Haunting of Nocton Hall

Nocton Hall Today, Photographer: L-Plate Big Cheese

Nocton Hall itself was believed to be haunted by one particular sobbing ghost, before it was burnt down. The ghost of a young girl was said to roam the halls and particularly enjoy haunting one bedroom within the building. Several staff who stayed in the room were awakened on separate occasions at exactly four thirty in the morning to find a young girl standing at the end of the bed. She was sobbing and speaking incoherently about a ‘devilish man’ who had ‘done this to her’. It is believed that this was the ghost of a young servant girl who lived in the house and was tragically murdered by the owner’s son after he had his way with her but then found out that she had become pregnant. This was obviously an inconvenience to the young master so he disposed of her.

A ‘Grey Lady’ has also been known to roam the halls of the old building.

The RAF hospital on the grounds is said to be haunted by various patients of the place, however, since the hospital was little used this is debatable since not many people died at all in the location and the dilapidated, spooky atmosphere of the place probably adds to modern tales of the supernatural.

History of Nocton Hall

Standing in the grounds of the remains of a beautiful listed building, RAF Nocton Hall is a deserted RAF hospital.

The hospital was originally built in 1940 but hadn’t even been used when it was decided that it was too small to be an RAF hospital and another hospital was built in a different location in the county.

In 1945, (the end of the war,) Nocton Hall hospital was chosen to be the RAF general hospital for Lincolnshire and several new buildings were erected on the site in 1946, with the hospital officially opening in 1947.

By 1966 the hospital had most of the facilities needed for a normal hospital due to the fact that buildings such as a maternity ward, operating theatres and a neuro-psychiatric ward had been built and opened as well as a few others.       In 1983 the 740 bed hospital was closed, only to be leased to the US armed forces in 1984 to be a US Air Force wartime contingency hospital, which was used during the Gulf War but only 35 casualties were treated there during this war.

The site was officially closed in 1994 and has stood empty since 1995…

Personal Experience

I decided to take a trip to Nocton Hall with some friends for a look around in daylight; however on the drive we managed to get lost and soon night had fallen. Having found the hall in the dark we thought we’d come too far to leave now so we decided to go ahead and look around anyway.

Thankfully we’d brought some torches with us but the eerie feeling as we wandered through pitch black forest toward the hospital was suffocating.

Eventually we reached the hospital and, sticking close together, began to explore the site. What I found most creepy about the place, was the sheer size of it, as well as the fact that it had so obviously been in everyday use. Road markings and parking spaces were visible in the darkness and the whole place seemed much more real than many abandoned buildings because of this.

We stumbled through the gloom into the first building on site and weren’t surprised to see that lots of people had been here before us. Other than rubbish from other explorers most of the buildings were empty but still in relatively good condition.

Despite the positively scary atmosphere of the place at night, little happened to convince me that it was haunted. Except… Moving a very well jammed door to open it into what I assume was a private patient’s room, one friend and I went in. There was a large hole where the door used to contain glass so we knew our other friends weren’t around that area, but as we turned our backs to look around the room, the previously stiff door creaked shut behind us..

Whether it was just the wind, the door protesting after years of disuse or a manifestation of the paranormal, I’m not sure, but it was certainly enough to get us out of the place pretty quickly!