Bodmin Moor is a roughly 80-square-mile expanse of granite upland in central Cornwall, dotted with Bronze Age stone circles, abandoned tin and copper workings, and the county’s highest ground at Brown Willy and Rough Tor. It has been continuously inhabited and worked since at least the Neolithic, and its granite tors, clitter fields and boggy river valleys give it a reputation as one of the most atmospheric — and easiest to get lost on — landscapes in England.

Unlike a single haunted building, the Moor carries a whole landscape’s worth of separate legends. Near Minions on its eastern edge stand the Hurlers, three Bronze Age stone circles that local folklore insists are men turned to stone by St Cleer for playing the Celtic game of hurling on the Sabbath — with the nearby Pipers said to be the two musicians who provided the tune, similarly petrified. Excavations in the 1930s dated the circles to around 1500 BC, long before the moralising folk tale that later grew up to explain them.

At Dozmary Pool, the Moor’s only natural lake and a traditional contender for the spot where the Lady of the Lake received — or reclaimed — King Arthur’s sword Excalibur, the folklore turns considerably darker. Local legend holds that Jan Tregeagle, a real 17th-century magistrate and land steward remembered as corrupt, cruel and possibly in league with the Devil, was set an impossible eternal task after his death: baling out the “bottomless” pool using nothing but a limpet shell with a hole in it. When storms roll in across the Moor, Tregeagle is said to break off from his task and flee howling across the open ground, chased by the Devil’s hounds — an old Wild Hunt motif transplanted onto a very specific, nameable Cornish villain.

The Moor’s most human tragedy is the 1844 murder of 18-year-old Charlotte Dymond, a servant girl killed near Rough Tor by her lover Matthew Weeks, who was hanged for the crime outside Bodmin Gaol later that year. A granite memorial still marks the murder site, and for close to two centuries locals have reported her ghost walking the slopes of Rough Tor in her green-striped dress and red shawl, seen most often around the anniversary of her death each April.

Layered on top of the folklore and the murder is the Moor’s most famous modern mystery: the Beast of Bodmin Moor, a large black panther-like cat first reported by farmers in 1983 alongside unexplained livestock mutilations, though sightings are recorded as far back as 1978. Reports peaked in the late 1980s and 1990s — roughly 60 sightings between 1983 and 1996, and nearly 200 more between 2000 and 2011 — prompting a 1995 government investigation that found no verifiable evidence of a big cat, but also no evidence disproving one. Elsewhere on the Moor, walkers and drivers have long reported phantom riders in tricorn hats galloping past before vanishing into mist, and unexplained thumps from abandoned mine workings — one shaft near Minions was nicknamed the “Roaring Shaft” for its unexplained bangs and groans.

Being upfront about the evidence: none of this — the Beast, Tregeagle, the phantom riders — has ever produced anything more concrete than the 1995 government report’s shrug and a scattering of blurry photographs. What the Moor undeniably offers is a genuinely disorientating landscape of granite, bog and mist, layered with centuries of consistently repeated folklore, an extensively documented Victorian murder, and one of the few British hauntings ever formally investigated by central government. Our guide to how ghost hunting evidence gets evaluated is a useful read alongside a story this tangled.

Whether it’s Tregeagle’s howl carried on the wind, a big cat that shouldn’t exist, or a heartbroken servant girl still walking Rough Tor every April, Bodmin Moor earns its reputation the same way the rest of Cornwall’s wilder places do — by being genuinely strange to stand in, long before anyone tells you why.