Her memorial at Dorchester Abbey Church (pictured above) is dated 7 June 1799, and describes her thus:

"The remains of a young lady whose artless beauty, innocence of mind and gentle manner once obtained her the love and esteem of all who knew her. But when nerves were too delicately spun to bear the rude shakes and jostlings which we meet within this transitory world, she sunk and died, a martyr to excessive sensibility."

Mike White points out that it is highly unusual for a suicide to be buried on consecrated ground, let alone memorialised so prominently in an abbey church. A special case was made for Sarah after the jury at the inquest returned a verdict of 'lunacy', which absolved Sarah of responsibility for her actions.

Many years after Sarah's death, Courtiers was converted into a boarding school and it is during its time as a school that Sarah's ghost began to make her presence known. This began with the classic symptoms of a haunting such as the sound of footsteps, doors and windows opening and closing on their own and unexplainable cold spots. One teacher reported that the sound of footsteps was accompanied by a strange mist.

None of these, however, prepared 17-year-old Edward Crake for his experience one night when he was awoken by the sounds of footsteps approaching his bedroom. To his surprise, a woman entered and stood at the end of his bed for a moment with a tearful expression on her face before suddenly vanishing. He described her as young and extremely beautiful, with a black silken cloak and purple-red ribbons tied in her curly auburn hair.

The encounter with Sarah's ghost had a profound effect on young Edward, in fact he claimed to have fallen in love! He met her one final time on 7 June 1864, the anniversary of her death. This time Sarah's ghost appeared to smile sadly at him before drifting into another room and disappearing. After this time, the trouble with mysterious footsteps and unexplained sounds grew less frequent and eventually stopped entirely, leading some to speculate that young Edward's love has been enough to soothe Sarah's troubled spirit.

However, the house did not remain quiet. Over a decade later the haunting began again, with the mysterious footsteps returning to spook the staff and pupils once again. Edward had left school and gone into the priesthood by this point, but this happily qualified him to return and attempt to lay Sarah's ghost.

I've not been able to find out what methods Edward Crake employed in his attempt to banish the ghost of Sarah Fletcher. But whatever he tried, it was a dismal failure, and in fact may have exacerbated the situation as Sarah's supernatural manifestations seem to have became much worse after this point.

The residents of the school reported being frequently troubled at night be deafening crashes, the rattling of doors, scratching sounds and even the sound of a body being dragged up the stairs.

However, it was not Sarah's ghost but an outbreak of fever in the village that ultimately caused the school at Courtiers to be closed. After standing empty for some time, the building was eventually split into separate apartments and the supernatural nuisance seems to have abated.

The next reported encounter with Sarah's ghost did not occur until nearly 100 years later, and is, if anything, a little weird!

In 1968, a landscape gardener from Bournemouth claimed to have been repeatedly visited at his bedside by the ghost of a woman. This nocturnal visitor somehow conveyed to him that she was buried at Dorchester, and after unsuccessfully searching Dorchester in Dorset for answers, the man found his way to Dorchester in Oxfordshire where he found Sarah's grave and became convinced that it was she who was visiting him each night.

What a women who died in Clifton Hampden in 1799 was doing bothering landscape gardeners in 1960s Bournemouth is anyone's guess!

More recent sightings of Sarah's ghost have taken place a bit closer to home, in the car park of the Barley Mow inn in Clifton Hampden. When seen, her ghost is described in similar terms to those used by Edward Crake 150 years previously: a young woman in a black cloak with a purple ribbon in her red hair.