12 Terrifying Ghost Stories From Around The World
8. True Detective Comes To Windsor
This one, we admit, was partially chosen for the chilling illustration that accompanies it. It's like the sort of thing you'd expect of the dark, murderous Yellow King from True Detective, albeit transplanted from the deep south to Berkshire.
Herne The Hunter is said to haunt the county's Windsor Forest and Great Park, appearing in countless folk tales and even scoring a cameo appearance in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor; his origin is said to lay further back than that, though, rooted in weird...Pagan...stuff.
Little was written down and preserved about Herne before Willy got there, describing him as "a spirit" and "sometime a keeper... in Windsor forest" who is seen to "walk round about an oak, with great raggd horns". Which, to be honest, would be enough for us to go on: a ragged, spectral being with a terrifying face and great big antlers? It'd certainly put us off of our Centre Parcs holiday, that's for sure.
Samuel Ireland provided more background to this spectre decades later, positing that in life he was a man of some social standing who, for some transgression, saw that he may fall into disgrace, and chose instead to hang himself in the very woods he overlooked.
So he is damned to protect them for the rest of eternity, with sightings dating as recently as the 1920s suggesting he rides with demon hounds, a horned owl and other creatures of the forest.