GhostFamous
Herne the Hunter
At midnight the keeper still walks the oak, horns and all.
Stand where it happened
- What's there
- Royal parkland with old oaks
- Legend from
- Shakespeare (c.1597) / later local lore
- Tone
- Eerie
A horned huntsman, a royal forest, and an oak that has been replanted more than once.
Herne the Hunter first appears in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, around 1597, as the ghost of a Windsor Forest keeper who haunts an oak at midnight in winter, wearing great horns. Later local tellings, retold by Royal Berkshire History, make him a huntsman of Richard II who saved the king from a wounded stag and was mauled by its antlers. Where his oak stood has long been argued over: one candidate blew down in 1863 and Queen Victoria planted another on the site. Nobody knows whether Shakespeare used a real local legend.