Pluckley is a traditional Kentish village with it's recorded history stretching back to at least the 1086 Domesday Book, when the village was recorded as a more significant settlement than that of the now larger town of Ashford. The village sits on the Greensand Way long distance walking route, that stretches from Haslemere in Surrey to Hamstreet in Kent. The parish has a long connection to the Dering Family, that resided at the nearby Surrenden Manor, and many of the hauntings involve historic Dering family members. The village featured as the filming location to the ITV drama series 'The Darling Buds of May'.
I visited the parish, somewhat appropriately on All Hallows' Eve (31 October) 2025, to ring the church bells. Arriving early, I took the opportunity to visit the majority of the locations of the alleged hauntings in the parish, the photographs of which, with associated information with their respective hauntings, will be listed below. Whilst in the village and visiting the church of St Nicholas, I had the chance to speak with local author Ed Adams, who had just published his new book Pluckley: The Making and Faking of a Ghost Story. Mr Adams has spend a great deal of time researching the history and individual stories behind each alleged haunting, and has collated his findings in a very detailed book. The generally regarded 'hotspots' of activity in the village is The Black Horse Pub, which for a long time was closed and used as a residential property but is now back open to the public, and St Nicholas parish church.
The village itself gained 'fame' in the paranormal world in 1955 with the publication of a book by Frederick Sanders called Pluckley Was My Playground. Comprising largely of a collection of memoirs from his memories of growing up in Pluckley, the book is widely regarded to be the first publication that collates the 12 alleged ghosts of the village together in one record.
It is perhaps coincidental and/or fortuitous that at around the same time as the publication of Sanders book in the early 1950's, a former resident of Pluckley by the name of Desmond Carrington admitted to ''concocting a whole string of them'' for use in an article featured in the TV times, written by Bill Evans. The records of the hauntings on this page concern: The Miller, The Schoolmaster, The Red Lady, The White Lady, The Monk and the Lady of Rose Court, The Highway Man, The Phantom Coash and Horse, The Old Gypsy Woman, The Miller, The Colonel, The Screaming Woods and The Screaming Man.