The Man in the Straw Boater Hat

Another ghost, this time a friendly one, is said to walk across the bridge towards the town, often in daylight and occasionally at night. In the late 1930s a former Council Clerk was researching into the history of Richmond and came across several stories which reported sightings of a man dressed in "old-fashioned clothes" walking across the bridge, but he was unable to find out any further details about the man. Later, in the 1940s and also 1950s tourists visiting the town and inspecting the Court House asked him the same question - who was the man in the fancy dress outfit they had seen on the bridge? They hadn't seen him come or go, but they all noticed his unusual old-fashioned clothes.

A former resident of Gunning Street told a magazine writer in the 1950s of her daughter's encounter in the 1930s with the ghost of an old man near the bridge. Apparently he was dressed in a dark grey suit and wore a straw boater hat and carried a walking stick. From her daughter's description she identified him as a local resident who had died some years previously and was unknown to the girl. Other sightings of this man say that sometimes he did not have his straw hat - and even that occasionally he did not have his head!