WARLEGGAN RECTORY

The Reverend Frederick Densham was the incumbent at Warleggan from 1931 until his death in 1953, and the story of his life is one of a man who, at the very least, was certainly eccentric. As soon as he arrived the parishioners found him very strange and treated him with a great deal of mistrust. He very quickly established himself as an "odd un" when he painted the rectory and the church in glaring colours, and it is recorded that the Bishop of Truro made him remove all the paint at the cost of £25, which Rev Densham had to pay. Fewer and fewer people turned up for his services, so to fill the empty spaces in his church he cut out cardboard figures and propped them in the pews so that he could still preach to a full congregation. In 1933, the Bishop of Truro was forced to order an inquiry into complaints made by the parishioners, who were getting more and more concerned at the decreasing number of people attending the church, and felt that the only way to stop the church becoming completely empty was to remove the vicar. The parishioners complained bitterly that the vicar had closed the Sunday School and that he had refused to hold services at times convenient to themselves. He had put up a barbed-wire fence around the rectory gardens, had threatened to sell the organ, which was a memorial to the Fallen of the First World War, and that he had misappropriated church property for his own use. The Bishop listened to the Rev Densham's explanations and found that he had no reason to remove him from his post. With that, the Church Council resigned in a body and the whole congregation refused to enter the church again. This did not deter the Rev Densham, who merely cut out more cardboard figures and placed them in the remaining empty pews; the local congregation switching their allegiance to the Methodist Chapel. In 1953, many years after he had preached to his last "live" congregation, Rev Densham's body was found in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairs at the rectory. There was a dreadful expression of horror on his dead face. Despite his wish to be buried in the "Garden of Remembrance" he had created within the rectory grounds, his body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the public garden of remembrance in Plymouth.Could the thwarting of his wish to be buried here be the reason why the ghost of the Rev Frederick Densham, the last incumbent at Warleggan, has been seen walking through the grounds of The Old Rectory, along the main pathway from the house to the church, and in the house itself?