If there is one thing everybody knows about Datchet it is the story of the hand-print which is said to appear on a window in the Royal Stag. As the pub has recently re-opened under new management, this seems to be a good time to look at the story's background and the evidence for the phenomenon.

In discussing apparently paranormal events, some people will dismiss them outright while others positively want to believe any manifestion of the supernatural. The present author's opinion is somewhere between the two; I have no personal experience of hauntings but I do not reject the possibility and I am aware that many extremely rational people have seen and heard things which are apparently inexplicable by any normal means. However, I am more inclined to be sceptical than gullible because being an historian leads me to question all evidence before accepting it.

The first published account that I have found is in the local Express newspaper of 1975. It concerns the quite genuinely terrifying experience of a young barman, Tim Cumming, who heard footsteps late at night, felt freezing cold and was being forced face down in bed. The article also tells how Bill O'Donahue, who also lived there, had several times seen in his bedroom the misty figure of an old man wearing old-fashioned knee breeches and silk hose. The figure had long hair, but always kept his face turned away. (Curiously, a figure described in the same way has been seen and caused alarm in a very level-headed young woman staying at Manor Green Cottage a few years ago.) The paper went on to say:

It would be very interesting to know when the hand print was first seen as this article implies it was before the 1970s, although I have not been able to find any written account earlier than 1975. In 1979 the same newspaper printed an account of the hand print being photographed by Richard Smith and Brian Heard, the photograph which is still displayed in the pub. Brian Heard is reported to have said that he remembered being there when the glass was changed about nine years ago, ie about 1970 again. Recently this Richard Smith, who now lives in Plymouth, contacted me through the village website with various memories of Datchet so I asked him about the window and its story. He became extremely evasive and refused any further contact with anybody involved with www.datchet.com , which led to my suspicion that the story may have been enhanced around that time, whether deliberately or not.

Even more worrying, from an historian's point of view, was Richard's 1979 newsaper statement that:

When I asked Richard where this information was to be found he retracted the suggestion that he had archive sources for it, saying that he had been reported inaccurately, but that the story was already current in the village. The problem is that there is no such evidence in the County Record Offices; a burial registration would not recount such details although an inquest might do. I am still hoping that I might discover the source, but Richard Smith's recent reaction leads me to suspect it does not exist. Also, it is not mentioned in any of the three previous histories of the village, the earliest dating from 1886. If anyone reading this remembers a pre-1970s version of the story I shall be very interested to hear from them.

It is this claiming of evidence for a paranormal phenomenon which I find most difficult to accept. It certainly seems that many people have seen what they genuinely believe to be a handprint on the window, and I would not want to persuade them otherwise; I might see it myself some day. Neither can the strange phenomena which scare people at night be discounted, but no explanations have been attempted for these events. They are accepted as hauntings of a familiar type and are very convincing, even to a natural sceptic.

One other 'mystery' concerns the broken tombstone of William Herbert, decorated with a skull and crossbones, which was found in the cellar in the 1970s and is now usually kept propped up in the bar. There really is nothing unusual about this at all. The church and the Royal Stag are very closely adjacent, and the boundaries between the two have shifted as the church and churchyard have been enlarged, so that it is not surprising that a gravestone should be broken and discarded on the wrong side. In fact, the 1979 report decribes the floor of the inn as having been paved with old gravestones placed face down. In 1992 another local Express article took this further. Graham Wyley 'Britain's top ghost-buster' was said to have investigated the hauntings at the Royal Stag and said:

I have looked into the story of William Herbert and have found that he had a very troubled life; his spirit may therefore be angry and still be roaming the earth.

I'm afraid my only response to this claim is 'nonsense'. Firstly, there is nothing macabre about the skull and crossbones design, as there are plenty of other typical examples from the 1700s a few yards away in the churchyard. The life of William Herbert can be traced, as the barest outline, in parish records. He came from a prosperous local farming family and in his will of 1705 he describes himself as a maltster, so he may have supplied ale to the Five Bells, as it was then called, and his son John was a trustee of the Barker Bridge House Trust which still owns the pub. While there is absolutely no evidence at all of a 'troubled life', his family does seem to have been connected with the business; perhaps the bar is the most appropriate resting place for his tombstone.

I apologise if I seem to be something of a wet blanket in playing down the evidence for the pub's haunted reputation, but my reservations only concern the interpretation and elaboration of the stories by those who claim to have found non-existent proofs. Ghosts by their very nature (if you acknowledge their existence) are not to be explained or rationalised, and if any house in the village could be the haunt of ghosts, it is likely to be the Royal Stag as it is the oldest domestic building in Datchet, dating from the 1400s. My other response to the whole affair is that it is fascinating to see local folklore in action, embroidering the hand print story a bit more every time it is told; apparently the child at the window is now said to have watched its father die in a pub fight.