As Halloween approaches, it seems an apt time to search the archives for stories of ghostly sightings in and around Bradfield.  Over the years, several legends of hauntings developed, a number reporting encounters with decapitated spectres.  A headless woman reputedly appeared upon Buscot Hill and the shade of a white horse without a head galloped along the drive down to the Rectory.  Before 1850, Dark Lane was the only road for villagers travelling to Pangbourne, but they often had to run a terrifying gauntlet when they reached the foot of the hill winding up to Dark Entry.  A ghost materialised at the top and its severed head would come bounding down the hill towards them.

In 1899, the Debating Society considered the motion that ‘In the Opinion of this House ghosts do actually exist.’  Those in support argued that ‘so many people had seen ghosts, there must be some foundation of truth in their assertions.’  Intriguingly, this was backed up by a speaker who declared, ‘that more than one ghost had been seen at Bradfield’.  He went on to say ‘Corpses of dead people had been found where their ghosts had been seen,’ but did not elaborate whether this was at the school.  Those opposing explained spectral visions by superstition, overwrought nerves or imagination, practical jokes or ‘rather more champagne than was good.’  The motion was defeated by 8 votes.  

If Bradfield did not officially believe in ghosts, some pupils were fond of scary fiction, including one who received an even greater fright when reading an anthology of ghost stories.  This was due to an error in how it was bound.  At this time one of the college’s libraries was called the Red and Green Library because of the colour of the books’ bindings.  Books in green covers were intended for reading on weekdays and those in red were authoritative works for devotional use on Sundays.  Old Bradfieldian A. Gaye complained of 'a book [mistakenly placed] in the Red Library called The Unseen World, full of ghost stories, &c., calculated to terrify a nervous boy who naturally believed it all, seeing that it issued from the Sunday store.'  At least one pupil was a very adept author of macabre stories.  In 1978, M. Henderson-Begg was commended for his entry for the Denning English Prize: the spine-chilling ‘A Literary Haunting’ in which a school changing-room, perhaps at Bradfield, was haunted by the ghost of a monk.

We’d love to hear about any ghost stories from Old Bradfieldians.