The Pump Hill Smuggler

One of the grimmest ghost stories on the Norfolk coast belongs to the village of Happisburgh, where eighteenth-century farmers returning home late at night told of a terrible figure coming up the main street from the direction of Cart Gap: a headless, legless man in a sailor's dark coat and leather belt, a pistol thrust through it, his pigtailed hair so long it trailed on the ground from a head that hung down between his shoulder blades.

The story behind the apparition traced back to a violent falling-out among Dutch smugglers on the beach at Cart Gap, which ended in gunfire and at least one death. Two men were said to have waylaid the wandering ghost, following it to a well at the top of Pump Hill, where they dropped a bundle — and then the ghost itself — down the shaft.

After that, the well became the focus of the haunting: whenever a storm was brewing, low groans were said to rise from it, as if the dead smuggler were still trying to warn the village. The well and its pump have long since gone, but for years afterwards people refused to have the pump removed, fearing that without it the groaning — and whatever it warned of — would return.