The primary lesson of most ghost tales is that you ought to finish your life here on earth before moving on to the next. If you don’t you may have to stay here for awhile, bereft of body, attempting to do in death what you did not accomplish in life. (Phillip DePoy, The Drifter’s Wheel, 2008)

That certainly seems to be the lesson one could draw from the story of the haunting of Hinton Ampner Manor, where incest, infanticide, and guilt seem to have sparked one of the strangest hauntings on record.

The house was already more than a century old when, in 1719, the heiress Mary Stewkeley married Edward Stawell, the younger brother and heir presumptive of the childless Lord Stawell. Mary Stewkeley was a decade older than her husband, but she bore him two children. She inherited Hinton Ampner Manor on her father’s death, and with it, the guardianship of her much younger sister Honoria.

And with so seemingly innocent an event—an older sister undertaking to raise a younger—the trouble began.

Mary Stewekeley Stawell died in 1740. She left behind her husband, a daughter, and Honoria; her only son had died while away at boarding school. By this time, one might have expected that Honoria would have been married and mistress of her own establishment, but she stayed on at Hinton Ampner. She had fallen in love with her brother-in-law, and he apparently returned her affection. Under the law of the time, their relationship was considered incestuous.

Moreover, Lord Stawell’s servants, as horrified by the "goings-on" as was the outer world, spread the word that Honoria had at some point borne a child to Edward Stawell—and the child had been "done away with."

Edward Stawell inherited his childless brother’s title in 1742, but he did not move to his brother’s manor; he remained at Hinton Ampner with his beloved Honoria. Honoria died in 1754. Her lover followed her within a year, dying of a stroke on April 2, 1755. He was fifty-six years old. Not long after, servants still living at the manor reported they saw his ghost in the house, wearing a "drab" (presumably beige) coat which he had worn frequently in life.

Hinton Ampner passed into the hands of Henry Bilson Legge, the husband of Stawell’s only daughter, as part of a marriage settlement. The couple only used the manor for a few weeks during the fall hunting season. The rest of the year, it was cared for by three old servants who had been there since Mary Stewkeley’s childhood. Legge died in 1764; his widow very shortly thereafter married the Earl of Hillsborough, and made the decision to rent out Hinton Ampner.

In January 1765 Henry and Mary Jervis Ricketts moved into the house, with their three young children. It was during their six-year residence in the house that the worst of the hauntings occurred. Mary Ricketts, who came from London and was a highly educated and frankly skeptical woman, kept a record of the strange events. Closely guarded by the Ricketts family until the 1870s, it makes for amazing reading even today.

From the time they moved in, the Rickettses were plagued by the most prosaic haunting noises, in particular sounds of doors being slammed. At first thinking there was hanky-panky in the servants’ quarters, they eventually decided that villagers were sneaking in to make mischief, perhaps upset because all the Ricketts’ servants were Londoners. They changed the locks, but the noises continued.

By summer, Lord Stawell had made his first appearance. He was seen first by the youngest Ricketts child’s nurse, who plainly saw a man in a "drab" coat go into the yellow bedchamber directly across the hall from the nursery. Thinking there might be a guest in the house, she was reassured by other servants that there was no guest. A search turned up no trace of the man. Shortly thereafter, a groom crossed paths with him in the entrance hall; the groom mistook the man for the butler, and was vastly surprised to learn that the butler was already in bed in the servants’ quarters and had not been downstairs since earlier in the evening.

In July of 1767, the servants were at tea in the kitchen when they heard a woman’s footsteps coming down the service stairs. They could tell it was not one of them, for they could hear the rustling of her clothes—apparently a gown of stiff silk; nor yet did the steps sound like those of Mary Ricketts. They saw a tall woman pass by the kitchen door and go on down the passageway to the yard, and, presumably, on into the street. A deliveryman came in almost in concert with her passing, and declared he had seen no one. Although the servants did not know it at the time, they had just witnessed the apparition of Honoria Stewekeley. Honoria was never seen again—only heard.

Around the same time, the noises that had disturbed the household from the beginning increased. Human groans, and rustlings and footsteps, became part of the repertoire. When the servants shared their misgivings with Mary Ricketts, she—perhaps predictably—ridiculed them. She would not do so for long.

Henry Ricketts was a man of business, and in 1769, his business took him on a long voyage to Jamaica. He left Mary, their three children, and eight servants behind at Hinton Ampner. And—again, perhaps predictably—the ghosts of Hinton Ampner took advantage of his absence to put on a ghastly exhibition for Mary, the skeptic.

