Watton
Priory in West Yorkshire is built mainly in Tudor style but there is also
ruins of an eighth century nunnery and monastery on the site. It is haunted
by two ghosts, both of them women grieving over their lost children.
The
first ghostly lady came to a bloody end after Cromwell and his soldiers
raided her home and found her and her child hiding in a cupboard. When she
refused to tell them where her treasures were, they took her child and beat
it to death and then cut its head off. The room where these brutal murders
took place is reputedly haunted by her headless ghost. She is seen wearing
blood-soaked clothes and holding her dead child in her arms.
The
second ghost to haunt the old priory is that of a nun. Legend has it that in
the twelfth century, a child was placed in the nunnery and as she grew up
she turned into a beautiful woman. As the nunnery was next to a monastery,
it was not long before the young nun fell in love with a monk. They met
secretly every night until the nuns eventually found out about their affair
and called her to them. The now pregnant young woman confessed to the nuns
and they attacked her, stripped her and locked her in a dungeon, with her
feet and hands bound by chains. Meanwhile, the young monk was brought to
them and was brutally attacked in front of the pregnant nun. A few days
later the baby was born and the nuns took it away and left its mother to
die.
The
tragic nun is now believed to haunt the fields and the grounds near the old
Priory looking for her new born child.