that because that’s a really good point.
Most Haunted went to Pluckley and they had this series in their ongoing series called Midsommar Murders, which is a reference to a television show here in the UK called Midsommar Murders, which is based in the place called Midsommar.
But they didn’t just go to Midsommar.
They went to Pluckley.
just to complicate it, just to complicate it.
But they called it Most Haunted Midsummer Murders.
And the idea was that they were going to these idyllic kind of little places and uncovering grisly unsolved murders that had happened there.
And they went to Pluckley to solve the unsolved murder of a man in the Screaming Woods.
And this was the ghost story that concerns the highwayman who was said to frequent that area.
And something to do with a hollow oak tree that he used to hide behind.
And he would jump out to rob people and then it got a reputation.
And some stories say that he was chased down by a local mob.
um like you know justice mob and killed others say that um a traveler was warned that when you go past that oak tree you can expect um a nasty surprise and he ran his sword through the tree and killed the highwayman who was here behind it but
I don’t think you can ram a sword through a tree, unless it’s a really dead tree, maybe.
Or a powerful magic sword.
Yeah, good point.
So there are already some holes in this kind of folklore stories, but, you know, who would have suspected that?
But the most haunted team, they went in and they went into the woodlands and…
the medium David Wells picked up on this ghost and then they went back to the I think it’s the pub it’s called the Black Horse Inn and they did a seance there and they picked up on devil worship and
witchcraft happening in the attic because, you know, what’s ghost hunting television if there isn’t a bit of devil worship?
That’s true.
Were there any demons involved?
Well, they did a Ouija board session in the Black Horse Inn and they were speaking to the highwayman who got murdered whose name was Robert Dubois and he was spelling out demon
on the Ouija board, and Lucifer… See?
See?
I’ve never even seen it, and I can tell it’s the heart of the group.
He was so spelt out, Lucifer.
And then they were like, oh, it’s because there used to be devil worship here in the attic.
And then one of them got affected, and he was like, I’m going to kill you all.
And then he had to go out of the building to calm down.
That was quite dramatic.
Yeah, it was a typical Saturday night for most haunteds.
So, is there any evidence for this Robert Dubois at all?
Did you not just hear her?
No.
Explain the whole thing.
No, I mean, you know, he was a demon, Karen.
We were saying earlier that a lot of these characters seem to be faceless and nameless, and yet there is some potential evidence for some of these characters, like the Derrings.
So I’m just wondering if there are any that might have truly existed as characters, as people.
Well, the claim is that Robert DuBois is a real person.
I haven’t looked into any records to see if he is real, but the story is that he operated just outside of Plutley and then around Plutley too.
And yeah, I generally don’t know if he is a real person or not.
And I think
His ghost is said to haunt different places, so Fight Corner and then the woods.
So again, there are different kind of folklore stories.
There’s also a crossroads, which he is said to be seen by people.
People out walking will see like a shadowy figure with a cloak.
sometimes with a horse, moving across the crossroads, which are now their roads, their normal roads, but it was a crossroads.
And, of course, when it comes to crossroads, there are all sorts of ghost stories attached to them because that’s where criminals would have been put up in cages, and it’s also where suicides were buried outside of consecrated ground and so on.
And if you need to become a really great blues guitarist, that’s a good place to go.
Absolutely, yep.
And, I mean, there are just so many stories in this village and so little time.
Isn’t there a phantom coach and horses as well?
Yeah, and that has a, I mean, I say relatively modern sighting.
It was a modern sighting when Strange But True was filmed, and they actually interviewed the eyewitness, oh, an eyewitness, I should say, who said that she was traveling home to Puckley or through Puckley one evening after visiting family.
Her husband were in their car.
And as they reached a bridge, or I think it was a bridge, they saw this coach being drawn by horses coming over the bridge, and they gave way to it.
And as it passed them, it had light inside from, I guess, from candles or a lantern or something.
And they said they couldn’t believe what they had seen, but it was very clear what they had seen was a horse-drawn carriage.
And it has been seen elsewhere in the village by numerous people.
But, you know, the skeptic in me says that could just be a horse-drawn carriage.
I mean, there is a horse-drawn carriage that goes through the town that I work in on a semi-regular basis.
