The Armoured Horsemen of St Nicholas' Churchyard, Great Yarmouth (1922)

Great Yarmouth Minster, the parish church of St Nicholas, stands in a large churchyard in the Norfolk town. The Old Yard lies directly east of the church. The New Yard stretches about half a mile north. Cast iron railings on brick plinths enclose the churchyard to the west and south of the church.

The ground already had a dark reputation. In 1827 Thomas Vaughan and his associates rented a room in Row 6, opposite the west end of the church, and took bodies from this churchyard. In the early 1900s an Egyptian mummy given to the Priory School was buried here at night. Tapping on the vicarage door followed, the story goes, until the mummy's arm was buried with the body.

October 1922. A woman went to the local police. She said she had witnessed three ghosts in shining armour riding horses across the churchyard. The Great Yarmouth Mercury, retelling the story much later, describes them as "three ghosts in armour riding on white horses."

Word spread. "Thousands of widely excited children and many adults were drawn to Church Plain and Northgate Street," the Mercury records. They peered for many hours through the railings in the hope of seeing the spirits. "Every now and again a person shouted they had seen a ghost flitting amongst the gravestones," and the crowd became frantic. Night after night, they came back.

Policemen went in search of the ghost, but found nothing. One brave church official offered to lead a search of the churchyard. No one dared take him up. A wager was offered to anyone willing to sleep in the churchyard and watch for the knights, but nobody accepted. In time, the town's citizens lost interest.

The story left a darker rumour behind. "It was said eight people died in Howard Street from shock." The Mercury headline states it as fact. No inquest, death notice or other record has been found to support it.

Eight months later, in the magistrate's court, a woman confessed to being the ghost. She said she had been suffering hallucinations. No name, charge or outcome survives in the retellings. Her words can be read two ways. She may have been the figure the crowds glimpsed, or the source of the story, seeing riders that were never there.

The Mercury offered a simpler answer for the crowd's sightings: "the moonlight and the electric light playing between the grey gravestones." Most of the watchers were children, and each shout set the others off. The accounts also disagree. The Mercury speaks of thousands, Spooky Isles of hundreds returning night after night. Ghost Catcher Isles says no further apparitions were seen at all.

No 1922 newspaper report or court record has yet been traced. The tale lives on in the heritage column by Dr Paul Davies, in Spooky Isles and in Ghost Catcher Isles. A page on the Minster from Out There Paranormal speaks of ghost sightings by a crowd in 1872, which may be another version of the same scare. And another St Nicholas' churchyard, in Brighton, has its own armoured rider. That is a different town and a different story.