“There was a ghost in the house of a baker, near Stoney Middleton in Derbyshire in the nineteenth century, who made holes in the loaves of bread—‘so large that the loaves could not be sold’.  In the same century a phantom was sometimes seen at Glowrowram near Chester-le-Street.  When approached, ‘the figure would fall down and spread out like a sheet, or rather like a great pack of white wool.’ 

In the nineteenth century, in a house reputed to be haunted, some children told their mother that they had been running after ‘such a queer thing in the cellar; it was like a goat and not like a goat; but it seemed to be like a shadow’.  In 1661 there was an apparition that had a plaster on its face ‘as broad as half a crown’.  In the twentieth century, a blue eye was seen by mother and child peering through a knot-hole in a wooden floorboard.”

—Peter Ackroyd, from The English Ghost

(Image by DerrickT)