The Langenhoe Church Haunting, Essex

Langenhoe sits on the marshes near Mersea Island, about 3 miles south of Colchester. Its 14th-century church was badly damaged in the Colchester earthquake of 22 April 1884 and rebuilt in 1886 from old materials. In 1908, two sisters said they saw a nun on the churchyard path vanish into the north wall.

Early in 1937 a new rector arrived. The Rev. Ernest A. Merryweather. He kept a diary.

20 September 1937. The heavy west doors slammed shut. No one had touched them. That October his valise locked itself twice in the vestry. It would not open in the church or the churchyard. Out in the lane, it unlocked.

Autumn 1947. Mrs Cutting called him to a troubled bedroom at Langenhoe Hall, the manor house. Merryweather went to the window. As he turned, he had the impression of walking straight into the embrace of a naked invisible woman. It lasted only seconds. Peter Underwood called it "a tactual phenomenon that is almost unique in the annals of psychical research".

In November 1948 his biretta turned round by itself. A woman's voice said "You are a cruel man." Then, in 1949, during Holy Communion, he saw her. A woman of about 30 in a white or grey dress, five feet six inches in height, walking "with a slight stoop, as though she were sad". She "walked across the church and disappeared into a corner… the wall seemed to open. She passed through. And the wall closed again."

In September 1950 came a scent of violets and singing. About a week later Merryweather and two workmen heard singing from the empty church. On Christmas Eve a figure like a man in a tweed suit "slowly glided across the nave and disappeared into the pulpit". In 1951 a woman's handprint appeared on a door and lasted 10 days. The last apparition came in October 1952. A young woman in a cream dress, "with pale face and blue eyes".

On a September night in 1949, Underwood sat in the church with John Dening of the Foreign Office. Doors and windows were sealed. Chalk and sugar lay along the apparition's route. Instruments stood around the building. What came was "a tremendous thunderstorm that lasted for hours", and Underwood found "all my controls intact and the instruments showed no unusual readings." Photographs taken after the 1884 earthquake showed a former doorway in the tower wall. Merryweather insisted she had passed through the solid wall.

No hoax accusation appears in the record. The doubt is simpler. Most events rest on Merryweather's diary alone. Rosemary Ellen Guiley suggested he may have been "an unwitting activator". Then there is the unverified legend of Arabella Waldegrave, a rector's murdered lover. The same name turns up at Borley Rectory, and Merryweather copied Waldegrave extracts into the parish register, including a passage from Paul Tabori's 1950 biography of Harry Price.

Merryweather left in 1959. The church was demolished in 1962. Only the overgrown churchyard remains. Underwood followed the case for 12 years and called Langenhoe the most haunted place he had ever come across. Dening told the story in The Restless Spirits of Langenhoe in 2000.