St Mary's Church - Clophill - Beds - Ghosts and Hauntings on Waymarking.com

A woman named Sophie is thought to be one of the ghosts that haunt this church. Her coffin was discovered hidden in the nave.A World War One air force mechanic named George is also thought to wander around the headstones, looking for his friend's grave.
from wikipedia"
In the 1960s the church became a focus of media attention after a
widely reported incident of graveyard desecration was followed by a
series of similar incidents, both at Clophill and across Britain.
On 16 March 1963, in a street in Clophill, a local couple saw two
Luton youths playing with a human skull. The youths claimed that they
had taken it from inside St Mary's, where they had discovered it stuck
on a broken piece of window frame that had been jammed into a wall. On
the floor were a breastbone, pelvis and leg bones laid "in the pattern
used for the Black Mass", as it was described in newspaper reports of
police statements. Scattered cockerel feathers and tracings of two
Maltese crosses infilled in red, one newly done and the other somewhat
weatherworn, were found inside the church. The rector at that time,
Rev. Leslie Barker, reported that six graves of females had been
tampered with before the stone slab above a seventh, that of Jenny
Humberstone who had died in 1770 aged 22, had been dislodged and the
coffin broken open. Barker, speaking to the press, stated that "Satan
worshippers are known to always use a female at the centre of their
ceremonies", and his churchwarden ascribed the damage to "some kind of
devil worship". Similarly, police reportedly stated that, as animal
sacrifice was commonly described in accounts of satanic rites, the
cockerel was possibly "sacrificial", and the crosses were possibly
painted with animal blood (although on this point Barker disagreed,
thinking them more likely to be simply red paint).

Author and researcher Bill Ellis, writing some years later, opined that the police's idea of a "sacrificial cockerel" had been derived from a scene in Denis Wheatley's 1934 novel The Devil Rides Out, where a black cock and white hen are sacrificed.

The remains of Jenny Humberstone were re-interred on 23 March, but the
incident was not to be an isolated one, thanks to the newspaper
publicity. Her grave was desecrated again on two occasions before 2
April, and the church had become a night-time attraction for local
teenagers. Humberstone's grave was resealed but was reopened on the
night of the following full moon, and there was a run on books about
magic at Luton Central Library.

The discovery of the heads of six cows and a horse in Bluebell Wood,
Caddington, south of Luton, on 9 April was linked to the desecration
at St Mary's, fuelling further interest. By then a local newspaper had
interviewed a student from Silsoe Agricultural College who admitted to
having visited the church two years previously with a group of
students. They had killed a cockerel, spread its feathers and blood
around, and drawn a Celtic cross as "a huge joke" that "doesn't seem
so funny now".
Despite the admission, stories about St Mary's, and about Clophill in
general, continued. The church and the reputation that it had gained
from the incident were mentioned in a coffee-table book on witchcraft
by the folklorist Eric Maple, who described "desolate Clophill" with a
"wilderness of desecrated and looted tombs, symbols of the revival of
black magic in the twentieth century", and recommended that people
visit it for a "truly Gothic experience". Leslie Barker retired in
1969, and reported that since the first incidents in 1963 there had
been numerous instances of graves being broken into "and some sort of
rite performed".
The desecration of St Mary's in 1963 was followed by a spate of
similar newspaper reports of "black magic rites" in churches in 1963
and 1964, including reports of a series of desecrations in Lancashire,
symbols painted on the porch of a church in Bramber, Sussex, and a
pentagram and a sheep's heart pierced with thirteen thorns in St
Clement's in Leigh-on-Sea."

Public access?: up a small lane limited parking near to church Visting hours: 24/7 Website about the location and/or story: [Web Link]

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