Ghost · Hitchin
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Each June night a headless Royalist gallops a white horse toward Hitchin Priory.
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Hitchin Priory is now a hotel and events venue, so its grounds are for guests and customers, for example at afternoon tea. High Down House at Pirton, the other end of the ride, is a private home.
Near here is Hitchin Priory, where every fifteenth of June a headless Cavalier on a white horse is said to ride in from Pirton at midnight.
In 1648, as Parliament's troops scoured the countryside after a failed Royalist rising, a wounded Cavalier named Goring was said to be hiding at High Down, a manor house at Pirton. When the search grew close he hid in a hollow wych elm by the gateway, but was found and cut down beneath it, while his sweetheart watched from an upper window. Every year, on the night of 15 June, his headless ghost is said to ride a white horse from High Down to the site of the old chapel in the grounds of Hitchin Priory, where he had earlier sheltered. A grey lady at the Priory is sometimes called his grieving love.