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Phantom Cottage

Ruth St Leger-Gordon, in her book Witchcraft and Folklore of Dartmoor, published in 1973, records that in a wood near Haytor in Devon there were several sightings of a phantom cottage, which would appear at certain times and be absent at others. A visitor to the district admired the cottage and commented on it to the owner of the wood who explained there was no cottage there; indeed when the visitor went back to prove it to herself she could not find the building. At another time a new arrival to the area who had moved into a house on the other side of the wood saw the cottage but could not locate it after a thorough search; Ms St Leger-Gordon was able to establish that this second witness had not heard about the former sighting. A surveyor working on the ordnance survey spotted the cottage and was surprised that he had missed it previously; he even reported smoke billowing from the chimney and clothes hanging out to dry.

On closer inspection he could find no trace of the cottage but asked a passerby who confirmed that she too had once seen the cottage but couldn’t find it either. Ms St Leger Gordon took great pains to determine that all of these reports concerned the same cottage in the same place, but no search located even the remains or foundations of an old cottage. If it was a phantom it was possibly a phantom from the future rather than the past. Essex | France | Wiltshire | Wiltshire | Cornwall | Devon | Devon | Essex | France | France | Hampshire | Indonesia | Ireland | Isle of Wight | Italy | Kent | Lancashire | London | London | London | London | Norfolk | North Yorkshire | Norway | Norway | Oxford | Oxford | Phenomena | Salop | Suffolk | Surrey | Surrey | Surrey | Unknown | Warwickshire | Wiltshire |