How’s this for a weird bit of (modern) folklore? (found in Grinsell’s ‘Folklore of Prehistoric Sites in Britain’)
The Manton round barrow was excavated in 1906, and they found an old woman’s skeleton amongst a number of grave goods. For some reason (unspecified) the skeleton was kept in a shed for a number of years. The owner of the shed apparently decided to send one of the skeleton’s fingers away to a friend overseas. He himself had circulatory problems and soon it turned out that he had to have a finger amputated. For some reason he then took it upon himself to replace the skeleton’s finger with his own, and he reburied the whole skeleton back in the barrow*. A ghost was then repeatedly seen looking in at his cottage window for the next few weeks.
(v odd and even sounds quite muddled, as you’d have expected the replacement of the finger to have happened after the ghost appeared. And you’d have thought being stored in a shed would annoy you more than having your finger removed. Dunno. For those interested, Grinsell notes the original sources and you could always look these over.)
*As MJB mentions below – the reburial in the barrow is at least actually true.
May 2025. I have discovered that this story – skeleton uncovered, wailing outside the window, vowing to rebury the skeleton, keeping the little finger, the wailing continuing, the excavator’s finger gets infected and needs to be amputated, they bury the finger in the grave and everything’s great again – it’s a story by Ethel Hampton in the Tatler of 18th February 1931 (“The Bath Road, an eerie story of the Wiltshire Downs”). I don’t think it’s even pretending to be anything other than fiction?