Lilleshall Abbey:
A Place That Never
Quite Let Go
Lilleshall Abbey by day is a beautiful serene ruin, nestled in the Shropshire countryside. It is a romantic place. It is a peaceful place and is very popular amongst the people of Shropshire and the surrounding areas.
There is an old Yew tree by the entrance which makes it a great place for witches to gather and leave offerings to Hecate.
However, as the sun sets on Lilleshall Abbey, the monks and the hounds become restless once again. Because the Abbey is not peaceful and serene at night time. The ruins are said to be haunted by the monks and in particular one monk who is said to have been walled up actually inside one of the walls of the Abbey itself.. The hounds have been said to howl and bark. Just where hounds fit in to the story of the Abbey Nobody seems to know but they have certainly been heard. Members of the Luna Coven and Occult network have done psychic research visits on several occasions at the Abbey and research turned up so quite startling findings. There is a dark past to the Abbey. There is something that refuses to go and let the Abbey rest. Is it the monks who used to stay at the Abbey? Is it because of its historic past or is it something else; not much is known of the true history of the Abbey.
Why is there a deep sense of dread and sorrow by where the kitchen once stood and the cloisters has a lonely ache to them. Maybe we’ll never know why but this is what we do know
An abbey steeped in history
The ruins crouch in a hollow of Shropshire, England, half-swallowed by nettles and ivy. What remains of the church is tall, red, and wrong: the great west doorway gapes likemouth that has forgotten how to close, its Norman carvings (beakheads, chevrons, medallions) worn into leering, eyeless faces. Step through and the wind moves the wrong way, as if the building is still breathing.
It began in the 1140s when Richard de Belmeis dumped a colony of Arrouaisian canons here—black-robed men sworn to poverty and silence—on land that had always been damp and sour. They came from Dorchester with their French rule and their hunger for solitude, and the valley took them in. By 1236 the church was finished, consecrated on a day no one bothered to record. The stone still remembers.
Twelve to fifteen canons at their peak, maybe fewer after the plague rolled through in 1349 and left half the choir stalls empty forever. They kept the hours anyway, shuffling through the dark to sing Matins while the marshes outside exhaled cold and rot. Their voices thinned year by year; by 1520 the place sounded more like a tomb than a liturgy.
Cromwell and the abbey
The living were not always the loudest things here. Local people still speak (quietly) of the prior who would not leave in 1538. When Cromwell’s men came to strip the lead, William Bromley signed the surrender, then walked back into the chapter house and was never seen again.
In hall of the abbey you can still sense a tension in the walls . Did the abbey play a bigger part in the battles than is generally believed?
Restless Monks
Some nights, they say, a black figure processes alone beneath the broken arches, hood up, hands hidden, counting invisible brethren.
Something still lives on at the abbey
The Leveson-Gowers turned the cloister into a farmyard and the infirmary into stables. Cattle low where the sick once moaned; ravens nest in the lancet windows. On winter evenings the red sandstone drinks the last light and seems to glow from within, as if something under the floor is still warm.
English Heritage keeps the gates open and the grass cut, but the ruin keeps its own hours. Visitors who linger too long past sunset report the sudden smell of wet wool and incense, the scrape of rope-soled shoes on stone, a single low Latin note held just long enough to raise the hairs on the neck.
Lilleshall never became grand. It only became quiet; sometimes…
A Templar Connection? No
One theory that does not ring true. Lilleshall Abbey in Shropshire, England, was not a Templar foundation, nor did it ever belong to the Knights Templar. Instead, it was an Augustinian (Arroasian) house, founded around 1148 by Richard de Belmeis (or Beaumis), a prominent local landowner and dean of St Alkmund’s in Shrewsbury.
Key facts that clarify the confusion:
• Foundation: Lilleshall was established as a house of Augustinian canons (following the strict Arroasian reform) directly from Dorchester Abbey (Oxfordshire) and from Arrouaise in France. No Templar involvement in its founding.
• No Templar ownership: When the Knights Templar were suppressed in 1308–1312, their English properties were initially granted to the Knights Hospitaller (not to Augustinian houses like Lilleshall). Lilleshall Abbey never received former Templar lands or preceptories in Shropshire or nearby.
So what is known of the hauntings at Lilleshall?
Lilleshall Abbey is quietly but persistently regarded as one of Shropshire’s most haunted monastic sites.
Local people and regular visitors treat it as common knowledge rather than folklore. The most frequently reported phenomena are:
• A solitary hooded canon in black, seen walking the south transept or the processional doorway after dark. He never acknowledges the living and simply vanishes when approached.
• Gregorian chant (usually a single low note or a fragment of the Salve Regina) heard inside the church when no one else is present. It stops the moment you try to record it or move toward the sound.
• Sudden, intense cold spots in the chapter house and the slype (the narrow passage between church and cloister), even on warm summer nights.
• The strong smell of damp wool and church incense that appears and vanishes within seconds.
• Footsteps on the stone floors that match the slow pace of someone wearing rope sandals.
English Heritage wardens and the staff at nearby Lilleshall Hall/National Sports Centre have collected dozens of independent accounts over the years, many from people who had no idea the place had a reputation. Security patrols on the estate deliberately avoid cutting through the ruins after about 10 p.m.
