The tale concerns a farmhouse in the village of Halton Holegate, near Spilsby, which was reportedly the site of a haunting in the late nineteenth century – though the story doesn’t end with that. 

The incumbents, Mr and Mrs Wilson, claimed to have been subject to the disturbing sounds of furniture moving on its own, and a shadow of a ‘very round-shouldered’ old man accosting them around the house. Once, noting that the floor in the corner of the sitting-room was not level, Mrs Wilson took up the bricks with the intent of relaying them. Then, as James John Hissey relays in his travelogue Over Fen and Wold (1898), she

perceived a disagreeable smell. Her suspicions being aroused, she called her husband, and the two commenced a minute examination. With a stick three or four bones were soon turned over, together with a gold ring and several pieces of old black silk. All these had evidently been buried in quicklime, the bones and silk having obviously been burned therewith. The search after this was not further prosecuted, but a quantity of sand introduced and the floor levelled again (Hissey, 279).

The couple turned to Dr Gray, a local doctor, who pronounced the remains human and over a century old. Competing accounts suggest they may have been dug up from the local churchyard, the earth from which was used to infill the foundations, or may have been the bones of a pig. Nonetheless, the ghost and the unearthing of the remains made the national press in 1897. Hissey, who recounts visiting the farmhouse, presents it in a fairly disparaging light: ‘Nothing could well have been farther from our ideal of a haunted dwelling than what we beheld; no high-spirited or proper-minded ghost, we felt, would have anything to do with such a place, and presuming that he existed, he at once fell in our estimation—we despised him!’ The story concludes, rather anticlimactically, with the ghost no longer appearing after the bones are dug up, but with sounds persisting, as well they might in an old farm-house. 

A new account of the story is the poem ‘Happenings at Halton Holegate’ by Robert Etty, included in our anthology Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined (2025).

Words by ANNA MILON