Ghost · Preston / Langley (near Hitchin) ·
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In a roofless ruin among the fields, a phantom monk climbs vanished stairs.
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A ruin on private farmland, reached by a public footpath. Stay on the path and don't climb the walls. Visiting at night is discouraged.
Out in the fields near here is Minsden Chapel, a lonely ruin whose guardian swore he would haunt its walls after he died.
The ivy-clad ruin of a 14th-century chapel stands alone in the fields near Preston. The Hitchin historian Reginald Hine took on its guardianship and warned trespassers that after his death he would protect and haunt its walls in all ghostly ways; when he died in 1949 his ashes were scattered there. A 1907 photograph of a robed monk among the ruins, later published in Hine's History of Hitchin, fed the legend. The best-known tale is of a monk climbing long-vanished stairs at midnight on Halloween, with reports also of distant music, ringing bells, a glowing cross and a tunnel to Temple Dinsley.