At first it was the strange rumblings that would wake her. Then bright lights would fill the bedroom as a face appeared, looking down on her. Her husband, who worked nights, never believed her until one day, he saw it too.
Shaken by the sightings, the couple sold the cottage and moved far away from Partridge Green, a quaint, isolated village in West Sussex. Thirty years later, a short distance away from where these night-time hauntings took place, the village welcomed a surprising new arrival.
Adele, fresh off the heady success of her second album, 21, moved to Lock House, a grand mansion hidden up a winding country road. In a 2012 interview, she cheerily gave the CNN journalist Anderson Cooper a tour of the home, which used to be a convent.
In between clips of Adele playing Angry Birds and the pair starting an impromptu cooking show entitled Rolling in the Dough, she remarked that the house was “quite scary”.
These off-the-cuff comments have now become central to a planning battle that could result in the mansion being converted into three houses and a cottage. The owners say they have struggled to sell it because Adele “blighted the property [by] saying it is haunted”. The singer never directly called Lock House “haunted”.
Regardless of how “scary” Adele found the property, the village overall has no shortage of spooky tales and ghostly visits. Not all of them have taken human form.
“Apparently there’s a cat ghost here,” said Bethany Illes, 28, the front of house manager at the Green Man, a 19th-century pub situated on the side of a long, leafy road. “I’m not gonna get involved, we can just coexist with one another.”
Illes recounted one spooky tale from a former member of staff: “When she was leaving to lock up, she thought she’d seen movement and then the kettle turned on. There was no one else in the building.”
While the village’s paranormal proclivities are not a surprise to Illes, she is not wholly convinced. “When you’re in an old building, especially when it’s windy, doors can creak. In our kitchen, when the wind blows, the door can move. That doesn’t mean there’s a ghost, it just means there’s a breeze,” she said.
The paranormal sightings in Partridge Green and its surrounding villages are rarely random and usually have traceable links to past lives and events.
The spooky cottage that kept its owners awake before they fled was once the scene of death and terror. One night in July 1941, a German plane was shot down over the home, which used to be three smaller cottages. A woman living in one of the houses heard a noise and picked her baby up as the aircraft exploded outside. The engine crashed through her roof and landed on the bed.
The crash spluttered oil and flames on the other surrounding cottages, causing them to catch fire. The body of the pilot was found wedged in the rafters of one of the cottages.
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“If a house has had a past life, there may well be a higher chance of a sighting,” said Graham duHeaume. The 86-year-old has documented more than 50 paranormal sightings in the area, including the tale of the haunted cottage.
He worked at the Natural History Museum for three decades. As he approached retirement, duHeaume visited a medium with his wife, which left a lasting impression on him. “He said to me, I’ve got a lady who’s passing by, she sends her love and she’s lost her little finger on her right hand.
“I went cold. That was my aunt, who I last saw in 1952, who lost her little finger on her right hand,” he said.
Since moving to Henfield, a short distance from Partridge Green, he has heard vivid testimonies from dozens of locals. One woman looking after a cottage said a “bloke dressed like an 18th-century soldier” would often loiter on the stairs and in the hallway. A gardener who tended to a nearby pub told duHeaume that a Victorian girl dressed in white would sit on a windowsill as he worked. He saw her hundreds of times.
Hauntings usually happen at home but sometimes, they can happen in more unexpected places. According to duHeaume, the former Budgens supermarket in Henfield, which was sold off in 2023, was ridden with paranormal activity. “Boy was that haunted, there was a hell of a lot of stuff going on there,” he said.
Former staff members told him that blocks of cheese and bread would fly off shelves and counters, and that one time, a jar was suspended midair before dropping on the ground. They also recounted shadows and footsteps while alone and the smells of burning tobacco and bonfire appearing out of nowhere.
Despite their frightening reputation, duHeaume and many others in the area are not scared of ghosts. “I believe they can’t hurt you,” he said.
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