Fantasy Short Story • Part of the Rootbound Bride Story Cycle
She found the account at 2am and told herself she’d stop at ten videos. She did not stop at ten videos.
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The Rootbound Bride is a gothic romantic fantasy series set at Aldermere Hall, the great house on the Wiltshire downs that took twelve brides across three hundred years. The novels follow the brides. These short pieces are the folk horror around them: side characters and witnesses, household ephemera, voices from the village and the road that runs past the hill. Each one stands alone. You can begin with any of them.
Three weeks ago a TikTok came up on my For You page. Local history content — English estate, old gate, roses blooming in February. The creator was cheerful and curious and had 40,000 followers and a series about forgotten country houses.
She asked if anyone knew anything about Aldermere Hall.
I made the mistake of clicking on the comments.
I want to be clear about what I mean by mistake. I don’t mean I lost an afternoon — I lost two weeks. I don’t mean I found something disturbing — I found something that I now cannot unfind, that has reorganised the way I think about several things I thought I understood, and that has taken up residence in the part of my mind where I keep things I can’t explain and can’t let go of. I found a thread, and the thread led to a forum, and the forum led to a letter, and the letter led to a woman in the Midlands whose grandmother worked in the kitchen at Aldermere Hall in 1963, and the woman told me something her grandmother said about one of the wives —
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start with the TikTok.
[@LostHousesUK, Feb 14, transcribed from video:]
‘Okay so I’m standing outside Aldermere Hall in the Wiltshire countryside and I genuinely cannot believe how beautiful this is, like the roses? In February? I don’t know if you can see them properly — [camera pans to the wall] — they’re everywhere, the whole north wall is just covered, and it’s February, it’s been below zero this week, I have no idea how this is happening. Anyway. This estate. So I’ve been trying to research it for the channel and I’ve hit a wall — which, maybe ironic given [gestures at the actual wall] — the Wikipedia article is basically just a stub, the county records mention it but not much, and I can’t find a single book about it despite it apparently being one of the more significant estates in this part of the country. Does anyone know anything? Has anyone been here? Leave it in the comments.’
Comments (selected):
@rosewood_reads: omg this is gorgeous
@haunted_uk: it’s giving haunted
@ThomasineBarker: my nan worked in the kitchen there. she never talked about it
@hauntedarchives: @ThomasineBarker what do you mean never talked about it
@ThomasineBarker: just that. she worked there for two years in the sixties and she never talked about it. when i asked she’d change the subject
@ghostroads: @ThomasineBarker what was she like after she left there
@ThomasineBarker: what do you mean
@ghostroads: like. was she different after
@ThomasineBarker: [no reply]
I sat with that thread open for a long time. I went back to it three times the next morning to see if @ThomasineBarker had answered. She hadn’t. I scrolled to the bottom of the comments and then up again, and I tried to find the original commenter’s profile, and the profile was still there but the comment had been deleted. I had screenshotted it the night before. I don’t know why I had. I just had.
That’s how I ended up on Reddit.
r/AbandonedUK — Aldermere Hall, Wiltshire — anyone have records?
Posted by u/parish_records_archivist · 8 days ago
I’m a part-time archivist (genealogy, mostly) and someone forwarded me a TikTok about Aldermere Hall in Wiltshire. I went to look up the estate in the county records as a favour. What I found is unusual enough that I wanted to put it somewhere.
The Sedgewick family has owned Aldermere Hall continuously since at least the early 1700s. There are extensive marriage records — Sedgewick men marrying Hargrove women, generation after generation, going back further than my access lets me check. I counted at least eleven Sedgewick-Hargrove marriages between 1700 and 1990.
Here is what I cannot find: a single death record, will, or churchyard entry for any of the wives. Not one. I checked Salisbury, Devizes, and the regional archives at Trowbridge. The men are buried at St. Cuthbert-under-Hill in the village. The women are not. They are not buried anywhere I can locate.
This is not normal. Parish records for that part of Wiltshire are well-kept. Death records are not the kind of thing that just go missing for eleven women across three centuries. I would expect at least one survival.
Has anyone here come across anything similar? I’m wondering if the records were deliberately removed at some point.
