The Haunted Cottage

On the outskirts of Barrow-in-Furness lie the remains of Furness Abbey, once one of the richest Cistercian abbeys in England and built from rich, red beautiful sandstone.

I took these photographs at dusk last weekend. The abbey is always magnificent and, perhaps because of its secluded setting, always slightly spooky.

I expect it's supposed to be haunted - I think a ghost or two is the least that may be expected from any decent abbey. Some years ago I knew the curator of Abingdon Abbey and he said he often saw ghostly monks gliding along, only visible from the knees upwards because the level of the floor had been raised in later years and nobody had told the ghosts.

At Furness Abbey, however, it's not the abbey that's known for being haunted, it's the cottage nearby.

I took this photo at dusk so it's a bit dark. If you click on this link and scroll down until you get to the aerial photograph, the cottage can be seen just to the right of the road, half-way up the photo on the right-hand side.

It looks like a perfectly ordinary cottage and over the years it's had quite a lot of money spent on it, but my Barrow relatives, who live nearby, tell me that nobody ever stays there for long.

Now look, folks, it's 2006 not 1306 so let's be grown up and search for a logical explanation. If you look at the position of the cottage, it's very near the Abbey - always liable to give ideas to a vivid imagination - and yet with no houses in sight. It's very dark round about, and next to a wood. And finally, a stream runs next to the cottage and streams make strange noises - and perhaps they can alter the air pressure too, and it's a well-known theory that differences in air pressure make people feel uneasy.

There we have it. Of course it's not really haunted.

So would you spend the night there on your own?

No, me neither.