Bowden House stands just outside Totnes in the parish of Ashprington, a building with layers of history written into its very walls. A manor has existed here since at least the medieval period. In the early 1500s John Gyles built a grand Tudor house on the site, complete with carved chimneypieces and panelled interiors. A century later, in 1704, Nicholas Trist purchased Bowden and transformed it, refacing the Tudor core in the elegant Queen Anne style that still dominates its south and east fronts. By the 1800s the Adams family (not the spooky one!) had taken over, leaving their own mark on the fabric of the house. Today, the Grade I listed property is home to the Bowden House Community, an intentional eco-community that has lived there since 2005.
That’s the official history... but there’s another side to Bowden’s story, one that’s almost been lost.
So, I was working on my Conversations About Ghosts project, when a story led me to research a location close to the house. This started a stirring... I had this nagging feeling - this buried memory. I was SURE the house ran ghost tours back in the 1990s! Proper guided walks, with glossy little leaflets stacked on tourist stands alongside Paignton Zoo and Crealy Adventure Park. I could see the leaflets in my head, remember the talk of hauntings, but when I searched online there was nothing. Not a word. It started to feel like a false memory, one of those odd tricks where you’re sure something happened, yet everyone else looks at you blankly. It was odd!
I didn't think about it again, then, but just recently, I was writing up some history and background for the book and, since I had a free afternoon, I decided to give it a deep dive. At first, much of the same... that being, nothing at all. Then, at last, I stumbled across a post on an obscure Fortean forum where someone described the very tours I remembered. Right down to the details. The relief of knowing I hadn’t dreamt it was immense. Even better, I eventually unearthed newspaper clippings from the early 90s confirming the tours had been real.
According to those old reports, visitors claimed to have seen ghostly monks chanting in the dead of night, Elizabethan figures drifting through the halls, and the famous “girl in blue” on the staircase. Others spoke of invisible dogs brushing past their legs, cold hands tugging at their clothes, and even a disembodied arm floating across the lounge. Guides in Georgian costume led groups room by room, keeping a sightings book of every chilling account.
Proof at last. I knew it.
What strikes me now is how little trace remains. For a while Bowden was painted as one of the most haunted houses in Devon, with stories of dozens of different ghosts drifting through its corridors. Now there is almost nothing. Apart from those buried newspaper articles and that single forum thread, it’s as though the ghost tours never happened. Maybe they ended when the house became a community in 2005, or maybe they were just a short-lived 90s curiosity that faded quietly into memory.
Hauntings often flare up in the public imagination and then fade away again like this though. In the 1930s, for example, Borley Rectory (in Essex) was everywhere in the newspapers, branded the “most haunted house in England.” but but after a fire and years of scepticism it faded into obscurity. Whilst those of us who are interested int he topic still know the name, there are no recent stories. In the 1970s and 80s Chingle Hall (Lancashire) was drawing crowds for its ghost tours until the doors shut and the stories fell quiet. Even Pluckley in Kent, once promoted as the “most haunted village in England,” has slipped into relative obscurity after years of ghostly fame. Bowden House seems to follow the same pattern. For a short time it was a place of leaflets and late-night whispers, before vanishing almost completely from memory. Its haunting, like so many others, was not just about ghosts but about the way we remember and forget them.