The Humber Stone is a gigantic rock that sits with most of its mass under the earth, like a stone iceberg. It is probably a glacial erratic – a boulder picked up by the passing of a glacier and deposited again far from its origin – but according to early antiquarians it was used by some of the ancient inhabitants of the area as an altar. 

The stone has gone by other names – Hell Stone, Holy Stone, all tenuously suggesting that some kind of ritual may have gone on here. The nearby area of Humberstone is definitely linked as it appears in the Domesday book as “Humerstan”, probably meaning “Humer's or Humma's Stone”.

During the mid 1700s it is said that a local landowner attempted to break parts of the stone off to flatten it so a plough could pass over. His fortunes went into an immediate downward spiral, his fortune lost, the land sold off and the bankrupt and now very sick man ended up dying in the workhouse.

In 1925 a man allegedly built a haystack over the now half-buried Humber Stone which spontaneously combusted, causing the fire brigade to come out twice to quell the flames. This continued, with all the stacks in the field bursting into flames of their own accord, forcing the man to leave them to burn out on their own.

In 1980 a family living in a street next to the Humber Stone were disturbed by their 10 year old son being menaced by a “horned figure”, which he drew for teachers at his school. He said he didn't know what it was but it appeared at the end of his bed regularly. So unsettling was this phenomena that the family moved out but a few years later their parents moved in to the council property, whereupon the boy's grandmother claimed she had been throttled “by a ghost”.