Edithweston – Extraordinary Occurrences.
The whole district has been recently aroused by a remarkable and at present unexplained phenomenon. At one of the houses in the village loud noises have been repeatedly heard, at all times of the day and night, the sounds resembling those which would result from knocking and banging doors; and, notwithstanding the fact that the closest investigations have been made by persons of all ranks, there is up to the present moment no apparent reason for the noises. These investigations have been carried out among others by doctors, clergymen, schoolmasters, police-officers, and other men accustomed to weigh evidence, but, although of course the solution of the problem may eventually be found to be perfectly natural, the affair is yet a complete mystery.
It seems to be out of the question to believe that the noises are the result of practical joking, or the perpetrators must surely have been discovered before now. One of the doors of the house had been recently varnished; and one day distinct knocks were heard, but the most careful examination to find marks on the varnish proved futile. Our representative has interviewed a number of the inhabitants of the village and neighbourhood, and his inquiries show that nearly every person in the village has heard the knocks and that no one can give a reasonable explanation of them.
Stamford Mercury, 18th December 1896.
The Edithweston “Ghost.”
No solution of the mystery.
Our Stamford correspondent writes: – I have to-day (Monday) made further investigations into the mysterious occurrences at the village of Edithweston, which is about five and a half miles from Stamford, and about eight miles from Oakham. Some hundreds of persons of all stations in life state that they heard loud and repeated knocks at the doors and windows of one of the houses in the village, the sounds being heard both by night and day for a full week, and notwithstanding the fact that the most careful examination has been instituted, there is up to the present moment nothing to account for the sounds.
The house in question is occupied by Mr and Mrs Gray, and the owner of the property is Major Braithwaite, of Edithweston Hall, for whom Mr Gray acts as farm bailiff. After the mysterious knocking had been in progress for some days, Major Braithwaite was communicated with, and he came to Edithweston from town, but, after investigation expressed himself as completely baffled in the matter.
The village of Edithweston is three or four miles from the nearest railway station, North Luffenham, on the Peterborough and Leicester branch of the Midland Railway, and there is a good deal of superstition in the parish. For several days a poor little servant girl at the house was blamed for making the noises, but it was afterwards found that the rappings continued when she was absent from the house. One deeply regrettable feature in connection with the mystery is the fact that the strain upon the mind of Mrs Gray, the wife of the tenant of the house, has seriously undermined her health.
The village is situated on the borders of Normanton Park, the Rutland residence of the Earl and Countess of Ancaster, who removed from Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire, to Normanton House for the Christmas holidays, and both his lordship and Lady Ancaster have taken some interest in the affair. Large numbers of people keep visiting the house from the surrounding villages, and from Stamford, Oakham, and other places in Lincolnshire, Rutland, and Northamptonshire, but no one has yet been successful in discovering a satisfactory solution of the mystery, though, it is needless to say, every effort has been made, both on the part of the villagers and the visitors, to find out the cause of the noises.
The owner of the property had decided that he would pull down the house if the sounds continued, but fortunately such drastic measures were not necessary, as the “ghost” has been very quiet during the Christmas holidays. Some curious suggestions have been made by the villagers to stop the disturbances, one being that the incumbent of the parish should “read the spirit down” with the Scriptures.
Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 29th December 1896.
Hunting a Ghost – The mystery of the Midlands – The house, the noises, and the natives.
A Daily Chronicle correspondent writes:- Yuletide is the right time for a ghost, and I spent Saturday, in accordance with editorial instructions, in hunting up the case of the latest visitor from unknown parts. The reference, of course, is to the ghost-haunted house of Edithweston, a little village down in Rutlandshire. There was a word on the matter in the papers of Christmas morning, and we promptly wanted to hear the whole story. You find your way first to Stamford, and then you take a “fly” – a fine old word which they use at Stamford – and drive across country for an hour or so. Soaking fields, dripping trees, a weary drizzle – there was nothing to inspirit one in this drive, and I was glad when we got to Edithweston. The horse had refused to do anything better than walk for the last mile, as if he knew he was getting into an uncanny atmosphere. Now what did I learn?
The district was celebrating Boxing Day by discussing for the hundredth time the affair of the ghost. Politics were nowhere, and I can even believe that the villagers, as they met, oftener than not forgot to pass the compliments of the season. Edithweston consists of a sort of street, with other dwelling-houses scattered round about – the vicarage at one end of the hamlet, the squire’s residence half a mile away. The good folks wondered who the stranger might be, but when they saw him go towards a particular house they knew he had come about the great event. Until now Edithweston has had no history – nothing beyond the record which attaches to any rural community. The house with the two red doors changed that, for here was the scene of phenomena which had stirred three shires.
