Spine-chilling stories of restless spirits in the afterlife are to be found in a veritable "who's who" of Devon phantoms from Torquay author Mike Holgate.

I was surprised to find the county has such a range of high-profile celebrity ghosts including royal personages Richard the Lionheart, William of Orange and the Duke of Monmouth, high-ranking ecclesiastics St Thomas Beckett and Bishop Henry Philpotts, Elizabethan adventurers Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, literary figures Oscar Wilde and Charles Kingsley, and other personalities including Lily Langtry, pictured left, Isadora Duncan, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and even Lawrence of Arabia. Mike's book on John "Babbacombe" Lee, "the man they couldn't hang", was used as the basis for a Radio Devon play last year, as well as for the Granada TV crime series, In Suspicious Circumstances, in the mid-1990s. In 1989, there was the strange case of the "pub sign they couldn't hang" when the sign at the new John Lee pub on Babbacombe Downs fell off on three consecutive nights for no apparent reason (other than perhaps some astute promotional activity).

■ Devon Ghosts & Legends by Mike Holgate is published by Halsgrove at £8.99.