Mandatas
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PemburyThis sounds good!!!
Pembury - The old village church, now isolated and seldom sought by visitors, has in its churchyard the tomb of Anne West of nearby Bayhall, who once dreamed she was buried in a trance and ordered that when she was in fact buried, the lid was to be left off her coffin and one end of the tomb was to be left open. She also left instructions for her butler to bring food and drink to the opening every day for a year - just in case.
When she died in 1903, aged 34, her wishes were respected and until 1947 one could still look down into the vault through an opening at one end. Poor Anne West. Her Bayhall, once the home of the great Kentish Culpeper family and also the Duke of Buckingham, is today a ruin, said to be haunted by her ghost.
Hers is not the only ghost hereabouts, either. The tale is told that when the owner of Hawkwell Mansion, west of Colt's Hill, died, he left the house to his widow and two daughters. One of the daughters married and went to live with her husband in London, but hr ill-treated her so cruelly that she left him and walked home to mother in Pembury, carrying her baby in her arms.
When she arrived, however, she found the house had been burned down and her mother and sister gone to stay with friends. Too tired to walk any further that night, the young mother laid down with her child in the grounds of the ruins of her home. The next morning they were both found, frozen to death, and it is the young woman's ghost who is said to haunt the site still.
Manda
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