Our Dorset Ghost Story – Ginny Groves

While we were in Evershot, Dorset – which features in Tess of the d’Urbervilles as Evershed – looking for sites associated with Alex Dunn‘s relatives, the Groves family, an old bloke who lived next door to a house that had once been inhabited in by Groveses told us about the time years ago when, while driving a tractor across a bridge, he saw a woman dressed in white who mysteriously disappeared. When he got home to tell the tale, his father said he must have seen the ghost of Ginny Groves, who haunted the spot. Eugene Byrne has since delved into the archives and found what’s probably her obituary from 1880 – a little tragedy of Hardyish dimensions involving shoplifting from the Co-Op and suicide. We had lunch in the pub where the autopsy was held.  None of us has been haunted yet.