Lower Bailey Pit, an unlikely name for a house, used to be the most haunted house in Monmouth. The Pit is, in fact, a reference to the swampy woodland where the old farmhouse was situated. Although the name was appropriate to the dank area it seems that it is more likely derived from the Welsh 'Cad y put' - the Pit of the Battle. In the late 1960s the farmhouse lay deserted, crumbling gently in the dampness of its setting. Even before it had been abandoned it had its ghosts - a man with a wooden leg stomped around the upper floors, yet no one ever saw him. Terrible screams occasionally came from the cellar: a maid had once been murdered on the steps down to it. About eighty years ago the lonely property was bought by a colonel who lived there with his daughter; she avoided contact with strangers because of a hideously disfigured face which had been badly scarred by an accident with an oil-lamp.

Thus after twenty or thirty years without occupation the big old house had come to have a thoroughly nasty atmosphere: it was a place to visit with bravado after a session in the pub. Thus three young archaeologists, with their wives or girlfriends, came to the building on a dark, drizzly night. After briefly exploring the downstairs of the house (upstairs looked even more forbidding) the party settled down in a large room on the ground floor. The air seemed to turn more and more chill, there were noises from above ... footsteps, perhaps. The girls wanted to leave but were made to feel foolish by the men. But then, without reason, one of them changed his mind: 'Let's go,' he said, 'I don't like the feel of this house at all. 'Picking up torches, matches, cigarettes, they made their way to the door and out into the driveway. But again one of the men did the unexpected. Shining his torch on the third-storey windows he said with almost unnatural emphasis 'If there's anything in this house, it's up there', and without heeding the objections of the others turned back to the derelict house. Another of the men chased after him but was handicapped by the lady of a light and only caught him up in the hallway. 'Hang on,; he said, 'wait for the others.' But his companion, David, was already on his way upstairs: 'It's my father,' he said in a strange, emotion-laden voice, and continued climbing the stairs. By this time two more male members of the group were on the first-floor landing while the last one had just entered the house. It was his panic-stricken voice that caused them to pause: 'It's coming after me,' he shouted, 'shine a torch at it.' He scrambled up the dusty, mouldering stairs as fast as he could; none of the others could see the object that had so frightened him, yet the dust was moving on the stairs, the wooden treads bending under an invisible weight, and the sound of heavy footsteps approached ... The party fled up the final flight to find David in a state of hysteria, transfixed by something that only his gaze could see. The feeling of evil was an ever-increasing presence in the room, threatening all of them. Then someone was inspired: 'Let's sing, come on.' The voices were hoarse yet shrill as they started on Bread of Heaven but slowly they grew in confidence and the evil ebbed out of the room. David always maintained that it was his father that he had seen at the farmhouse even though he had been a baby when his father had died. A few years later the farmhouse was destroyed by fire and the site bought by a London property company. They put up the present building on the site, but not before there had been endless trouble in building a floor over the cellar, the scene of murder so many years before.