Glasshayes House is a country house in Lyndhurst, at the heart of the New Forest in Hampshire. The building has a connection to one of literature's most famous names — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who redesigned and extended the house in the 1920s. Conan Doyle's involvement is fitting, for the author was a devoted spiritualist who spent the final decade of his life championing communication with the dead. The house he shaped has since acquired its own reputation for the very phenomena he believed in.
Reports of hauntings at Glasshayes span most of the 20th century. During its period as a hotel and later as a private residence, guests and residents described a range of unexplained occurrences. The most frequently reported phenomenon is the apparition of a grey-haired woman in Edwardian dress, seen in the drawing room and on the main staircase. She appears solid and lifelike before dissolving into transparency and vanishing. Some witnesses have speculated she may be connected to Conan Doyle's wife, Jean, who shared his deep interest in spiritualism and reportedly held séances in the house.
Other phenomena include footsteps on the upper floor when no one is present, the sound of a piano playing in an empty music room, and objects displaced overnight in locked rooms. The New Forest itself has a rich tradition of supernatural folklore — from phantom horses to spectral charcoal burners — and Glasshayes sits within this broader landscape of reported hauntings. The irony that the home of Sherlock Holmes' creator — literature's supreme rationalist — should become a haunted house has not been lost on visitors.