They are not superstitious at Edithweston – at all events I met nobody who expressed a belief in ghosts, but very strange things had happened. The evidence as to these was overwhelming, and the one endeavour had been to arrive at an explanation of them.
First, as to the house itself, which stands at the angular corner of the street to which I referred. It is occupied by the squire’s farm bailiff, and behind it are the farm buildings, or some of them. Two separate doors looking out to the front might indicate two houses, and originally perhaps the doors did have that meaning. To the right of the entrance-lobby is the kitchen, to the left a sitting room, and upstairs on the next floor are bedrooms. Then below one half of the house there is a cellar, which, as I was told, had been used merely for storing potatoes. Walls built of a whitish grey stone, square well-sized windows, and slated roof – that completes the description of the farm bailiff’s residence.
Yet there is one point to add, and, as will be seen later on, it is important. Another house, or, in strict accuracy, a half-house, is connected with that described, being simply an extension of the same walls – three red doors altogether, but the complete building such a one as you might find anywhere and never so much as look at.
Then as to what happened, and on that I held counsel with a group of the village fathers, men who had been in the thick of the campaign. Three weeks ago, on a Friday, the farm manager and his wife went to Stamford to market, leaving the servant girl at home in charge of the house and baby. When they returned the girl informed them that she had heard knockings on the front door, and that when she had answered them there was nobody outside – nobody to be seen. That seemed to be the generally accepted version of the beginning, but in any case the farm bailiff himself had not long to wait for such knockings. There would be a succession of loud raps on one door, then on another, again inside a cupboard in the kitchen, or in one of the bedrooms upstairs. It was not as if a door shook, say, with a strong gust of wind, but as if a heavy hand came against the wood with successive and distinct thuds. The noise would hardly have died away in one quarter when “Rap, rap, rap,” it came from somewhere else.
Off and on the thing continued from the Friday until the Wednesday, so that there was plenty of time for the village to be convinced and for the wonder to grow. The sounds did not confine themselves to the hours of darkness either, but often were most prevalent and most violent between dawn and dusk. The attitude of a man of good sense and nerve would at the outset be one of severe disbelief, allied to the thought “Oh, somebody is playing a joke.” But then the joke defied detection, and a jocular person could hardly lay himself out so extensively without being detected. Again was there any natural cause for what was going on? but here also search and reasoning failed utterly. Remember I am always reflecting the attitude and the wisdom of the village, not expressing any personal view.
The fame of the noises drew little crowds to the railings, which mark off a strip of garden between the street and the house. Some people went and waited, and had no reward, for the ghost did not move; others heard it thumping about, and all believed. Never a form was seen, not a shadow, much less a wraith – nothing happened but the sounds, and this fact really added to the uncanny element. The squire came from town on the report of the happenings, and was forced to believe his own ears; and the local doctor took part in the investigations.
Such is the gist of the statement put before me, and with the object of getting light on it I asked many questions. As has been mentioned, a half-house adjoins that of the farm bailiff, and I sought to ascertain whether the sounds had extended to it. No, was the reply, except in the sense that the sounds could be clearly heard through the dividing wall. To that extent the occupants had had enough of the phenomena, but, indeed, one villager declared that he had heard the sounds as far away as the village pump – a distance of perhaps 150 yards. “I agree with you,” another remarked to me,”that if it had been any movement of the foundations on which the house stands all the blocks must have been affected. But the foundations are as firm as you like, and the knocks could not have had anything to do with the recent shock of earthquake, since they were confined to one house.”
Anyhow, a chorus of voices here broke in, the knocking did not take the form of shaking, but on the contrary was like a closed fist or a mallet striking a piece of wood. Next I inquired about the history of the house, and an old fellow in moleskin answered me. He thought it had been built about five-and-forty years ago, adding that in one part of it there had once been a baker’s oven. He spoke further of there being a well near the end of the house, and of the influences which water might have in a locality, yet when it came to the “Rap, Rap, Rap,” he just shook his head.
An individual experience of the ghost! That I should have sought from the farm manager himself, but he was away from home paying a Christmas visit. Accordingly I got it from a friend who had sat up “o’nights” with him, and it ran thus: – “I must confess that I thought the idea of the sounds rather a childish affair at first. However, when I had experienced them several times I simply didn’t know what to think, and that is still my state of mind. One watcher was outside the cellar door when there came such a pounding at it that he almost fell off his chair. The cellar was empty except for some potatoes, the door was locked, and yet here was the thumping. As soon as we heard a knocking anywhere we ran to the spot, and often reached it almost as soon as the noise had ceased. But we saw nothing, not even the slightest mark on a door which had been recently varnished. To test this another door varnished at the same time was sharply hit with the hand, and a mark was left on the varnish.
