Warleggan

The remote location of this hamlet, up a steep wooded lane, has led to its long associations with the supernatural and it has long been acknowledged as a haunt of the Cornish ‘piskies’. However, Warleggan’s most eccentric inhabitant was the Reverend Frederick Densham who was the parish priest from 1931 to 1953. Disliked by his parishioners he built a high wall round the rectory and withdrew from the world. He even painted the church and rectory in garish colours, but was ordered to remove the paint by the Bishop of Truro. As no villagers would go to his church he preached to an empty church and filled it with cardboard cutouts for a congregation; one record in the parish registry of the time reads, ‘No fog. No wind. No rain. No congregation’. It does appear that the rector did have a kinder nature, however, as he constructed a children’s playground in the rectory garden. After his death people began returning to the church. It is said his ghost still haunts the village.