It’s A Funny Old World

‘The villagers do love a good ghost story’

My parish, Finedon in Northamptonshire, is very well off for phantoms. The Charity School is so haunted that an ode, written to its many ghosts, was published in the papers in 1824. The most famous is the Dutch Doll, a figure of a girl in puritan dress that stood over the door. Once a year at midnight she would stir from her plinth and walk round the village presaging doom. This was so annoying that someone once grounded her by sawing her feet off. She was de-plinthed and chucked into the cellar, where she would terrify naughty girls locked in there for misbehaviour by the headmistress. This was eventually thought too cruel and she was taken to church and screwed down on to a ledge on the wall, until 1981,…

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Woman's Weekly (Digital) - 1 Issue, 09-feb-16

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