She, hitherto unaware of or undisturbed by the noises that had pestered the rest of the household for four years, was now hearing not only footsteps that came from nowhere and belonged to no one in the house, but rustlings of invisible silk that accompanied some of them. Occasionally, the silken rustlings were loud enough, and close enough to her bed in the infamous yellow bedroom, that they woke her out of a sound sleep.

In the winter of 1769-1770 she received a visit from an old man living in the poorhouse at West Meon, close by. He told her that it was common knowledge that a carpenter had made a sort of hideyhole under the dining room floor during the tenure at Hinton Ampner of Mary and Honoria’s father, Sir Hugh, presumably a hiding place for papers or treasure. Neither Mary nor Lady Hillsborough followed up on this information. Given what would eventually be found under the floorboards, Mary missed her chance to stop the haunting in its tracks.

In the summer of 1770, she was startled by the sounds of a man’s footsteps coming across the floor of the yellow bedroom; the sounds were never repeated, however, and she remained in that room until winter, when she moved into the chintz (so called because of its decorations) bedroom across the hall, which was a warmer room. There, she heard sounds of music and sounds as if someone were banging on a door with a club—but again, these sounds were not repeated.

During the winter of 1770-71, she also became aware of the strangest of all the manifestations: an eerie, hollow, murmuring noise that seemed to fill the entire house. She said adamantly that most might have mistaken it for winds in the eaves, or drafts, but it could be heard on nights when there was no wind.

On April 2, 1771 (the anniversary of Lord Stawell’s death in 1755), she was awakened by the sounds of people walking in the hall outside the chintz bedroom. She listened to the racket for some twenty minutes before waking her maid; the two of them not only heard the footsteps, but sounds that indicated someone was opening and closing the door of the yellow bedroom. A search proved that no one save she, the maid, and the children were on the second floor; moreover, the door to the yellow bedroom was locked.

As that summer drew on, the hollow murmuring that filled the whole house became hollow no more; for out of it came the sounds of angry human voices, one high-pitched and obviously female, two others deeper and male. They were carrying on a conversation, but none of their words were ever distinguishable. These sounds often went on all night and into the next morning.

Mary Ricketts was now convinced, she wrote, that "[these things] were beyond the power of any mortal agent to perform, but knowing how exploded such opinions are, I kept them in my own bosom, and hoped my resolution would enable me to support whatever might befall."

In the event, she would remain in the house less than a month from the time she penned those words.

There was a brief respite from the sounds when, in late July of 1771, her brother John came to visit her. Her brother was a naval officer, who would eventually rise to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet and mentor the much more famous Horatio Nelson. No sooner was Captain Jervis gone, however, than the sounds got worse. This time, it sounded as if some tremendously heavy object was falling with preternatural speed and landing in the floor of the lobby outside Mary’s chintz room. Worse yet, it was followed by a piercing, indisputably human scream, which came again and again before it finally seemed to fade beneath the floor.

Mary hadn’t told her brother about the haunting on his previous visit. When he returned to Hinton Ampner in early August, she did so; her entire household, herself included, was by now in a state of near-panic. This time, Captain Jervis got no respite. He, his manservant, and a fellow officer from the Royal Navy sat up every night for a week and were treated to the full cacaphony of sounds and a few new ones besides; one night, there was a phantom gunshot, followed by groans of agony, that had no mortal source.

The last straw, for Captain Jervis, was a repetition of the heavy object falling/screams. Horrified, and unable to find, despite repeated searches of the house and grounds, any cause for the events, he advised his sister to move out. She did so within the week.

Lady Hillsborough managed to rent Hinton Ampner again; that tenant lacked Mary Ricketts’ stubbornness. He moved out within six months, unable to tolerate the ghostly noises. The old manor stood empty, growing derelict, until 1797, when it was razed to the ground. It was reported, during the dismantling of the house, that the body of an infant child was found under some floorboards.

A new Hinton Ampner House, which still stands and is noted for its gardens, was built a few hundred feet from the old site. Even it, however, is haunted; some of the same noises that plagued the old house are heard there, usually around dawn.

It sounds as if Lord Stawell and Honoria, whose illicit love led to something infinitely more sinister, are still trying to put things right—and, although the child's bones under the floor were found and buried, they, the guilty parents, are still looking for redemption.

Scary thought.