Twelve Ghosts and a Guinness Record: Haunted Pluckley

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 25, 2026 · How we verify

No village in England has been counted quite so precisely as haunted Pluckley. This scattered agricultural parish in the Ashford district of Kent earned an entry in the 1989 Guinness Book of Records as “the most haunted village in Britain”, the qualifying figure being twelve different ghosts. The category no longer exists at Guinness, and the claim has taken some knocks since, but the tally stuck and the ghost hunters kept coming.

Where Pluckley Sits, and What Came Before the Ghosts

The village is centred five miles west of Ashford, on the edge of a well-drained plain with the lowest slopes of the Kent Downs rising to the north west. Land use is mostly agricultural. The civil parish also takes in the neighbouring hamlet of Pluckley Thorne.

Pluckley is older and, once, more important than its larger neighbour. References to it appear in the Domesday Book of 1086, at which point it was a more significant settlement than the now considerably larger town of Ashford. The parish church, the Church of St Nicholas, dates primarily to the 13th and 14th centuries. Its Dering Chapel, screened off at the east end of the south aisle, was built in 1475, and the nave holds brasses to members of the Dering family, all of them made in the 1630s by Sir Edward Dering.

The Derings, Surrenden Manor and a Shakespeare Manuscript

The Dering name runs through everything here, including the ghost stories. Surrenden Manor was the former residence of Sir Edward Dering, 1st Baronet (1598 to 1644), who is buried locally, and it was at the manor that the Dering Manuscript was found: the earliest extant manuscript text of any Shakespearean play. It compresses Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2 into a single play, and the scholarly consensus is that it represents a redaction prepared around 1613, possibly for family or amateur theatricals.

Elsewhere in the parish, Elvey Farm dates from 1496 and includes a collection of stables and outbuildings dating from the 16th to 18th centuries. It is a genuinely old working landscape, which is part of why the village photographs so well and why television crews keep returning to it.

The Twelve: Who Is Meant to Walk Here

The most famous of the reported hauntings is the Red Lady, also called Lady Dering, said to have died in the 12th century and sighted in the churchyard of St Nicholas. Others in the roll call include a ghostly monk, a phantom highwayman, and a gypsy woman named Susan Richardson, who is said to have died in mysterious circumstances. Three of these are reported within a few feet of each other at a road junction that ghost hunters have christened Fright Corner.

Dering wood, better known as the Screaming Woods, is the other focus, described in the local tradition as a strong centre of paranormal activity. None of this is documented in the way the church fabric or the Domesday entry is documented. These are reported experiences and inherited stories, passed along by visitors, broadcasters and enthusiasts rather than established by record.

The Sceptical Reading

The Guinness entry is the source of the village’s fame, and it is worth being clear about what it was: a record for a count of reported ghosts, in a category Guinness has since retired. In 2008 a Daily Telegraph journalist visited and cast doubt on the veracity of the claims. That is the honest state of the evidence. Pluckley has an enormous reputation and no proof, and the reputation has plainly fed on itself as each broadcast brought the next crew.

Pluckley on Screen and on Air

The broadcasting history is longer than the ghost list. An episode of the LWT series Strange but True?, titled Pluckley: The most haunted village in England, went out on 13 September 1996. Most Haunted: Midsummer Murders investigated the murder of the highwayman Robert Du Bois in the Screaming Woods and was broadcast on 10 July 2007. Ghost Hunters International visited The Black Horse Inn, Elvey Farm and the Screaming Woods for an episode broadcast on 30 January 2008. Channel 4’s Sunday Night Project camped overnight in the woods on 20 July 2008, KMFM ran a Hallowe’en special from the pub and the woods on 31 October 2009, and BBC Radio 4’s Open Country looked at the hauntings and their effect on village life on 4 November 2010. Even Top Gear used the place: James May and Richard Hammond spent 24 consecutive hours in a Smart Forfour, passing the night in the Screaming Woods.

Not everything filmed here was supernatural. The ITV drama The Darling Buds of May was shot in the village in the early 1990s, standing in for Sidcup, and in 1997 St Peter’s Hall hosted an Eric Clapton concert raising funds for the Crossroads Centre, with appearances from Willie Nelson, Barry White and Bob Dylan.

Getting to Pluckley and Walking It Sensibly

Pluckley railway station lies about 1.25 miles south of the village, which makes this one of the few ghost hunts in the country you can reach without a car. Drivers are roughly five miles from the nearest junction of the M20. The village sits on the Greensand Way long-distance walking route and is close to the Stour Valley Walk, so the churchyard, the lanes and the woodland edge can all be taken in on foot in an afternoon.

The church and its churchyard, the road junction and the public footpaths are the accessible parts of the story. Surrenden Manor and Elvey Farm are not public attractions in the way a museum is, and the woods are dark, unlit and easy to get turned around in after nightfall. Pluckley is still a working farming parish that has been putting up with amateur ghost hunters for decades. Park considerately, keep to the rights of way, and treat it as a village first and a record holder second.

Address: Pluckley, Ashford district, Kent

See Pluckley for Yourself

Sources

• Location of Weald of Kent
• St Nicholas' Church, Pluckley, Kent
• The village with a dozen ghosts
• BBC Radio 4 – Open Country, Pluckley: The Most Haunted Village in Britain
• In England's Most Haunted Village, Halloween Means Screams and Skeptics (The New York Times)
• Wikipedia: Pluckley