Woodchester Mansion

The Woodchester Park estate was bought in 1854 for £100,000 by William Leigh, who pulled down the existing house, known as Spring Park, and set out to build something far grander in its place. In 1857 he hired Benjamin Bucknall, a young and very inexperienced aspiring architect who had been an assistant to Hansom, and Bucknall threw himself into the study of Gothic Revival architecture; the result is generally regarded as his masterpiece. Work began in 1858.

By around 1870 the shell was up, the roof was on and the drawing room, the only room ever completed, was fitted out, but progress had slowed to a crawl. When Leigh died in 1873 the work stopped altogether. His heirs had neither the money nor the appetite to finish a house of such scale in so remote a spot, and Woodchester Mansion was simply left, a Gothic monument to one man's ambition, with its interior a maze of missing floors, bare stone and open ceilings.

The house's one real tragedy came in the Second World War, when American and Canadian troops camped in the pasture opposite, used the cellars for stores and trained on the estate's lakes for the D-Day landings. During one exercise a bridge across a lake collapsed and soldiers drowned; accounts of the number range from two to as many as twenty, and their bodies were laid in the cold of the mansion's game larder. Stroud District Council eventually bought the house, and since 1992 it has been leased to the Woodchester Mansion Trust, which conserves it and opens it to visitors, while the National Trust cares for the surrounding park and its five lakes.

Woodchester Mansion's paranormal reputation grew with the ghost-hunting boom of the early 2000s, and television led the way. Most Haunted broadcast a live investigation from the house at the summer solstice in 2003, and returned for a full episode in series seven, first shown in 2005. In the later programme Yvette Fielding concentrated on the poltergeist-type activity the team said it had experienced on the first visit, together with a hooded monk seen on the first floor, strange light effects, loud bangs and falling masonry. Psychics Gordon Smith and David Wells were asked by parapsychologist Ciarán O'Keeffe to plot the active areas on a floor plan before entering, in an attempt to test their impressions.

Since then the mansion has become one of the busiest ghost-hunt venues in the south west, hired by companies including Haunted Happenings, Haunted Rooms and the Original Ghost Hunting Company. Their reports, and those of visitors, describe stones thrown across empty rooms, sudden bangs from the unfinished floors, hair pulled, people pushed, figures on the stairs and the persistent floating head in the bathroom. Some guests have reportedly collapsed in fear or described being "attacked" by something unseen, which the operators take care to advertise.

The sceptical reading writes itself: a vast, unlit stone shell with missing floors, open flues, resident bats and a valley wind is a machine for producing noises, draughts and shadows, and a building that was never occupied has no one to haunt it. Paranormal writers counter that Woodchester has a documented tragedy in the drowned soldiers, that the site was inhabited for centuries before Leigh cleared it, and that the reports are unusually consistent. Either way, the mansion by torchlight is an experience few forget.

Woodchester Mansion lies in Woodchester Park near Nympsfield, between Stroud and Dursley in Gloucestershire, and it is open from Easter to the start of November on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays; check the Trust's website for current dates and times. Visitors park at the National Trust's Buckholt car park off the B4066 Stroud to Dursley road (a small parking fee applies), then either walk three quarters of a mile down an unmade track through beech woods and pasture, or catch the free minibus that runs hourly from the foot of the car-park steps when the house is open. The walk is delightful but not suitable for wheelchairs, and the house itself has stairs and uneven, unfinished floors.

Inside you can explore the unfinished rooms with volunteer guides, watch the colonies of greater and lesser horseshoe bats on CCTV, and have tea in the seasonal café. The National Trust's park, with its chain of five lakes and the restored boathouse walk, makes a fine full day. There is no accommodation at the mansion and no evening opening, but overnight ghost hunts are run on selected dates through the year by paranormal event companies, usually from evening until the early hours.

Nailsworth, Stroud and Dursley are all within a few miles, with pubs, inns and B&Bs, and the Cotswold towns of Painswick and Tetbury are a short drive for something more comfortable after a night in the dark.