It is said that St. Peters churchyard holds more bodies than any other graveyard in Derby, predominantly due to the plague.
The Black Death ripped through the town in 1349, killing a third of the Parish of St. Peters population.
The burial ground became so overcrowded that bodies were buried vertically to save space.
The sounds of the bells on the carts collecting the deceased along with the cries from the body collectors of “Bring out the dead” were often heard during this time whilst bodies were collected from the houses with red crosses painted on their doors signalling that the home was holding the diseased or deceased.
With one of the common symptoms of the plague being a coma, many people were in fact pronounced dead when they were actually in a deep sleep and it is reported that some were buried alive and clawed their way out the shallow graves, pushing open their coffins and climbing out of the ground.
Some say that the clawing sound at the graves, the tinkling of bells and the cries of the caller can be heard to this day.