Do ghosts haunt some of Dartmoor's most well-known buildings? You can bet on it!

Some good friends of mine, knowing my reading habits, presented me with some books as a gift for my recent birthday on my favourite subjects, ghosts and Dartmoor.
Reading them for research purposes, I was immediately struck by a couple of entries that referred to allegedly haunted properties where compulsive gamblers used to reside.
As regular readers will know, my favourite Dartmoor tale, the one I’ve based one of my tours around, is all about Jan Reynolds, a tin miner who felt he could better himself by making use of his skill at cards.
Sure enough, during a drunken night at the Newhouse Inn on the road to Ashburton just outside of Widecombe, the landlord, a Mr Foales, wagered a patch of scrubland that he owned at the back of the Inn on a hand of cards. Jan won, and straightaway let the fact he was now a landowner go to his head. Thinking the best way to consolidate his good fortune was to make a pact with the Devil himself, Jan made a deal for seven years good luck as a gambler at the end of which the Devil would return to claim his soul.
For seven years, Jan amassed a small fortune with his luck at cards which finally ran out when the Devil duly caught up with him, playing cards in the back pews of Widecombe in the Moor Church with his friends during one Sunday service. Ironically, Jan’s lasting memorial on Dartmoor is four small stone enclosures in the shapes of the suits of cards that sprang up at the spot where his precious pack fell to earth after he finally lost hold of it as he was whisked away on the back of the Devil’s flying horse, clinging on for dear life. This was the last that was ever seen of Jan, passing over Birch Tor, opposite the Warren House Inn, but the Ace Fields, as they became known, can still be seen to this day.
How true this particular story is is open to debate. Sadly, there are no known ghostly sightings of Jan, but the same can’t be said of one of the other moorland gamblers that I read about recently.
The hamlet of Wonson lies on the north-eastern edge of Dartmoor, near the villages of Gidleigh and Throwleigh. It boasts its own pub, the Northmore Arms, allegedly haunted by the ghost of a sailor which takes its name from the family who owned Wonson Manor next-door. It is in the manor house that we find our gambling ghosts.
It is said that if you quietly open the door to the gaming room, late at night, you might be lucky enough to catch four men dressed in cavalier outfits, dating back to the English Civil War, engrossed in a life changing game of cards. One of them is a Northmore, who not only owned the house, but also all the surrounding land. Sadly, he was a compulsive gambler and this tableau shows the moment he wagered his entire estate on the turn of one card, the ace of diamonds. Of course he loses everything. In order to remind himself of his foolishness, he has a large mural of said card painted on the room wall, which can still be seen to this day. It is said he never touched a pack of cards again. Instead, his spirit comes back to re-enact that fateful night, in the hope he can change the outcome.
Another allegedly haunted building, which once housed a gambler, this time on the north-western edge of Dartmoor, is Lewtrenchard Manor. This lies on the Okehampton to Launceston road, heading into Cornwall. The family estate fell into the hands of one Captain Edward Gould, appropriately nicknamed 'The Scamp', who did his utmost to squander his family’s wealth. Not averse to killing someone he had lost money to, he even used his powerful connections to avoid a prison sentence. Unfortunately, the cost of the case left him penniless and he died in poverty only 11 years after inheriting the estate. Fortunately for the family, his mother, Margaret 'Madam' Gould, took over the reins, and proved to be a phenomenal business woman, putting Lewtrenchard Manor back on its feet, paying off all her son’s debts, thus saving it for future generations.
In this instance, it isn’t the gambler who haunts the house, instead it is his indomitable mother, affectionately known as 'Old Madam' who continued to make her presence felt around her domain as soon as she had passed away. She has been sighted many times over the years, even chasing away a carpenter who dared to take a peep inside her family vault in the local church and being very overprotective confronting a young girl stealing apples from the orchard, forcing her to empty her pockets. It is said she made her presence known to the most famous resident of Lewtrenchard Manor, her great-great grandson, Sabine Baring-Gould, who also loved the house so much that he, too, haunts the place.
Folklorists and storytellers, like myself, owe a great debt to Sabine for he spent most of his life collecting many of the tales that we like to share, and for this I myself, will be eternally grateful.