Preston Manor, Brighton

The story

Preston Manor was the manor house of Preston, once a separate Sussex village and now absorbed into the city of Brighton and Hove. The village name comes from the Saxon Preste-tun, the priest's farmstead, and later it was often called Bishops Preston or Preston Episcopi, because for centuries the manor belonged to the church: first to the see of Selsey and then, after 1075, to the Bishop of Chichester. The Domesday survey of 1086 valued it at £25 and recorded a church, a mill, a manor house and twelve plough teams. Nothing of that early house survives, but St Peter's Church, raised around the middle of the 1200s where two earlier churches had stood, still stands.

The oldest part of the present house is a two-room stone building dated to about 1250, with walls two feet thick. Its layout can still be traced in the basement, along with fragments of its original arched doorways. By 1510 the bishops had stopped farming the estate themselves and leased it out, first to Edward Elrington and his wife Beatrix Shirley; Edward's tomb is in St Peter's. After the Dissolution the Crown took the manor, and the Elringtons became Crown tenants. When Richard Elrington died without sons in 1569, the property passed through his widow to her son Anthony Shirley, and in 1628 Anthony's son Thomas bought the reversion of the lease from the Crown, making him the first lord of the manor. The Shirleys added classical doorcases in the 17th century, and part of the staircase may date from around 1685.

The house largely took its current form in two campaigns. In 1738 Thomas Western, then lord of the manor, rebuilt the medieval structure, keeping part of it inside the new house. In 1905 the architect Charles Stanley Peach renovated and enlarged it. By then it belonged to the Stanfords, reputedly the wealthiest family in Sussex. Eleanor Stanford's second marriage, to a Macdonald, produced twin daughters, Lily and Diana, who would play a central role in the ghost stories.

In 1932 the family left the house to Brighton Corporation, and it has been a museum ever since, presenting both upstairs and below-stairs life in the Edwardian era. After five years of closure it reopened on 5 April 2025.

The legend

Preston Manor is often described as one of the most haunted houses in Britain, and its own museum staff have done unusually careful work on where the stories came from.

The oldest and most famous ghost is the White Lady, described as a woman in a flowing white dress, her fair hair long and loose. The household was talking about ghosts by the 1880s at the latest. In autumn 1896 Lily Macdonald, who already knew how the ghost was described, followed a figure out of the drawing room as far as the bottom of the staircase and tried to embrace it; her arms went straight through. A sister then reported seeing the figure on the upper landing of the staircase, and a family friend who came to stay in the hope of a sighting said he met her in the entrance hall.

Later that year a séance was held in the Cleves Room with the medium Ada Goodrich Freer and Thomas Douglas Murray of the Ghost Club. It was from this circle that the idea of a nun emerged: two nuns, it was claimed, had been excommunicated around 1535, one of them unjustly, and the White Lady was given the name Sister Agnes. The museum notes that the séance's results were described at the time as inconclusive, and that Freer was publicly denounced as a fraud the following year. Early in 1897, drainage work behind the house uncovered the skeleton of a middle-aged woman, which a doctor dated to the 16th century, and the family quietly arranged its reburial in consecrated ground at St Peter's. A séance in 1898 reportedly found the spirits at peace. Fair-haired apparitions were noted only twice more, both in 1903, in a billiard room and a bedroom; the White Lady is also said to have appeared to Eleanor Macdonald before her death that year and to have frightened her night nurse. Passers-by reported women in white in the grounds in 1976 and 1992.

Other stories cluster in the southwest part of the house. The same daughter who saw the White Lady on the stairs described two phantom men fighting on another staircase, and later an "immensely evil" presence moving about the southwest bedroom and leaning over the bed. In that room, visitors twice described a disembodied hand moving up and down a four-poster bed, one of them adding that the bed shook. Noises, objects moved, doors opening and closing, and dresses found cut with regular patterns of holes were all reported there.

A Lady in Grey was reported several times in the 20th century: in the boiler room, twice by a Second World War firewatcher, first on the main staircase and then on the roof parapet, and by a security guard. A Lady in Black is linked to the servants' areas, and another guard saw a figure in old-fashioned black clothes crossing a landing in the 1990s. Back in the 1960s someone reported a child's ghost riding a toy tractor in the grounds. More recent accounts add locking doors, lights going out, furniture moved in a locked child's bedroom, a playful spirit nicknamed "Mad Jack" (single source) and ghostly children and dogs.

The museum's own research is the best corrective. Its staff point out that the oldest written records of the stories are letters from the early 1930s; that John Benett-Stanford set down his account of the White Lady in 1935; that nobody ever established the skeleton was a nun; that no witness ever described her wearing a habit; and that tales shift with retelling. The 16th century is when the nun supposedly died; no record survives from that time. The museum compares the legend with Borley Rectory's nun and with the walled-up nun of Walter Scott's poem Marmion (1808), and a researcher has even floated, as pure speculation, that the figure could be a Roman-era woman. Test pits dug by the Brighton & Hove Archaeological Society in 2019 turned up mostly sheep or goat bones. Tellingly, Henry Roberts, the first curator from 1933, refused a family member's request to put the ghosts in his guidebook. Staff member Paula Wrightson tells that story in her book Mr Roberts & the Ghost.

Most Haunted filmed at the manor in June 2006; the team included psychic Ian Shillito and parapsychologist Ciarán O'Keeffe, and the episode features bells ringing though unconnected and a woman in grey. Crime novelist Peter James has also joined a night investigation there.

What remains today

The house is listed Grade II* and largely reflects the 1738 rebuilding and the 1905 enlargement, with remnants of the 13th-century core in the basement. Inside, rooms are furnished to evoke Edwardian life both upstairs and in the servants' quarters. Inside the historic walled garden, enclosed by aged flint walls, you can find the ruins of a wellhouse and a cemetery for family pets, and several garden structures are listed Grade II. St Peter's Church, where the 1897 skeleton was reburied, still stands.

Visiting

Preston Manor is a public museum run by Brighton & Hove Museums and reopened in April 2025. Guided tours cover both the history and the ghosts of the house and include a recreation of the 1896 séance, and the museum holds themed ghost events, such as its after-dark Ghostly Gatherings (autumn 2026). Check the Brighton & Hove Museums website for current opening days, tour times and tickets. If you visit St Peter's churchyard, be respectful of the graves.

Sources

1. Historic England list entry (List entry 1380750) — Historic England · Open Government Licence
2. Preston Manor, Lavenham Road, Preston St Mary, Suffolk- Archaeological Monitoring Report — Archaeology Data Service via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Preston Manor — Wikimedia Commons
4. "Haunted tales and Edwardian grandeur as Brighton's Preston Manor reopens" — Absolutely Magazines (15 Apr 2025) — Absolutely Magazines (15 Apr 2025
5. "Lily Macdonald: a ghost-seeing enigma at Preston Manor" — Brighton & Hove Museums (Paula Wrightson, c. 2017) — Brighton & Hove Museums (Paula Wrightson, c. 2017
6. "Most Haunted S8E6: Preston Manor" — TheTVDB — TheTVDB
7. "Mr Roberts & the Ghost" (book listing) — Brighton & Hove Museums shop — Brighton & Hove Museums shop
8. "My night of ghostbusting" — Peter James (author's official site) — Peter James (author's official site
9. Official website
10. "The House of Ghosts: comparing Preston Manor with Borley Rectory" — Brighton & Hove Museums (Paula Wrightson, c. 2019) — Brighton & Hove Museums (Paula Wrightson, c. 2019
11. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.