The Figure in the Lane at Pitsea Rectory (the Rev. H. Hasted case)

Henry Hasted had been rector of Pitsea, Essex, since 1861. A Magdalene College, Cambridge man, and a Justice of the Peace for the county. Over the years, several people reported seeing him in places where he was not.

Wednesday, 16 March 1892. At half past eleven, the rat-catcher, recorded only as N., drove up to Pitsea Rectory in a cart with two dogs. He had come to see the master. The cook, Eliza Smallbone, and Jane Watts had just checked the clock so they could tell him when Mr Hasted would be in. They stood at the back door, looking down the lane after the rat-catcher. The lane was straight. About 100 to 150 yards long. Near its lower end stood the cottage of Wilson, the groom.

Then Watts called out. "Here comes the master!" Both women saw him. Mr Hasted, coming down the lane, "his dog with him." His brown-and-white spaniel was there beside the rat-catcher's two dogs. And they knew the walk. "Mr. Hasted's peculiar way of walking and swinging his stick was noticed."

The cart came between them and the figure. As the investigator later put it, "when he should have appeared on their side of the cart he was gone." The servants assumed he had gone into Wilson's cottage. Later, Watts asked Hasted whether he had seen N., who wanted to talk to him about a puppy. That is how they learned he had never been there.

From about 11 until after 12, Hasted had been at Mr Williams's house at Bowers Gifford. Mrs Shield wrote this down that same evening and interviewed the servants the next day. At 10.40 a.m. on 17 March, Smallbone and Watts signed a joint statement. Wilson, at the bottom of the lane, was "quite positive" that no one but the rat-catcher had been in it.

On 4 April 1892, Eleanor Sidgwick of the Society for Psychical Research visited the lane and the drive. She interviewed both servants, Hasted and Miss F. Williams. His dog had "no other like it in the neighbourhood", except one that was kept tied up. She judged the servants "good witnesses" and concluded the figure "could not have been Mr. Hasted himself".

In the summer holidays of 1874 or 1875, Florence Mary Williams and Lucy Harriet Williams saw Hasted coming up the rectory carriage drive at about 4 p.m. They hid among the shrubs, but when they looked out, he had vanished. Hasted confirmed in writing that he had been at least a mile away. In 1890 a lady at a neighbouring rectory thought she saw him ride up and lift the gate latch with the loop of his whip, though no one had come.

For psychical researchers, this was a phantasm of the living, seen by two people at once, with matching details of gait, stick and dog. S. E. Braude, writing in the Psi Encyclopedia, describes Hasted as someone who "seems to have been unusually prone to making apparitional appearances", and pairs the case with that of Canon Bourne. One detail interests theorists. At that hour, Hasted was hurrying through his work to be home for lunch at 12.15.

A more ordinary reading is also possible. The servants had just been checking the clock about their master's return. One called out before both looked. The cart blocked the view at the very moment the figure vanished. Sidgwick herself weighed whether it was simply someone else. The distinctive dog, and Wilson's empty lane, argued against it.

In October 1893 the SPR published the whole file as case L. 959, "Collective Apparition", in its Journal. A lane in Essex. A passing cart. And a rector who was somewhere else.