So they do still exist.
I don’t know why somebody would be out at 2 o’clock in the morning in one, but there is definitely that.
But the thing with…
with horse-drawn carriage ghosts.
They used to be quite historic ghosts, I think, and they kind of faded out when technology changed and we started to get cars.
And so a lot of people who would traditionally have seen horse-drawn carriage ghosts, they now report seeing car ghosts.
Or they’ll be driving down the road and they feel like they’ve hit somebody or something, and when they get out, there’s nothing there.
So I do think that as
society changes, our ghosts change too.
So, you know, there’s…
There’s that, and then a lot of people see, they think they see horses at night, but it turns out to be a nightmare.
Oh, my God.
A nightmare.
Very nice.
I was thinking to myself, why would they be asleep?
And then it hit me.
Then it hits you.
I’m going to throw out a… Actually, this is not an apology, but some of the criticism that we get on the show sometimes for people who give us our occasional one-star review is always, you laugh too much and you mock the paranormal.
And I want to make clear that
I love ghost stories, and I think we all do.
We do.
And we care about what’s real.
But I think this conflation of folklore and legitimate witnesses, it gets confusing.
And I find it amusing at this point.
I don’t find it terrifying anymore.
Yeah, but I think we’re pretty moderate, really, if you listen to a lot of other podcasts and speak to a lot of other skeptics.
We have, I think, more respect for folklore and stories.
I do, and we do.
And I just wanted to make the point that while I’m laughing, I’m not mocking the people who say these things, because people see weird things.
We’re actually mocking you about your puns.
Yeah, that’s what I was laughing at.
Also, I laugh at myself a lot.
I’m kind of an idiot.
Yeah, I think we’ve said many times that we really enjoy the stories, and we also like trying to solve them or trying to find explanations for them.
Absolutely, right.
And I think – So I just wanted to throw that out there because we’re laughing a lot, and I don’t want people to think we’re mocking.
Yeah, that’s all.
Yeah, for sure laughing.
I think with the folklore thing, you know, I think they are quaint stories, and they’re really interesting, but they’re also –
From the perspective of someone who investigates sightings of ghosts and claims about ghosts, they’re really important too because they tell us what our ancestors thought of the world around them and how they interpreted stuff.
And they influence what people see today and how people make sense of the world around them.
And I think, like you were saying, it’s difficult to tell where the folklore ends and the contemporary or the…
eyewitness accounts whether they’re historic or not start and actually I think there is no clear cut line because I think eyewitness reports of ghosts are so often influenced by the folklore that we grow up with and
If you’re not saying, I saw the Grey Lady, when you see something, you associate it in your mind with the stories that you’ve heard growing up.
So if you photograph something a bit weird at a location that has a Grey Lady, you’re more likely to say, oh, I must have photographed the Grey Lady.
So I don’t think there is a distinction between the two.
I think we have to ask the questions, what does the folklore…
due to modern ghost stories.
And I think one of the things that happens, and we spoke about the number of ghost hunting groups going into other places that are alleged to be the most haunted places in the country, they go overnight and they use really rubbish techniques.
They don’t do any investigation.
They’re actually just looking for anomalies that they can chalk up to ghosts.
And so what you see happening is the folklore just being reinvented constantly.
And so suddenly it’s not…
ghost hunters investigating what eyewitnesses have reported um it’s ghost hunters investigating what other ghost hunters have investigated based on what other ghost hunters have experienced and what other ghost hunters have experienced has influenced them and it’s just this really weird cycle where folklore was kind of like the starting block and now it’s just like this weird kind of i don’t know it’s almost like a cycle and it i don’t know it’s really really strange that’s a really good point yeah
Yeah, it’s definitely a feedback loop.
Yeah, that’s what I was looking for, a feedback loop.
That was the phrase.
He sums it up in one phrase.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, but we’ve talked about it too on the show.
I talk about the sort of echo chamber of paranormal literature, that you get the same stories repeated again and again and again, and different writers will throw in their own embellishments.
Yeah, like the telephone game.
Exactly.
And one of the things that we can, as skeptical investigators, is…
We can look at if no new eyewitnesses are coming forward, but the stories become more and more detailed, that’s a pretty good sign that people are embellishing with fiction.
