Local ghost stories, and strange occurrences.
“Mysterious” writes: – Speaking of strange occurrences in the neighbourhood recalls to mind a singular premonition of death, which happened about twenty years ago. It was summertime, and on a certain morning, a parishioner of Preston Bissett, departed to Hillesden to undertake a day’s work mowing grass. Sometime during the day it was noticed he had left his occupation, but as no untoward event was suspected, no alarm was occasioned. However, in the evening his body was found lifeless, and drowned in a pond in the village. He had perhaps been trying to take a drink of water, or more probably walked to the pond to wet [whet?] the edge of his scythe, when he accidently overbalanced himself, and fell in.
On this selfsame afternoon, a woman, who lived near the unfortunate man’s abode at Preston Bissett, saw him repeatedly come out of his house, and walk backwards and forwards on the pathway in front of it. This strange action he seemingly kept doing all the afternoon. She naturally thought he returned to the village, and that he was upset about something, as he continued going in the house and shutting the door after him, and then coming out again, and pacing up and down the road.
This same afternoon, and about the same time, the man’s nephew, a boy, kept hearing someone chopping wood in his hovel. He went several times and opened the hovel-door, thinking his uncle must be there, but there was no one in the shed. Then the boy drew the attention of the sounds of wood-chopping to a woman, his neighbour. She could hear them just the same, and thought the noises most extraordinary, when, later on, the sad tidings were conveyed to the relations, the boy and women remembered the occurrence, and related what had taken place.
There is not the least doubt this was a startling and unimpeachable instance of premonition or warning of death, and that whilst the sounds and vision were being enacted in the village of Preston Bissett, the person implicated was lying dead, or dying in the pond in the village of Hillesden.
Buckingham Advertiser and Free Press, 1st January 1898.