HALLOWE’EN is traditionally the night when unquiet spirits are abroad but, according to that most modern of tools, the internet, people in East Hampshire have experienced ghosts and strange phenomena at many other times.

More than 20 such ‘sightings’ for East Hampshire and surrounding area are listed on the website at: www.paranormaldatabase.com with Bramshott and Liphook having the dubious claim to fame of the most notifications.

However, one which is not on that website but mentioned on a list of haunted hostelries of Hampshire is The Trooper Inn at Froxfield, a former coaching stop on the road between Petersfield and Alton.

Coincidentally with the current commemorations to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War, a man dressed in khaki of that era is believed to have been seen around the pub on foot and on horseback.

Three other public houses – the Red Lion at Chalton, the Red Lion at Horndean and the former Sun Inn in Petersfield – as well as The Royal Anchor Hotel at Liphook have all had their fair share of apparitions over the years.

Several phantoms have been reported at Chalton, which may well be the oldest public house in Hampshire, including a woman behind the bar, a child on the staircase and an unknown face looking from an upper floor window. The road through the middle of the village has also been the route for a ghostly horse and cart.

No dates are given for those sightings whereas in the 20th century people reported a woman sitting in Horndean’s Red Lion and it is suggested she could be a person who committed suicide in an upstairs room.

Sudden death is also at the heart of stories surrounding The Royal Anchor Hotel in Liphook’s Square where a highwayman was killed in room six.

The former Sun Inn in Dragon Street in Petersfield, which was also known as the Green Dragon and is now JSW restaurant, has a number of documented experiences of customers and staff hearing strange sounds such as marble-playing, running, banging and jug swinging on a hook with no obvious means of it moving.

The term paranormal can cover incidents such as the report in December 1991 of a lorry driver who was on the A3 going towards Petersfield near Sheet Service station when he believed he has run down a figure standing in the middle of the road, looking as if he was trying to signal for help. A subsequent search by police found no evidence of a body or the driver having hit anything.

Supposedly last seen in a number of places around Buriton in the 1960s is a figure of a friar who vanishes when anyone approaches him and Algernon Bonham Carter was quoted as saying he had seen a monk or friar dressed in a brown habit.

In 1957, he applied for a rate reduction on the Manor House, where he lived, due to a ghost in the property which lessened its value. He said it was a chambermaid who had committed suicide there and he had it several times.