Haunted Kent, Pluckley.

Located at the top of the first aisle in St Nicholas’s Church is the Dering Chapel, where numerous members of the family lie buried.A strange, dancing light has frequently been seen in the upper section of the window to your right. It is often accompanied by the sound of knocking coming from the family vault beneath your feet.

In the early 1970s, in the hope of recording supernatural phenomena, a group of psychic researchers persuaded the rector, the Reverend John Pittock, to allow them to spend a night locked inside the church. Armed with their cameras, tape recorders, thermometers and other apparatus, they settled down to watch and wait. When the vicar came to let them out the next morning they complained of having spent an uneventful night, the boredom of which had been alleviated only by the vicar’s dog, who had come to visit them from time to time. ‘Actually,’ the vicar commented, ‘I don’t have a dog.’

Listen carefully as you move between the gravestones for the voice of the ‘Red Lady’. She is reputed to have been a member of the Dering clan whose baby died at birth and was buried in an unmarked grave, possibly because it was illegitimate. She herself died shortly afterwards, some say of a broken heart, and was laid in the family vault.†But her apparition, in a flowing red dress, often appears in the churchyard, drifting silently between the tombstones, calling to her lost child.

She shares her weary search with another female member of the Dering family, the ‘White Lady’. This woman’s beauty was famed throughout the neighbourhood, and when she died, at a tragically young age, her husband was grief-stricken. He could not bear the thought of the effect that the ravages of the grave would have upon her looks, so he had her body wrapped in a priceless flowing gown. She was placed in an airtight lead coffin with a single red rose laid upon her breast. Sealed inside a further series of airtight lead coffins, she was finally encased in a casket of solid oak and buried in a deep vault in the Dering Chapel. But on misty autumn mornings she breaks free from these confines and manifests in the churchyard, as beautiful in death as she was in life. Her flowing black hair is a striking contrast to the white of her gown. Clutched before her she holds a single red rose.