As one considers the multitude of reputedly haunted places in the UK, one notices that a small number of locations persistently generate reports of activity, year in, year out. One such location that has done so over the last 70 years in Britain is Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, a place which many ghost hunters have heard about but few have entered. Now a new book by Damien O’Dell, Chicksands Priory – England’s Most Haunted House? published in November 2022, provides the most detailed study yet to appear of a long-term haunting at the site.
The difficulties of penetrating the mysteries of ancient Chicksands Priory are due to the sensitivities of its modern military role and location. Prior to 2005 only a handful of ghost hunters were granted access. One was Andrew Green (1927-2004) in 1972 when a Captain Kennett, then serving with the United States Air Force (USAF), assisted him with a wealth of material, some of which duly appeared as the first entry in Green’s Our Haunted Kingdom (1973) a county-by-county guide to contemporary British hauntings.
The Priory’s history begins with the foundation of a building dedicated to Saint Gilbert in 1150 by Countess Rohese, whose husband, Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex and High Bailiff, rebelled against the king. Perhaps in penance for the crimes of her husband (de Mandeville’s ghost traditionally haunts locations stretching from Camlet Moat in Enfield Chase to West Suffolk; see FT408:16-19) Rohese established the house in her widowhood.
The Priory was unusual in housing both nuns and monks under the same roof, one of a handful ofthe priory he discovered “two… nunnes not baron [barren]” one having been impregnated by a serving man, the other by a superior.
