The history of Ashford

The Dering family ruled this Domesday village for centuries

Pluckley is a village and civil parish in Kent, built around the 13th-century Church of St Nicholas. The Domesday Book of 1086 recorded it as Pluchelei, a settlement already more significant than the nearby market town that is now Ashford. Historians say the name comes from Old English, meaning "Plucca's clearing." A Roman bathhouse, dated to around AD 270, was dug up nearby in 1942, and flint tools and a Bronze Age bracelet have turned up in the fields around it.

Tradition holds that Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury granted the village to a Saxon knight named John Folet for his military service. By the 14th century it had passed to John de Surrenden, and when he died without a male heir, the estate went to the Dering family. The Dering family held it for the next five hundred years.

The Derings left their mark on the church itself. Richard Dering built a private chapel at its east end in 1475, and the nave still holds brass memorials to the family, the oldest commemorating John Dering, who died in 1425. During the Civil War, Parliamentarian troops besieged the family's manor house at Surrenden Dering three times without ever taking it. Sir Edward Dering, a 17th-century baronet, owned the earliest known manuscript of a Shakespeare play, a redaction of Henry IV found at his house in 1844.

The manor's luck ran out in the 20th century. A fire destroyed most of Surrenden Dering around 1952, and the ruined mansion was pulled down the following year. Only one wing survives, now a listed building. By then the family's long hold on the village was already over. In 1928, the Dering estates were broken up and sold at auction, ending five centuries of ownership.

A ninepin bowl killed a young man at the inn

At the old Black Horse Inn, a 22-year-old named Jesse Spicer was killed on 20 May 1772 in a freak accident involving a ninepin bowl, the forerunner of modern bowling. Jesse Spicer's death is recorded on his tombstone in St Nicholas Church, plain and undecorated, the way most deaths in Pluckley's past actually were.

Real deaths in hard jobs became local ghost stories

The village's ghost stories mostly trace back to real deaths in hard jobs. On 11 January 1899, a clay pit wall collapsed at the Pluckley Brick and Tile Works and crushed a 35-year-old laborer named Richard Bridgland. Richard Bridgland became the basis for the "Screaming Man of the Clay Pit." In August 1911, a woman named Sarah Sharp, who sold watercress for a living, burned to death near a bridge in the village. She is remembered today as the "Watercress Woman."

Other legends grew up the same way, out of ordinary tragedy rather than haunting. Mary Ann Bennett took her own life at a house called Rose Court in 1862, and became the "Lady of Rose Court." A papermaker named Henry Edgar Martin died by suicide in August 1919. Henry Edgar Martin's story later got tangled up with that of a schoolmaster named Harry Martin, who died in the neighboring village of Smarden in 1923, and the two men merged into the legend of the "Hanging Schoolmaster."

One writer turned Pluckley into England's most haunted village

The village's reputation as England's most haunted place was built by one man. In 1950, a local writer named Frederick Sanders called Pluckley "the most haunted village in England" in an article for the Kentish Express, listing ten ghosts. Frederick Sanders expanded the claim into a 1955 memoir, "Pluckley Was My Playground."

The legend grew further in 1962, when the actor and radio DJ Desmond Carrington wrote a Christmas article for TV Times. He invented three new ghost stories: a phantom coach and horses, a "Monk of Greystones," and a poltergeist haunting the ruins of Surrenden Dering.

By 2000, a Pluckley resident told the journalist Julia Stuart that the hauntings had no real history.

Guinness crowned Pluckley Britain's most haunted village

None of that stopped Guinness. In 1989, the Guinness Book of Records listed Pluckley as having twelve distinct ghostly apparitions, cementing its name as Britain's most haunted village. Ghost hunters still come looking for the Red Lady, said to be Lady Dering searching the churchyard for a child who was never baptized, and for a phantom monk and highwayman said to haunt a road junction known locally as Fright Corner.

The village itself carries on much as it always has. Around 1,000 people live here now, farming the same fields recorded in the Domesday Book nine centuries ago. St Nicholas Church still stands at the center of it, its 13th-century walls holding the Dering family's brass memorials and their chapel of 1475. Ghost-tour groups still walk its lanes after dark, looking for the Screaming Man or the Watercress Woman, usually without knowing their real names were Richard Bridgland and Sarah Sharp.