The account comes from a 1968 recording of a local woman named Eileen Claridge. Mrs Claridge states that she was cycling to Finstock and had reached the stretch of road above Finstock Halt ('Finstock Halt' being the old name for Finstock Railway Station) when she saw a "huge nanny-goat dragging a chain".

Mrs Claridge says she cycled fast to try and catch the nanny-goat, but was presumably unable to do so. She shortly afterwards met her boyfriend, who claimed not to have seen the nanny-goat, although Mrs Claridge herself saw it "disappear" down the old coach road.

Mrs Claridge rounds off this brief account by saying she never found out the meaning of what she saw, but that she later learned that a woman from Stonesfield had seen the exact same thing the previous Sunday.

Mrs Claridge's account is a little confused. For example, she states she "cycled fast to catch the nanny-goat" but doesn't explain whether she managed to catch it or not. She was presumably got close enough to it to tell that the goat was female rather than male as she refers to it as a "nanny-goat" throughout.

It's also not clear whether the nanny-goat was still in sight when she met her boyfriend, and thus whether we are supposed to read something supernatural into the fact that he said he couldn't see the nanny-goat.

It would be easy to explain away the nanny-goat as merely an escaped farm animal, but Mrs Claridge clearly believed otherwise. She begins by describing the encounter as "my own experience of a ghost", and follows it by mentioning some other local ghosts.

Although Mrs Claridge's account is brief and inconclusive, it stood out to me as a rather unique example. While ghostly horses and black dogs are fairly common in local folklore, this is the only example I'm aware of concerning a phantom goat!

This is in spite of the fact that goats superstitions around goats have existed for thousands of years. With their horns and cloven hooves, goats are associated with pre-Christian paganism and the god Pan. In the bible, goats appear as the bearer of the sins of others, outcasts with no hope of spiritual redemption. In the medieval period, it was believed that the Devil presided over witches sabbats in the form of a goat.

This story resonated with me because I had my own rather unnerving encounter with a goat not far from Finstock. On an overcast afternoon at some point in the early 00's, I was walking across a field near Wilcote when I found myself being stared down by a particularly large and intimidating black billy-goat, thankfully on the other side of a barbed wire fence.

What I found most unnerving at the time, apart from its size and steely gaze, was the fact that the goat had not two but four horns, giving it a particularly satanic appearance! I've since learned that four-horned goats are a rare but not unheard of genetic abnormality, but at the time it quite put the wind up me and I was relieved to get across the field and back to my car!