From a folklore perspective, that’s going to happen anyway.
But when you’re looking at a specific thing about whether this legitimately really happened or not, it becomes more difficult because sort of,
parsing out what really happened or what was really reported versus what’s the embellishments of the author who’s relaying the story is really challenging.
It’s funny you should say that, because in the Usborne book, there’s just a little section in here which I’ll read out to you, and the author said, researchers point out that conflicting opinions about ghosts can be a sign that they really do exist.
If everyone had the same opinion, it would probably mean that they’d read the same book or newspaper report.
Hmm.
Interesting.
I think as much as we’ve talked about psychology on the show and how much people can be primed, having a well-established list of legends and being told that when you go to a particular pub, you’re going to see a particular thing, that seems like that’s very much priming people to have a particular kind of experience.
But what I find even more interesting is the discussion about demonic influences and satanic influences in hauntings.
That’s become more popular in television.
People are becoming more and more interested in having a priest and expecting it to be a dark and satanic or negative spiritual experience to encounter these things.
And I think that feedback loop goes not just with the details of the legend, but the very nature of what’s happening.
It’s like, I don’t know, it’s not common when people are investigating ghosts to declare to everyone what your view of what ghosts are, right?
You’re looking for these experiences, but everybody contextualizes them based on their own belief systems, which I think is kind of what we’ve been talking about.
Yeah, and a lot of people often say, I was a skeptic until this happened.
Oh, sure, yeah.
Exactly.
But for one person to see a phantom or experience something moving or knocking, it might be, ah, it’s the dead trying to communicate with us.
And in another, it’s a demon trying to influence us.
And in another, it’s a psychic emanation by the people here.
Someone here is the focus, almost like a poltergeist.
So there’s so many different ways to interpret the phenomena.
And I just wonder…
when you’re in a place like this where there’s so many stories and they’re being repeated so often in pop culture, I wonder how it’s possible to even determine what’s really going on if something is going on because everything is contaminated by these preconceptions and stories.
It’s interesting.
There are contemporary reports from the people who own these establishments where things like…
you know, in the pub, a glass that’s hung up will move.
And it’s probably just the vibrations on the wooden beam or, you know, by a door slamming or a lorry going by.
Oh, you mean real vibrations?
Yeah, yeah, not psychic ones.
Yeah, actual vibrations.
And, you know, but yeah, because the place is just so, it’s just dripping with ghosts.
and ghost folklore that instantly a glass moving is a ghost.
And yeah, so it just adds constantly to those original stories.
I think it’s interesting too that a lot of these more contemporary sightings are more interactive.
So you
You’ve got a poltergeist that’s throwing things at you or you’ve got a demon that’s doing things to you.
Whereas if you look at the stories going back to when I was a kid, so back in the 80s, they’re really just more sightings.
Someone saw the phantom coaching horses or they saw the white lady just flirting past or something like that.
But it just seems like nowadays, possibly because of the influence of pop culture, that these ghosts are more interactive.
Yeah.
I think pop culture plays a huge role in it.
And especially, as we mentioned, ghost hunting TV, where on those shows, people just get attacked all of the time.
And traditionally, ghosts, they had a role in that they would give a warning or they would write a justice, you know, something they had been wronged in life and they would write that justice or seek vengeance or something like that.
And so, you know…
some ghosts at crossroads would be a warning that there’s a dangerous place or criminals beware.
Like I said before, they were buried suicides at crossroads and they would stake them through the heart and keep the stake pointing out of the ground as a warning to people not to take their own lives because it strayed them from God.
And the idea that these crossroads were haunted were a warning that if you take your own life, your ghost, your spirit will wander forever.
And so that traditional role of ghost has gone.
And now they’re just almost like these malevolent things that people seem to be generally terrified by.
And I do find that when I do talk to people who have strange experiences, more often than not, I find myself having to reassure them that they’re not in harm’s way.
