Reginald Hine

Reginald Leslie Hine (25 September 1883–14 April 1949) FSA, FRHS was a solicitor and historian whose writings centred on the market-town of Hitchin in Hertfordshire and its environs. He committed suicide in 1949 by jumping in front of a train at Hitchin railway station when facing disciplinary proceedings from The Law Society.

Hine was born in 1883 at Newnham Hall near Baldock in Hertfordshire, the son of Alderman Joseph Neville Hine (1849–1931), a tenant farmer, and his wife Eliza Taylor (1843–1892). Hine was educated at Grove House in Baldock, was privately tutored by the Revd George Todd of Baldock, attended Kent College in Canterbury and The Leys School in Cambridge.

In 1907 he and two others, the Hitchin photographer Thomas William Latchmore (1882-1946) and F. L. Griggs, took a camera to Minsden Chapel with the intention of photographing the ghost of a monk who it was believed had been murdered there and whose spirit was said to emerge from the stone walls of the ruined chapel. Hine claimed that they had been successful and published the resulting photograph in his The History of Hitchin. The photograph is now accepted as having been a practical joke at best, and a hoax at worst, but Hine never admitted this, and its inclusion in what was purported to be a work of serious history is questionable. The shrouded figure is almost certainly that of Hine.

Hine frequently visited here, and eventually obtained a lifetime lease of the building from the vicars of Hitchin. So fond of the chapel was he, that he even bid "trespassers and sacrilegious persons take warning, for I will proceed against them with the utmost rigour of the law, and, after my death and burial, I will endeavour, in all ghostly ways, to protect and haunt its hallowed walls".

...
Wikipedia