The haunting at St. Peter’s Church at Stapley turns Gerry Fenn’s search of an old parish chest into an encounter with a hooded apparition, while Nancy Shelbeck’s separate experience confirms that he is not the only person to see it. The episode joins a present-day assault to the church’s concealed history: papers transferred from St. Joseph’s Church in Banfield preserve Thomas Woolgar’s account of Einor, whose death and curse bind the apparition to an earlier religious scandal and violence.

The Search at St. Peter’s

Fenn arrives at the estate in heavy rain, passing through its tall iron gates without meeting anyone on duty. He expects the grounds to be closed out of season and drives past a sign limiting traffic to ten miles per hour. The weather and the unfamiliar estate frame his visit as an intrusion into a place that is both physically remote and burdened by an older history. At St. Peter’s Church, he searches the chest for records, working among books, loose papers, Latin Mass books, and vestments.

The records he finds are not all from the period he seeks. Three small, stiff-vellum books are dated 1556 and the two consecutive years after it. Their Latin handwriting is precise but faded. Loose leaves fall from the third book; their writing is less orderly, and Fenn finds a date among the scattered pages. He places the leaves back with the book and packs the three volumes into his holdall. The storm intensifies, the church door rattles, and the effort to finish searching gives way to an urgent desire to leave. The chest is thus more than the object of an antiquarian investigation: it carries evidence that the church’s present danger and its past may be connected.

Two Encounters with the Figure

The narrative also presents Nancy’s experience inside the church. Standing at a pew doorway, she tries to speak to a seated nun, but the figure does not respond. Nancy feels an inexplicable, overwhelming dread and finds that she cannot make her body retreat. Only when the figure slowly turns does it address her. The scene leaves the figure’s identity and purpose uncertain; its stillness and Nancy’s involuntary paralysis establish menace before the apparition is fully described.

Fenn encounters a similar figure as he backs away from the church entrance. A dark, hooded shape sits in a segregated side room beside an empty fireplace, then begins to rise and turn toward him. The church door bursts open in the storm, and Fenn is thrown down by the force of the wind. He senses the figure approaching, but it remains beyond his reach. The attack nonetheless seems to affect him physically: he experiences pain and discovers raised marks on his skin. As he struggles along the aisle toward the exit, the wind and the unseen presence combine to make escape seem increasingly difficult.

Fenn eventually breaks through the doorway and falls outside with the holdall. From the path he sees a person running beyond the perimeter fence and recognizes Nancy. He follows her through the wet undergrowth, loses his footing on a slope, and reaches a valley where an old, partly open barn stands. Nancy is crouched behind a pile of wood, sobbing and frightened. When he identifies himself, she initially recoils from him; he kneels beside her and gently draws her into his arms. Their reunion establishes that both have been shaken by the church, though the encounter has left them in different states of distress.

Nancy’s Account and the Chronicle

Later, Nancy describes her encounter to Sue. She explains that she and Fenn searched separately and that she believed she had found the right chest. After sensing someone else in the church, she went toward the altar and saw a figure seated in an enclosed pew-like alcove. At first it looked like a nun in an old hooded habit. When it turned, Nancy saw a burned, severely altered face; the figure rose, approached, touched her, and tried to keep her there. Her account supplies the detail Fenn could not confirm while fleeing: the apparition appears to be not merely a shadow in the storm but a dead or burned religious woman.

The papers in the chest deepen that identification without making the haunting a simple, independently verified history. Fenn reads Thomas Woolgar’s chronicle, dated to 1560, in which Thomas describes the dead Einor pursuing him and recounts his own guilt. He writes that Einor had been admired for helping the sick, while secretly keeping valuable gifts in the crypt of St. Joseph’s Church. He also admits that he was involved in the deaths of three children and records how he denounced her as a witch after suspicion fell on them. The chronicle describes the villagers’ attack and Einor’s execution, during which she cursed those present. These claims come from Thomas’s own distressed account: he repeatedly acknowledges that others considered him mad and that his father and the Church attributed his visions to a poisoned mind.

The chest’s later history makes the document’s survival part of the mystery. Thomas says that his father arranged for him to serve at St. Peter’s after his removal from St. Joseph’s, and that the church chest was transferred with him. He believed his father searched its contents for evidence that could shame the Woolgar family, but says that his account of Einor was hidden for future discovery. When Fenn finds the chronicle among the papers, the text appears to explain why a nun-like presence might haunt the church, while its uncertainty preserves the possibility that Thomas’s guilt and fear shaped what he recorded.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The haunting links three kinds of evidence without making them identical: Nancy’s direct account, Fenn’s experience of an assault by an unseen or partly seen presence, and Thomas Woolgar’s retrospective chronicle. The first two establish the apparition’s appearance in the present; the manuscript offers a historical identity and a possible cause. Its disturbing details also complicate any straightforward acceptance of Thomas’s version, since he confesses to complicity while shifting blame toward Einor and repeatedly fears that readers will dismiss him as mad.

The episode changes the chest from a collection of old parish materials into a conduit between St. Peter’s Church and St. Joseph’s Church in Banfield. Fenn’s escape with the documents allows the buried account to enter the investigation, but does not resolve whether Einor’s presence is supernatural or filtered through Thomas’s damaged testimony. The church’s storm-lashed interior makes that uncertainty active: a hidden past is not simply read about, but appears to reach into the present and drive its investigators out.