And I think…
I think the television shows play a large role in that, but also the ghost hunting groups who go out to these places and they use really bad techniques and they don’t really get…
positive hits so they kind of ramp it up a bit so things do get a bit scarier and then they can start saying that was a ghost something’s pushed me something scratched me and then you know they they can go home at the end of the day um and they don’t have to live in that environment um and so i i don’t know i feel a bit like a grandma when i say this and i say you know kids these days they just back when i used to do ghost hunting um
We didn’t really do much of that, but there does seem to be an element of horror almost in modern ghost hunting.
It’s a bit weird.
The expectation that you’re going to find something as well.
You’re going legend tripping.
You want to recreate this phenomena and you don’t let yourself down.
Yeah, and there are ghost hunting teams out there who they’re almost like…
They almost cosplay as the people on ghost hunting television shows.
So they wear almost like military clothing and they have, you know, it’s usually black clothing and they’ve got the utility vests and a big heavy flashlight and…
you know the men are quite brave and confrontational and the women in the ghost hunting groups tend to be the more spiritual person so I mean there’s that television show I think it’s Paranormal Lockdown
where they spend like 72 hours at a location.
And we spoke about ghost stereotypes, but there are also these ghost hunting stereotypes too.
And the people who host that show are actual living, breathing examples of that in that the woman is the one who kind of communicates with the ghost and feels that when the guy is there going, bring it on, bro, you know.
And I think…
Yeah, I was going to ask, I literally was going to ask you if you had like a Zach Bagans style thing.
Come at me, bro.
Dude, run.
And I think when you go ghost hunting, you do end up, and I remember doing this, you just sit in the dark for ages and it’s so boring.
And so now you can actually just play these characters and you can, you know, any little knocking noise or a drop in temperature or…
If your shirt moves on your back because it’s settling or anything, it could be a ghost and you get to see adrenaline going.
And so I think that desire to be like the people you see on television, in a way, it’s kind of changed the way in which we talk about ghosts.
And also, I think, a bit, it’s changed the direction that modern ghost folklore is kind of going in.
Yeah, absolutely.
Totally agree.
You know, and…
there’s probably an opportunity there in all seriousness to turn that into a full-blown ghost hunting game where you can LARP but use like an app to track your experience points and actually level up and that sort of thing, earn achievements and badges.
That’s probably a really good business opportunity beyond just doing ghost hunting.
And you’ve just given that to someone else now?
Well, you know what?
It’s because it’s a great idea.
Somebody run to that, and I’ll sign up for that.
I want to be able to pay 99 cents and have no ads, though.
We should probably stop winding this down.
I think we’re winding it up.
Well, yeah.
One of the things we have at the end here, we were looking at the, I guess it was 1989, the Guinness Book of World Records said that Pluckley was the most haunted village in England.
Britain.
Yes, get it right.
Britain.
Not just England.
I shouldn’t say that.
Right, no, no.
That includes several places.
I don’t know if that includes…
Does that include Canada?
Not the Commonwealth, no.
Yeah, you’re thinking of the Commonwealth.
I watched the video.
You know what?
I’m going to put a link to that video.
Let me add that right now.
Video explaining UK, Britain, and England.
Great Britain is Scotland, England, and Wales at the moment.
I might change, whereas Britain is just England and Wales.
It was in the Guinness Book of World Records, but it wasn’t, as near as I could tell, it didn’t get usurped.
It got removed.
They stopped that record from being part of the… Yeah, they say it’s rested.
Do you know much about that?
Yeah, whatever that means.
Yeah.
That’s kind of what I was thinking.
Do you know anything about why they dropped it as a category?
I can research that on my own later.
I actually did look for a specific reason, and I found some really weird records on their website, by the way.
It’s a really good thing.
If you’ve got half an hour to kill, just go on the Guinness World Records website and just look at the random records that people break.
It’s mad.
But I’ve got…
There’s a drinking game.
But I’ve got a feeling that it’s probably something to do with how difficult it is to substantiate that claim, but also the amount of contenders there are.
So there are other places in the UK that claim to be the most haunted.
One of them is Presbury.
which is near Cheltenham.
I’ve been to Presbury.
It’s really beautiful, really quiet.
I think there were three of us walking around.
Someone was giving us an unofficial tour because they’re a local.
And I don’t think we saw one other person.
It’s really, really weird.
So Presbury says that it’s the most haunted.
And they’ve got an infamous black monk who walks through the graveyard.
