Ghost
Skeleton Under the Stairs
Dig the cellar deeper, and the haunting finally stops.
Stand where it happened
- What's there
- Old Leigh streets; the house is unidentified
- Legend from
- Georgian tradition
- Tone
- Chilling
Somewhere in old Leigh stood Blacke House, where a woman's skeleton lay under the stairs until her ghost was laid.
A house in Leigh, known about 150 years before 1867 as Blacke House, was once dreaded as haunted. The historian Philip Benton suggested it may have got its name from its colour or from its grim reputation. When the owner, Loten, deepened a cellar, he found the skeleton of a woman under the stairs. The bones were reburied in consecrated ground, and the popular belief was that the ghost troubled the house no more. Benton tells a separate story of the old house of Dr Cook, a physician, near the village's middle pump, which was shut up for years because a troubled spirit was thought to haunt it.