In summer, 1770, Mrs. Ricketts heard someone walk to the foot of her bed in her own room, “the footsteps as distinct as ever I heard, myself perfectly awake and collected”.  Nobody could be discovered in the chamber.  Mrs. Ricketts boldly clung to her room, and was only now and then disturbed by “sounds of harmony,” and heavy thumps, down stairs.  After this, and early in 1771, she was “frequently sensible of a hollow murmuring that seemed to possess the whole house:  it was independent of wind, being equally heard on the calmest nights, and it was a sound I had never been accustomed to hear”.

On 27th February, 1771, a maid was alarmed by “groans and fluttering round her bed”:  she was “the sister of an eminent grocer in Alresford”.  On 2nd April, Mrs. Ricketts heard people walking in the lobby, hunted for burglars, traced the sounds to a room whence their was no outlet, and found nobody.  This kind of thing went on till Mrs. Ricketts despaired of any natural explanation.  After mid-summer, 1771, the trouble increased, in broad daylight, and a shrill female voice, answered by two male voices was added to the afflictions.  Captain Jervis came on a visit, but was told of nothing, and never heard anything.  After he went to Portsmouth, “the most deep, loud tremendous noise seemed to rush and fall with infinite velocity and force on the lobby floor adjoining my room,” accompanied by a shrill and dreadful shriek, seeming to proceed from under the spot where the rushing noise fell, and repeated three or four times.

Mrs. Ricketts’ “resolution remained firm,” but her health was impaired; she tried changing her room, without results.  The disturbances pursued her.  Her brother now returned.  She told him nothing, and he heard nothing, but next day she unbosomed herself.  Captain Jervis therefore sat up with Captain Luttrell and his own man.  He was rewarded by noises which he in vain tried to pursue.  “I should do great injustice to my sister” (he writes to Mr. Ricketts on 9th August, 1771), “if I did not acknowledge to have heard what I could not, after the most diligent search and serious reflection, any way account for.”  Captain Jervis during a whole week slept by day, and watched, armed, by night.  Even by day he was disturbed by a sound as of immense weights falling from the ceiling to the floor of his room.  He finally obliged his sister to leave the house.

What occurred after Mrs. Ricketts abandoned Hinton is not very distinct.  Apparently Captain Jervis’s second stay of a week, when he did hear the noises, was from 1st August to 8th August.  From a statement by Mrs. Ricketts it appears that, when her brother joined his ship, the Alarm (9th August), she retired to Dame Camis’s house, that of her coachman’s mother.  Thence she went, and made another attempt to live at Hinton, but was “soon after assailed by a noise I never before heard, very near me, and the terror I felt not to be described”.  She therefore went to the Newbolts, and thence to the old Palace at Winton; later, on Mr. Ricketts’ return, to the Parsonage, and then to Longwood (to the old house there) near Alresford.