This unobtrusive stone marker on the verge of Barton Road (A18 between Wyham and Cadeby) could be mistaken for a milestone. It is a memorial for a young man called George Nelson, who died on the spot after either being thrown by his horse or trapped under an upturned cart in the roadside ditch.

The inscription on the marker reads:

This stone marks the spot, where

George Nelson,

of Cadeby Hall,

was killed January 16th, 1885.

Aged 16 years.

In the midst of life, we are in death.

As Simon Marsden writes in The Haunted Realm (1986), the young George Nelson was out rabbiting one day. As he was coming back from his trip, a storm began to brew, and his horse, spooked by thunder or lightning, threw his cart into the ditch. He was trapped under it, and suffocated, unable to get free. He was buried in the family tomb at Limber.

Perhaps folklore and superstition was bound to follow. However, several circumstances conspired to make this more likely. The stone would once have been more prominent than it is now, and the road quieter, allowing people to stop and read the inscription (not something we recommend now), which gives no indication of how he died. He was from a locally prominent family. Memory of the incident may have faded, or have been obscure to most passers by on this long route, but the marker remained to tempt imaginations.

On the anniversary of George’s demise, a spectral rider can allegedly be seen along this stretch of road, riding out in front of cars, or the horse throwing the youth under the wheels. By the time startled drivers stop to investigate, the spectre is long gone.

Tom Herbert reports a staggering sighting of the spectre in ‘The Riddle of the Stone’ published in Lincolnshire Life in 1992:

As horse and rider swept by they left the road and galloped across country towards Barton Street. Intrigued I followed the distant shadow dancing elusively like a will-o-the-wisp through the transient mists.

… the dim shadow ahead was slowly fading and I knew that my horse, a working Suffolk bred for endurance rather than speed, could never catch up… The baying of hounds and the forlorn note of a hunting horn seemed to come from far away but of the horse and rider there was not a sign.

Herbert’s account combines George Nelson’s appearance on the anniversary of his death with a much more ancient tradition of spectral huntsmen. These elusive figures haunt British byways from Cornwall to Northumbria and beyond, usually riding at a speed impossible for a mortal to match, accompanied by the ghostly wind of the horn and belling of dogs. But that is a different story altogether…

Young George’s death was neither the first nor the last tragedy to strike Cadeby Hall. Just seven years earlier, in 1878, another George Nelson, a farmer and landowner in the district, died unexpectedly at Limber, possibly from epilepsy. In 1869, the body of a male infant was found concealed in a privy connected to Cadeby Hall. A sixteenth-year-old servant, Mary Laking, was accused of concealing the birth of the child. Though the infant was pronounced stillborn, Mary was convicted to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

The Hall’s tragedies are attributed to a curse, placed upon it long ago by a woman whose young child went missing in the grounds. His body was apparently found, years later, in an old tree trunk. A ghostly coach and horses is said to ride up the drive every time a family member is about to die, and a spectral monk is believed by some to wander the grounds, owing to the Hall allegedly being built on the site of an old monastery. The same monastery’s foundations and tunnels, now said to be under the Hall, are believed to resound with the rattling of chains.

Historical records indicate there was once a small nunnery at Cadeby, though it isn’t clear exactly where that was. There was a priory at North Ormsby, two miles to the south, with much clearer evidence of its location in earthworks. Near Cadeby Hall, you will however find the earthworks of one of four deserted medieval villages in the neighbourhood: Beesby (which is the easiest to visit because a public footpath skirts the site), Cadeby, Wyham, and North Ormsby. It is easy to imagine how Cadeby’s earthworks and those of the priory at North Ormsby were conflated, not least because so many large residences had been built built where monastic houses had once stood.

Barton Street, along which George Nelson’s ghost is seen, is itself an ancient route running from Alford through Louth and towards the Humber, possibly in use from the Neolithic period.

Note: the marker is on a thin and busy road, and there is nowhere very close by to park a car, so take great care if you wish to visit this location.

Words by ANNA MILON, additions by RORY WATERMAN