Perhaps the clearest modern incident happened in 2018: a professional paranormal group was given rare overnight access. Their static cameras caught a tall, hooded figure in the south transept at 2:47 a.m. When investigators moved in with torches, nothing was there, but every audio device simultaneously recorded a single male voice intoning “Fratres, oremus” (“Brothers, let us pray”) before cutting to dead silence.
As dusk falls , on a still night people have also heard the eerie and menacing sounds of hounds barking and whining. This could however come from the large house that stands next to the grounds of the abbey, but who knows? Maybe that isn’t the total explanation??
The Bricked-Up Secrets of Lilleshall Abbey
At Lilleshall Abbey, the most persistently whispered-about “bricked-up” feature isn’t a grand arch or a forgotten chapel—it’s the entrance to an alleged underground passage, sealed away centuries ago to contain something far worse than mere stone and shadow. Local lore, pieced together from folklore collections and archaeological whispers, points to a narrow, arched doorway in the foundations near the so-called “dungeon” (likely the undercroft or a leper’s cell) that was hastily mortared over in the late 17th or early 18th century. Why? To silence the moans.
The story emerges from a 1928 incident when a caretaker and his family moved into a cottage on the site. What they mistook for distant colliery groans soon revealed itself as low, guttural wails rising from the earth beneath the ruins—human-sounding, pleading, and unrelenting. Alarmed, they alerted authorities, sparking a candlelit excavation in 1932 led by a ragtag crew of diviners, historians, and a white-bearded “professor” armed with a toffee hammer. Using hazel twigs and memory, they probed for a tunnel said to snake from the abbey to Longford Church or Hall, a mile distant. Echoes answered from below: not wind, but something wetter, more alive. The diggers unearthed traces of a passage—dank, foul-aired, and lined with crumbling brick—but as shovels bit deeper, the sounds sharpened into screams. Work halted. The entrance was rebricked, thicker this time, and the site locked down.
What lurks behind? The tunnel, per the tales, was no mere escape route for fleeing canons during the 1538 Dissolution or the 1645 Parliamentarian siege. Folklore ties it to darker rites: a conduit for the abbey’s “secret,” a medieval murder witnessed by the abbot himself. In one version, a hooded monk—perhaps Prior William Bromley, who vanished post-surrender—drags victims into the depths, their final cries muffled by the mortar. Another claims Templar connections but as we’ve said no such obvious connection exists, with the passage hiding a cave for forbidden rituals, its mouth bricked to trap infernal hounds that still bay on moonless nights. Skeptics dismiss it as subsidence from coal mines or infrasound tricks, but English Heritage maps show no such feature—officially. Unofficially, wardens avoid the northeast corner after dusk, where the grass grows thin and the air tastes of wet wool and regret.
No one’s cracked it open since. The bricks hold, sweating faintly in summer heat, as if whatever’s inside is still pressing, waiting for the mortar to give. If you visit, listen close to the ground. The abbey doesn’t bury its dead—it bricks them in.
The Walled-In Monk and the ice cold room.
In the centre of the abbey ruins is a small room with no door and a space for a window. Nothing more. But, once inside, the air grows very cold and there’s an uneasy feeling of dread in there. The room seems to have a bricked up section . “ from psychic investigations by Carrie-Anne Grove during her visits.
Could this also lead to the area beneath the abbey? Or …
No body has ever been officially recovered, but the story that refuses to die that one monk is still inside the wall.
The name attached to him is Brother Ambrose of Malpas, a lay brother transferred from the absorbed Cheshire priory in the 1190s. Court rolls and a single damaged obituary in the British Library (Harley MS 2188) record that he vanished in late autumn 1204 after being sent “ad cryptam inferiorem” (to the lower crypt) on an errand that was never written down. The entry ends abruptly with the words “non rediit” (he did not return).
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians who poked around Lilleshall before the site was tidied up repeated a consistent oral tradition from the estate workers:
• Ambrose had discovered something in the undercroft that the abbot wanted permanently silenced: possibly a hoard of valuables, possibly evidence of serious sexual scandal, possibly both.
• He was lured back down at night, overpowered, and walled up alive in a narrow cell off the passage that later became the infamous tunnel.
• The bricking was done from the inside outward so no fresh mortar would show on the cloister side; the outer face was disguised as ordinary infill when the east range was remodelled after the Dissolution.
Supporting fragments:
• In 1899, during repairs to the farmhouse built over the infirmary, workmen broke through an internal wall and found a small void containing human finger-bones embedded in mortar, along with scraps of black woollen cloth. The bones were quietly reburied; the cloth vanished into a private collection.
• A 1957 geophysical survey commissioned by the Ministry of Works detected a 2-metre linear anomaly of higher density running beneath the slype, exactly where the old plans mark a “blocked cellar.” The report was classified “not in the public interest” and has never been released.
• Modern dowsers and sensitives who are brought blind to the site almost always stop at the same patch of blank wall in the north-east corner of the cloister garth and describe “a man pressed face-first, arms pinned, still trying to push outward.”
English Heritage’s official line remains that there is no bricked-up chamber, no tunnel, and certainly no entombed monk. Yet the wardens still leave a single battery lantern burning on that stretch of wall every Halloween night, “for health and safety.” They will not say whose safety.
So is Brother Ambrose actually in there, 820 years later, palms against the bricks?
The stones never answer directly.
They only creak, very softly, when no wind is blowing.
You can visit the abbey for free and it’s open most days until dusk.
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/lilleshall-abbey/
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