A small West town and the creepy countryside around it have been acclaimed as among the most haunted in Britain.

Ancient Winchcombe, on the edge of the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire, is the ghostly centre for ghastly gatherings of hooded apparitions, a new book reveals.

They are known as the Genii Cucullati or “hooded spirits”.

Here you can hardly move for the spiritual remains of long-dead medieval monks, says Paul Devereux, who has written Haunted Land, an investigation into ancient mysteries and current-day phenomena.

The thoroughfares of Gloucestershire are a haven for hauntings. Many of the reports are from travellers who had no idea the highways were inhabited by spectres so each new story from a fresh source adds to a fascinating mystery which continues to grow.

“The Black Dog and the White Lady are two of the most prominent forms of landscape spirit as reported in relatively modern times, but there is a third type, the Black Monk,” says Devereux, a veteran researcher and writer.

“He, too, can be white or grey as well as black.”

He tells how hospital anaesthetist Guy Routh was driving on the B4068 near Naunton, Gloucestershire at 10pm on August 26, 1998 when he encountered in his headlights a woman in a cream-coloured dress standing on the verge.

He stopped to make sure she was all right but she had vanished. His car was suddenly full of a strange smell of wood smoke.

Two years later a security guard on the same stretch of road was confronted by a figure all in white.

“It looked like a monk and was six feet tall,” he said. “He drove through it. When he went back to check, there was nothing there.

“The Cotswolds seems to be especially prone to these manifestations of monk-like ghosts,” says the author. “Among the examples from the region are the occasional sightings made of spectral monks in the aptly-named Cowl Lane near the Abbey in Winchcombe. Monkish ghosts have also been reported on roads immediately around Winchcombe, especially around Postlip Hall, which used to be a medieval chapel.”

It is a rich area for road ghosts but why are there so many sightings?

There can be many reasons, says the author, including hallucinations, rampant imagination and hysteria.

“Until there are more detailed, closely-textured studies of haunted roads, it will be hard to tell,” says Devereux.

He adds that ‘road ghosts’ could be more a function of the availability of witnesses than an indicator of a special type of haunting.

Haunted Land, by Paul Devereux, is published by Piatkus Books on October 25, at £17.99.

• Story originally published by:
Western Daily Press, Bristol / England - Oct 15.01

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