The headless pedlar of Bygrave

Coming into Bygrave, where a murdered pedlar's headless ghost walked the road until his bones were found at the bottom of a well.

In the eighteenth century, so the story goes, a pedlar walking home from Baldock fair was murdered at Bygrave House. His killer, named as Thomas Fossey, cut off his head and threw the body down a well. Soon travellers on the road nearby began meeting a headless figure in the dark. The haunting is told as a lesson in the old belief that the spirit of anyone denied Christian burial would walk until put to rest: only when the pedlar's remains were found and buried in consecrated ground did the headless ghost stop appearing on the road.