Rufford abbey - Part 2

England has lots of haunted places — whenever you're getting a tour of an old building, just ask if there have been any ghost sightings. You'll almost always get to hear about some spooky tale. However, if you visit the once magnificent and majestic Rufford Abbey, a Cistercian monastery turned country house in Ollerton Nottinghamshire, you will soon realise this is no ordinary abbey, this is one of the most haunted places in England!

Here are just a few of the ghost stories you will be told if you speak to the abbey staff :

There is one from Edwardian times, first told by the mother of Vita Sackville West (the famous authoress)who stayed at the Abbey as a guest of the Savile family. She was woken in the middle of the night by a clammy sensation, like cold skin brushing against hers. When she told this to other house guests it transpired that other lady visitors to the house had also been bothered by a "clammy baby" — the ghost of a dead child trying to snuggle up to them in bed! The infant phantom is thought to relate to the old legend of a child being murdered in the house.
One of the most common occurrences told by modern visitors to staff of the park is that they have heard a child and a woman crying in a particular area of the grounds near the old moat close to "Broad Ride"!
A psychic medium (David Rawlin) who visited the park a couple of years back said he was "drawn" to the ditch. We had not told him that according to local stories a housemaid at the Abbey drowned herself and her child there after an unwanted pregnancy.
There is supposed to be the ghost of a little old lady in black wheeling an old fashioned pram around the grounds, and of course we also have the White Lady. Some say she is the spirit of the unhappy Arbella Stuart, a lady who due to her royal connections might have been Queen of England after the death of Elizabeth the First, but who eventually died a prisoner in the Tower of London. Her mother Elizabeth Cavendish and father Charles Lennox met and secretly married at Rufford Abbey, which infuriated the English queen when she found out. A local woman told the abbey rangers about the time her husband had seen this ghost — in the form of a misty grey figure — one snowy day whilst delivering mail to the Abbey buildings. We (NGRIT) hold regular "vigils" locked in the Abbey undercroft overnight using sophisticated scientific electronic detection equipment. Over the many years we have investigated the abbey we have witnessed and reordered many 'strange' and unexplainable anomalies. These include: strange balls of light drifting in the air, dark shadows standing in the doorways seemingly looking at us while we sit checking the equipment. We've heard strange disembodied voices, footsteps, chanting, we've encountered musky smells and heard horses cantering on the abbey grounds

We have in the past (with the estate managers permission) occasionally held ghost hunts when the public can join in and find out what we do, try out some of the equipment and ask questions.
Last time we held one of these, a gentleman said he had heard and felt small stones apparently being thrown at himself & the group! Another lady witnessed seeing strange balls of red white light.