The Hinton Ampner Haunting

The old Tudor manor at Hinton Ampner stood near Alresford, about 13 km east of Winchester. Its master, Edward, Lord Stawell, was remembered as "a notorious evil liver". He died of apoplexy "in the little parlour" on 2 April 1755. For years the house was left largely to servants. Then, around the start of 1765, it was let to William Henry Ricketts and his wife Mary.

Even before the family came, the groom George Turner had seen "a man in a drab-coloured coat" in the hall. Now the nurse Elizabeth Brelsford saw "a gentleman in a drab-coloured suit of clothes go into the yellow room". She searched it with the housemaid Molly Newman. Nothing was there.

July 1767. In the kitchen, servants saw a tall figure in dark-coloured clothes. "A female figure rushed past, and out of the house door." Her "clothes rustled as of the stiffest silk." A man coming through the yard at that very moment saw no one.

Mary Ricketts wrote to her husband of "people shutting, or rather slapping doors with vehemence." In summer 1770 she heard "the footsteps of a man, with plodding step, walking towards the foot of my bed." A "hollow murmuring that seemed to possess the whole house" came even on still nights. Her cat would "slink down as if struck with the greatest terror."

In 1771 it grew worse. On 2 April, about 2 a.m., something walked the lobby and pushed hard against a door. The yellow room was found locked and empty. Three knocks followed.

From Midsummer a shrill female voice would begin, and two deeper voices joined it. No words were ever made out. Once, after a heavy crash, came "a shrill and dreadful shriek" that seemed to sink into the earth.

Her brother, Capt. John Jervis, sat up every night for a week. Capt. Luttrell of Kilmeston kept watch too. He heard footsteps, threw open his door and called "Who goes there?", and something "flitted past him." Both men judged the house unfit to live in. Jervis wrote that his sister was "harassed, not terrified."

She left by August 1771, writing: "I am not afraid or ashamed to pronounce that it must proceed from a supernatural cause." John Sainsbury, acting for the landlady, offered fifty guineas in September 1771, with a pardon for any accomplice. Nobody claimed it. Mary noted that the servants had changed over the years, which to her ruled out a plot.

Trevor H. Hall thought "underground water was mainly responsible for the noises at Hinton." Some accounts suggested seismic disturbance. Harry Price accepted Mary Ricketts's statements in Poltergeist Over England. When the old house came down in the 1790s, a box of bones was found under the lobby floor, with "what was said to be the skull of a monkey". It was never examined.

Her narrative appeared as "A Hampshire Ghost Story" in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1872. The National Trust says Henry James's The Turn of the Screw "is thought to have been partly inspired by the story." A forthcoming study by Eleanor Reynolds sets it beside the Cock Lane ghost. The old house is gone. Its site lies under the orchard.