Top reply — u/skeptical_pints · 8d
Honestly probably just poor record survival. Old parish records are messier than people think.Reply — u/parish_records_archivist · 8d
With respect, no. I’ve worked on a dozen Wiltshire parishes. St. Cuthbert’s is unusually complete. The Sedgewick male burials are all there. The pattern is one-sided.
Reply — u/[deleted] · 7d
[removed by moderator]
Reply — u/quiet_corners · 7d
My great-aunt grew up in a village near Aldermere. She wouldn’t talk about the hall directly but she once said something I’ve never forgotten. She said: ‘You don’t bury what doesn’t come back.’ I was a child. I didn’t know what she meant. I have wondered about it for thirty years.
Reply — u/[deleted] · 7d
[removed by moderator]
MOD NOTE — u/r_AbandonedUK_mod · 6d
This thread is being moved to r/UnresolvedMysteries. Please continue discussion there.
I read that thread eight times. I bookmarked it. When I went back the next afternoon, the thread had been moved as the mod said it would be, and the new version on r/UnresolvedMysteries had three of the comments replaced with [removed], including u/quiet_corners’ great-aunt story. The original was still in my browser history. I have a screenshot of that one too.
Here is the next piece I found.
[Excerpt from THE OLD ROAD, a Substack newsletter on English folklore, posted three months ago. Author: a folklorist whose newsletter I will not name here, because the post in question has since been deleted and I do not want to draw further attention to her, as a courtesy.]
One reader wrote to ask about the Aldermere estate in Wiltshire, which apparently has a local reputation for absorbing its brides — her phrase, not mine. I’ve spent the afternoon looking into it. I cannot find a pre-existing folk tradition. There is no entry in Briggs, no entry in Westwood, nothing in the Folklore Society’s archives that I can locate. Which either means the tradition was never written down, or it is very new, or the thing that inspired it is not old enough to have developed a proper folkloric tradition yet. Any of these possibilities interests me. I would be grateful for further reader correspondence.
I emailed her. The newsletter post had been live for ninety days when I found it. By the time I checked again the following Tuesday, it was gone. There was no announcement, no replacement post, no goodbye. I have her email address from the contact page of her newsletter. I have written to her three times. She has not replied.
I went back to @ThomasineBarker’s profile on TikTok. Her account had been set to private.
I sent her a polite DM through her now-private account, explaining who I was and that I was researching the estate respectfully. I did not expect a response.
I got one — from her cousin, whose grandmother was the same grandmother, who had told her something different.
[Email, transcribed with permission. Sender’s name and identifying details redacted at her request.]
Hi —
My cousin Thomasine forwarded your message. She’s not going to write back, she’s said as much; she wishes she’d never put that comment up in the first place and she’s been getting weird messages ever since. I’m writing because I have something I think you should know and I’d rather it goes somewhere than nowhere.
My gran did work at Aldermere Hall. She started in 1963 and she left in 1965 and she never went back. Thomasine is right that she didn’t talk about it but she wasn’t completely silent — she said things sometimes, when she was older, that I think she only said because she’d forgotten she’d promised herself not to. She lived with us for the last six years of her life and I helped her in the kitchen and we talked about a lot of things in a kitchen, the way you do.
She told me about a woman called Iris.
Iris had arrived at the Hall in the autumn of 1963, the autumn my gran had started, and was gone by the March of the following year. My gran had only seen her three or four times — Iris hadn’t come down to the kitchen, naturally, but she’d passed through the corridor near the back stairs once or twice in a way that didn’t seem accidental, like she’d been looking for somebody to look at her. My gran said she had been quiet and kind and very young and very tired, and one of the times my gran had been bringing tea up the stairs and Iris had been on the landing, and Iris had stopped, and they had looked at each other, and Iris had smiled.
My gran said: she had the kind of smile that means someone has stopped being afraid of the thing they’re afraid of. I didn’t know what that meant until I saw that TikTok and I’ve been thinking about it since.
I don’t know what happened to Iris. My gran didn’t know either. She knew Iris was gone in March because the housekeeper had told her not to lay a tray for her any more. There wasn’t a leaving. There wasn’t a goodbye. The tray just stopped.
I don’t want my name attached to this. But if you write something about that house I want this in it. My gran wanted somebody to know.
—
🌹 These stories are the folk horror around The Rootbound Bride — the gothic romantic fantasy trilogy set at Aldermere Hall.
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