Swaffham is a town with a fund of haunting stories . . .

Swaffham Church.

It is early evening. The moon rises over a flat landscape as the last rays of sunshine fade into an eerie twilight.

With Swaffham church silhouetted in the background, a lone, ghostly figure shrouded in gray, glides silently along a worn path… and disappears.

All is still again. The ghostly monk of Swaffham has faded into the past.

No one is quite sure why there should be a ghost monk in the town - but some even say there are two, each making his way home to nearby Castle Acre Priory, but each strangely never getting there.

What is known is that the West Norfolk town has an abundance of eerie tales of unexplained spooks and sightings.

Take, for instance, the courting couple walking one night through Swaffham churchyard. Each feels a tap on the shoulder, they part to let the person through… and there is nothing there.

And the strange experience of the father of local historian Mr Reg Drake who dared to knock on the door of a local old woman thought to be a witch.

Mr Drake said: "When he was a boy, father and his friends used to play in Lynn Street near to where this old lady lived. One day he was dared to knock on the lady's door and, being very bold, he did."

As the door swung back Mr Drake senior saw a sight which stayed with him for the rest of his life. There, seated round the kitchen table were four people. And each had been dead for years.

Castle Acre Priory.

Mr Drake said the two spooky monks were supposed to be trying to get to Castle Acre, one along Captain's Close footpath and the other along land near the Antinghams.

Why they never made it nobody knows.

Could it be because of the owner of the squelching footsteps said to be occasionally heard walking through nearby Wood Farm? Or the faint grey figure reported to be seen emerging from the rear of a cottage in Northwell Pool on certain dark nights?

A young Swaffham man was called up to fight for his country in the first world war. After a long period of service in Egypt he was transferred to the horror of the trenches in Belgium.

Meanwhile, back home, one of his best friends was sitting at home one evening when he heard a spooky noise upstairs. Investigation revealed hundreds of apples rolling around his loft of their own accord creating an eerie rumbling. That same day the soldier and his gun crew were blown up in Flanders.

Another unexplained happening concerned local eccentric Mark Flint. A constable on duty outside the assembly rooms spotted what he thought was Flint walking towards the churchyard, but when he got there there was nothing.

And just outside Swaffham there is a group of cottages at Toll Bar near the Norwich Road. On certain nights it is said that a ghostly shepherd's smock is seen suspended above one of the beds giving out an eerie light.

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