The Only Officially Recorded Ghosts Are from a Centuries-Old British Battle

The First English Civil War was a nightmare for everyone involved -- and a lot of people were involved. In just a few years, 4% of the population of England would die from war-related causes, along with 6% of Scots and 41% of the Irish, some 200,000 people. That’s a lot of ghosts being made in a short period of time, if you believe in that kind of thing.

Apparently, England’s Public Record Office believed in that sort of thing in the 1640s. When King Charles I sent a team to investigate ghostly figures fighting over one of the war’s old battlefields in Edgehill, so many people apparently witnessed the spectral scene that officials entered the afterlife armed conflict into the public record.

After coming to power in 1625, Parliament immediately began chafing King Charles I, so he began ruling with absolute authority, deferring little to Parliament as a governing body. Parliament, of course, disagreed with that style of government. Both sides were reluctant to take up arms against the other, but when they did in 1642, things got violent pretty fast.

We probably like to think of battles in this time period as uniformed armies with muskets, marching with new armor, glinting in the sun. But when it came to the earliest battles between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians, these were hardly professional soldiers. If the king’s foot soldiers didn’t die of typhoid or plague before arriving on the battlefields at all, they were basically peasants forced to fight with clubs or farming equipment. Luckier (read: wealthier) troops had horses and fought as cavalry or dragoons.

By the time King Charles marched on Edgehill in October 1642, he had around 11,000 foot soldiers, 3,000 cavalry and 1,000 dragoons to meet a Parliamentarian force that was roughly the same size, if not slightly larger. The Battle of Edgehill was inconclusive and decided nothing except the fates of more than a thousand troops, with another 3,000 wounded (considering the level of sanitation at the time, they probably died, too).

As if forcing thousands of peasants to fight cavalry and mounted rifles with sticks and scythes wasn’t enough, the combatant forces also left their dead bodies unburied in an open field. The bodies were subsequently looted for money, clothes and basically anything else a dead man had no use for. Then both sides left to regroup.

It’s likely no one would have given a second thought to the scores of dead soldiers littering the battlefield, had it not been for a strange occurrence around Christmas of that year. Shepherds walking across the battlefield reported hearing the clash of swords, the screams of men, horses and the cries of dying men. When they looked up, the herders saw the ghosts of the dead men re-fighting the Battle of Edgehill in the night sky.

Understandably upset, the shepherds contacted a local priest who also saw the phantom fray. In fact, so many people saw it, the locals published a pamphlet about it in 1643.

When King Charles I heard about the dead men continuing to fight for and against his rule in the afterlife, he sent a royal commission to check it out. Not only did the commission see the apparitions, they even recognized some of the ghosts, including ​​Sir Edmund Verney, the king’s standard-bearer.

After three months, all it took was the constant, nightly ghostly replay of the Battle of Edgehill for the locals to finally give the fallen troops a Christian burial. When that was done, the fighting finally stopped, although some still claim to hear the sounds of swords (probably scythes), cannon and horses during the night. But because the royal commission’s investigation acknowledged the ghosts of Edgehill, the Public Record Office officially acknowledges them, too. To this day, they’re the only ghosts in the public record.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Facebook, X or on LinkedIn.

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