And we actually stood in the graveyard.
And actually, I really wanted him to walk through at that moment.
But strangely, it didn’t happen.
But there are others too.
York was actually given the title of the most haunted city in Europe.
But that was by the Ghost Research Foundation International.
So they’re a little bit biased.
But I think Pluckley is the most famous, most haunted place.
But anywhere you go in England or Great Britain, any county that you go to, any town will have a most haunted pub or a most haunted road or a crossroads or something like that.
In Wiltshire, the most haunted pub is said to be the Black Swan in Devizes, where I’ve done a ghost hunt.
Uri Geller has also been there.
There’s absolutely nothing there.
The whole thing was allegedly made up for the tourist trade, but I don’t know if that’s true or not.
But anywhere you go, you have these most haunted claims.
So I suspect the record was just too contested.
That’s probably what happened.
Yes.
It could be.
I did a very scientific study before this episode where I looked at
I guess the real arbiter of most haunted, besides the Guinness Book, would be like the tabloids.
And the sun and the Daily Mail and the Telegraph all reference Pluckley.
But the mirror says Brighton.
Brighton does have a reputation for being quite haunted.
The Mirror doesn’t even put Pluckley on the top ten.
Really?
Not even in the top ten.
So it’s very… Well, The Mirror are definitely a trustworthy source of information.
Yeah, of course.
You can rely on them.
Well, it just seems like, I mean, it’s just a common thing nowadays to say that New Orleans is the most haunted city in America.
I mean, it’s pretty much every city in the United States.
So you hear the same thing in Great Britain too.
But it seems to me, as though when I was a kid anyway, that that phrase wasn’t really out there.
or was only out there in reference to Pluckley Village.
I was always hearing that that’s the most haunted village in Britain, and you really didn’t hear it that frequently.
It seems to be one of the first places to have taken that title.
Yeah.
Oh, I got it.
Zoinks.
It’s an app.
It’s like Yelp for ghosts.
I think you need to create that.
As quickly as possible before someone else gets it.
With Zoink, everybody can just rate the ghost and stuff, so you can trust it because we crowdsourced it.
But the thing about what you were saying about hearing as a child that Plucky was the most haunted place, I think that probably has a lot to do with the mass media and the way in which it’s changed.
So now we can just access the folklore or the ghost sightings from all over the world, whereas previously we were kind of limited to books and television shows and so on.
But when you kind of look back at the history of anywhere, but especially in the U.K.,
the ghost spectacle has always been present.
There have always been mass panics.
Obviously, one of the most well-known was in London, which was the Cock Lane ghost.
That drew crowds of people in who wanted to see this alleged poltergeist that was scratching at the walls in one of the homes in Cock Lane in London.
And that was a very early example of almost like a tourist track in a way because the local landlords of that area made a great trade off the back of it and the local pickpockets had these huge crowds to pickpockets from.
So I think it’s always been the same.
I just think the only thing that’s changed is the technology we have and the way in which we share our stories.
That makes sense.
It does.
I guess we should wind up.
So I reminded Hayley, and she’s already been on the show before, but I don’t recall what your favorite monster was.
Well, I am very excited.
You don’t remember.
Might have changed.
Well, I barely remember what I had for breakfast.
Me too.
Oh, my God, I didn’t have breakfast.
I think I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure, because I came on your show in 2011.
I can’t believe it’s been six years.
Really?
Oh, I know.
A couple of years ago.
Yeah, it’s unreal.
But at the time, I think my favorite monster was Bonesi, and it still is Bonesi.
Oh, really?
Yeah, it’s just changed.
What is Bonesi?
People can go back.
Yeah, I enjoyed our discussion on Bonesi, so we can put a link to that episode.
Yeah, we’ll have to have you on the show more frequently.
That’d be lovely.
I know it’s been really fun to talk about, and I could just talk about ghosts all day.
Oh, us too.
We love the topic.
You should get a podcast.
Good idea.
Zoinks.
I’ll put a link to your podcast in the show notes too.
Okay, that’d be wonderful.
Thank you.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stolzno.
You’ve just heard an interview with Hayley Stevens about Pluckley, which is claimed in many publications to be the most haunted village in England.
