In the vicinity of what used to be Otteys farmhouse, off Beccles Road, Gorleston, was the "Lily pit." For many years there were strange tales about it, some with a greater possibility of being true than others. Three main stories appear to have been handed down the generations. ..

One took place some time during the late seventeen hundreds when a passenger coach was travelling on a bitterly cold and stormy night from Suffolk and was approaching Gorleston along what is now the Beccles Road. As the coach neared the approach to Otteys farm the horses took fright and bolted. The coach, passengers and horses finished up in the ice covered and apparently deep, pond, where all perished. It was said that on or around the time of year when this tragedy took place, it was possible to hear the approach of the phantom coach, followed by the terrified screams of the drowning passengers as they met their ghastly end in the pond at Otteys farm.

Then there was the farm-hand who ran away with the farmer's daughter. She fell into the pit and drowned. The stricken lover then hanged himself on a hollow oak tree opposite. People going to Yarmouth, it was said, would divert down Crab Lane, for fear of seeing the ghost of the young man crossing from the oak tree and vanishing into the pond. The third story was that the pit was the well of an ancient chief who had a castle nearby.

Researchers produced three possible explanations for the tales. For the first they recalled a man named James Keable, when riding home on horseback in fog in 1888, plunging into the pit. His horse was found, outside its stable at Thurlton, which is a dozen miles away, the next morning. But the man's body was never found. The sad lover episode? It was suggested that this developed from a Gorleston man, upset at the death of his only daughter, hanging himself on a hollow oak tree which was still to be seen up to the 1930s.

What about the ancient chief? Well, in 1892 a skeleton was unearthed. It rested on flints and was said to have all the appearances of an early British burial. The skeleton was found about 30 yards from the pit. But the pit itself was said to go back about 200 years (that was in the 1930s.) In the present century, men digging for brick clay were said to have tapped a powerful spring, which rose at great speed. The pond at Otteys farm, which lasted until just after the last war, was said to have originated from a spring. Was this the Lily pit?

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