Thread by @simon_moreton

On this day in 1950, the Kentish Express published an article by a man named Frederick Sanders under the headline ‘Operation Spooks?’. It was (probably) the first published list of Pluckley's many ghosts, and the first to call it 'the most haunted village in England'. A thread.

Sanders' ghosts include: the spectre of a highwayman; the screaming ghost of a man who died in a quarry; a ghostly miller; the shade of the ‘Red Lady’ who haunts a graveyard; the ‘White Lady’ who haunts the site of a demolished mansion; a bush where one can summon the devil..

... the spectres of a schoolmaster and a military man, both of whom hanged themselves; a phantom coach and horses ; the shape of an old woman who died after accidentally setting herself on fire; and the revenant of a woman who poisoned herself in a local house

Frederick William Thomas Sanders (1908-1996) was the son of RAF Sergeant Frederick Sr & Alice (née Pile), a housewife. He was born in Pluckley & returned to live in the village in 1919 during Frederick Snr’s military service at RAF Uxbridge

It is Sanders' work as an amateur local historian, ghost hunter, and memoirist that provides us with the earliest written accounts of Pluckley's ghosts in newspapers and in his 1955 memoir, 'Pluckley Was my Playground' recently republished by @canterley canterley.co.uk/product/pluckl…

Sanders first popped up in the papers in 1939 in a report about his ghost hunting exploits looking for the 'Red Lady' of St Nicholas' Church, Pluckley (The Daily Herald Monday 24th July 1939). This is the first written recording of any of Pluckley's ghosts I have found.

He popped again in 1946 with his self-published 'Psychical Research: Haunted Kent', a type-written account of 14 ghost hunts he conducted in the county between February 1939 and December 1940, and a skeptical letter to the Kentish Express in 1948 (Ghosts Were Owls, Fri 13th Feb)

Next came his homemade edition of 'Pluckley was my Playground' and numerous press appearances. He wrote paranormally inclined fiction for the Kentish Express during the 50s & 60s and led ghost hunts in the village.

Of these ten stories listed in Sanders' 1950 article, 1 is not a ghost but the devil, 5 are local folktales of indeterminate age, and I have found out that 4 are based on the deaths of local individuals between 1862 and 1919. [CW details of historic suicides]

The Screaming Man story relates to the death of Richard Bridgland, 35, who on Wednesday 11th January 1899, years of age, was with two companions digging clay from a pit when a portion of the wall fell on him (Canterbury Journal, Kentish Times and Farmers’ Gazette 1899)

The story of the 'Watercress Woman' relates to the death of Sarah Sharp on 10th August 1911. Sarah was an itinerant worker who sold watercress in the village. She died after accidentally setting herself on fire, presumably with her pipe. She was 76.

The Lady of the Rose Court is the story of Mary Ann Bennett who took her own life on August 8th 1862 by drinking opium. Later stories suggest this event occurred in Tudor times, but that was a later variation. She was 31 years of age.

The final verifiable story (& the hardest to unpick) was that of the Hanging Schoolmaster. According to Sanders, the decaying body of a teacher from nearby Smarden was found hanging in a crop of bay trees in Pluckley.

According to his memoir, Sanders claimed his own schoolmaster, Henry Turff, told him the story, and that the deceased was a teacher, and friend, who often walked the 2 miles to Puckley to drink "and discourse upon logic" with Turff at the Black Horse Inn.

However, the deceased was not a in fact a teacher but a papermaker named Henry Edgar Martin, who worked at a nearby paper mill as a ‘coucher,’ a position working in collaboration with a ‘vatman’ and a ‘layer’ to produce individual sheets of paper from a vat of suspended fibres.

Martin, who lived nearby at Jennings Farm,was found "hanging by a halter from a tree" on 15th August 1919. There are no newspaper accounts of his death, but I traced a marginal note in the parish burial records abt Martin being buried under 'coroner's warrant' to his death cert

This term often indicates a suicide, being an instruction to bury the individual in consecrated ground. Unusually, the inquest found his death to be an act of ‘felo de se’ – literally ‘self-murder’. This was considered a crime; mostly suicides were deemed to be carried...

... out by individuals of 'unsound mind' indicating an impairment in judgment and thus sparing them the legal and religious ramifications. Martin's widow would likely have faced financial penalties including the potential forfeiture of property or the invalidation of insurance.

Something of this kind seems to have happened, as by 1921, his widow Kate Martin was living with her sister and brother-in-law in Maidstone, again working at the nearby Springfield Paper Mill where she was still employed until at least 1939, at which point she was 70 years of age

So why did Sanders think Martin was a schoolteacher? The truth is, he got muddled up; it is almost certain that Turff was in fact talking not about the paper maker but about the death of the similarly named Harry Martin 4 years later, in June 1923

Martin had taken his own life due to being “depressed at having to leave the village where all his friends lived, to undergo hospital treatment in London” (Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail 1923). According to his death certificate, he drowned himself in a pond in Smarden.

Sanders had accidentally amalgamated the circumstances of Henry Edgar Martin's death and the biographical account of Harry Martin's life into one story during the composition of his memoir.

Now, there are loads more twists and turns in the story of how Pluckley got its reputation—mischievous TV personalities, amateur dramatics companies, ghost hunters, journalists, & drunk locals—but that's for another day.

I'm busy writing all the research up, but for now here's some mysteries solved and some names remembered. Oh and Sarah Sharp was my distant cousin.

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