As we were preparing for the episode, Karen, Hayley, and I corresponded about the story that the Guinness Book of World Records had once held that the little village was deserving of this title.
I’ve found references to it being the most haunted village dating back to the early 1970s.
But recently, the claim that Guinness had confirmed it had become much more common.
especially references to the 1989 edition of the book.
Even Wikipedia’s entry for Pluckley says this is true.
One of their references on the Wikipedia entry is the 2008 article from The Telegraph by Francisca Hoyles.
I quote, Ghost hunting is beginning to make me feel a bit shifty, so I head back to the Black Horse Pub, itself possibly the haunt of a mischievous poltergeist, where I decide resolutely not to ask about its phantoms.
Over a Bloody Mary, I ponder what set of rules the Guinness Book of Records might have used to determine Pluckley’s paranormal status.
When I call them to find out, they can’t tell me much about the criteria, but they do say that England’s most haunted village category has been, quote, rested for some years now, end quote.
Rested here means that they no longer monitor the category or recognize the record.
When I ask why, I’m told it’s because they try to make records more international nowadays.
but I suspect it might also be because they try to make them at least a little bit empirically verifiable.
I was excited to open my own copy of the 1989 World Records book to find the entry, and yet I felt more than a little foolish when I discovered there is no such entry.
Undaunted, I went to Google Book Search and tried to find it there, but every online version of the book had no such entry.
Every book that cited the World Records book had no particular issue referenced.
I reached out to Guinness myself.
Initially I was told there was no such category.
I’m not quoting directly because there was a confidentiality boilerplate attached to that correspondence, but I did follow up for a quotable response and got this.
Every record verified by Guinness World Records must be measurable by a single superlative, verifiable, standardizable, breakable, and also present an element of skill.
In this case, it is difficult to standardize and verify something being haunted.
It appears that the record was monitored in the past, but has since been rested for the reasons listed above.
So while I agree with the summary and see how it comports with the Telegraph article, I can’t help but note that there would never have been a point in the past when it could be standardized based on anything but hearsay.
Because of that, and because of my inability to find any digital reference or printed reference to a specific issue or page so far, I am extremely skeptical of
that such an entry exists in any edition of the Guinness Book of World Records.
I’ve reached out to Guinness for a more specific answer in regards to when this particular record was to have been posted.
To be honest, I don’t think I’m going to get one because I don’t think it ever existed.
I’ll follow up if I hear otherwise, but for now, I’m of the opinion that Pluckley never held the world record for most haunted village in England within the pages of any Guinness Book of World Records.
It would make an interesting bar bet though, don’t you think?
Here is that text.
Most Haunted Village?
Pluckley in Kent is generally thought to be the most haunted village in England, boasting at least 12 spiritist inhabitants.
These include both a white and a red lady at St. Nicholas Church, and a highwayman at Fright Corner, a screaming man at the Brickworks, and a spectral coach and horses at various locations.
Both pubs cater for more than one kind of spirit.
Dancing round the devil’s bush three times is supposed to guarantee the personal appearance of its namesake, provided the dancer is naked, of course.
So I’m glad to see the entry existed, but as you can hear from that text, this is more about a village’s folklore than about a testable case of quantifiably more hauntings.
It lacks the precision of the other entries on the page.
Check out the show notes for a full view of this entry.
I’m delighted to find this correction so quickly and appreciate the good folks at Guinness for helping me run down the facts.
And of course, I’m disappointed to be wrong, but admitting you’re wrong and moving on is absolutely imperative for the advancement of science or of science shows about monsters.

You just heard a Flashback episode with Hayley Stevens discussing Pluckley Village – said to be the most haunted village in England.

This episode is a snapshot of three friends who have all been bound together by a common interest in things that go bump in the night, studying such things from a scientific and rational perspective, and – sadly – we now all have one more thing in common. But I don’t want to leave an archaeological trail of grief to stumble on in the future so if I don’t say much more about my loss it’s just because I know that’s what such artifacts will be to me. These are audio Legos for me to step on some dark night in the future and I’d prefer to leave the floor as uncluttered with such artifacts as I can.

MonsterTalk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys – I really do hope you enjoyed this flashback.