The bottom doorway into the staircase was bricked up about 30 years ago to stop people climbing up the tower. The lower part of the stair well is now just filled with rubble. The stairs were checked by the surveyor recently and are very unsafe. There are also owls nesting up there. The rope was removed. Please do not try to climb up the tower. Sooner or later someone will fall and then there really will be a ghost in the church!

Meanwhile there is now CCTV at the church with police monitoring. Plans are in progress to rebuild and restore the church.

The church was not actually abandoned in 1848. It was simply too small for the village and agreement could not be found on enlarging it, so a new church was built. The old church continued in use as a mortuary chapel until the 1960s when the lead was stolen from the roof and the parish, lacking funds to repair it, abandoned it to become a ruin.

DNA tests subsequently made in the Hanratty case have proved beyond doubt that Hanraty was guilty of the murder. Moves for a posthumous acquital have now stopped.

Sorry to spoil the fun but most of the stories about Clophill church are wrong. The myths that it is wrongly orientated, built on the site of a leper colony run by monks or that villagers were left to die there during the black death were all started in the late 1960s as a practical joke by students at a local college.

Other practical jokers have added to this in recent years by spreading the stories and using hidden projectors to frighten people. There have been no actual authenticated ghost sightings and paranormal investigations have found no evidence of temperature changes or other phenomena.

The orientation is easy to prove by looking at the church on a map: it faces due East as it should by tradition, though there is no church law on the orientation of holy buildings and churches can be found facing all directions.