“Even one of us would stand outside the front doors, another of us inside, and the hammering would go on between us, and we be unable to see anything. The servant girl – a girl of fourteen or fifteen – would go into the kitchen and the rapping would begin there, or somebody would go upstairs and it would begin upstairs. ‘Here I am,’ the girl might call in a half-merry voice, so common had the noises become – ‘here I am, come on, you,’ meaning the noises, whatever they represented.
“It gave you an eerie feeling to be surrounded for a time with what you could not fathom, do what you might – with something which gave no visible signs in any shape. We are all as sure as we live that there was no trickery, and so that affairs happened which, it being impossible to understand them, would be called supernatural. They stopped on the Wednesday as suddenly as they had begun on the Friday, and they have not occurred again.”
That being so, I could not myself have the opportunity of testing the visitation, but what I have written may be regarded as a fair statement of the available information. Two general conclusions, therefore, are apparent – first, that over a period of six days the sounds were heard; and second, that the ingenuity and resource of the community have been unable to trace them to any explanation. Aged women in Edithweston may talk of witchcraft, and young men debate on psychic forces in the individual – forces lurking in the least “fey” of us, whether a servant-girl or a duchess. That and much babble filled the air on Saturday, but it advanced the inquirer nothing, and, indeed, the good folks are simply beaten by their mystery. Here is a chance for the eager spirits of the Society for Psychical Research – a problem which at least promises to take some finding out, lie the secret where it may.
South Wales Daily News, 29th December 1896.
By The Way.
It seems ridiculous in these enlightened days to talk of a “haunted” house, but the Daily Chronicle is responsible for the statement that a real find in this mysterious direction has been made in an Essex [sic] village called Edithweston. The domicile in question is haunted, not by women in white, chain-clinking spectres, or tragical visions, but by sounds without a cause – at least, by no cause that can be seen or assigned. Such accoustical demonstrations have often been reported, but have never yet been explained. Sir Walter Scott, if I recollect aright, once heard in his border residence an “invisible row” of the same character, though the sounds in that instance resembled those of a carpenter’s shop, and not those of door-banging and knocking, as here reported.
Of course, to allege a supernatural cause would be preposterous; one is rather inclined to suspect the existence of some unknown law of sound which leads to explosions under certain conditions and in certain substances, just as the heating or cooling of a fire grate produces audible cracks. May it not be possible for doors and walls to bottle up, as it were, oft-repeated sounds such as knocking and door-banging, and liberate them again? The investigation of the Edithweston case, where “nearly every person in the parish has heard the knocks over and over again,” would otherwise seem one peculiarly suited for investigation by the Society for Psychical Research, say on the theory that a whole village has been labouring under a hallucination!
Northern Chronicle and General Advertiser for the North of Scotland, 30th December 1896.
A “Ghost” Story From Stamford.
A correspondent writes: – The village of Edithweston, about five and a half miles from Stamford, has been the scene of a remarkable and at present unexplained phenomenon, and the whole of the district has been aroused. In one of the houses of the village loud and at times almost uproarious noises have been repeatedly heard at all times of the day and night, the sounds resembling those which would result from the knocking and banging of doors; and, notwithstanding the fact that the closest investigations have been made by persons of all ranks in society, there is up to the present moment no apparent reason for the noises. The majority of the inhabitants of the village, it would appear, are firmly of the opinion that the sounds are of ghostly origin.
Thorough and prolonged investigations have been carried out by large numbers of people from the village and the adjacent parishes, and by many persons from the neighbouring town of Stamford. These investigations have been made, amongst others, by doctors, clergymen, journalists, schoolmasters, police officers, and other men who are accustomed to attach to evidence its proper value; but although, of course, the solution of the problem may eventually be found to be perfectly natural, the whole affair is, up to the present moment, a complete mystery. The knocks have been heard over and over again in broad daylight by groups of men, who were standing within a yard or two of the door. Occasionally the sounds would come apparently from the inside of a small cupboard, which has been opened immediately afterwards, but without any discovery to throw light on the remarkable occurrences. In numerous instances the sounds have been heard a hundred and fifty yards away.
It seems to be quite out of the question to believe that the noises are the result of practical joking, or the perpetrators must inevitably have been caught before this. One of the doors of the house had recently been varnished, and one day loud and repeated knocks were heard, but the most careful examination immediately afterwards to see if marks could be found on the varnish or on the wood proved to be futile. A Stamford correspondent has interviewed a large number of the inhabitants of Edithweston and the neighbourhood, and his inquiries clearly show in the first place that nearly every person in the parish has heard the knocks over and over again, and in the second place that no one can give a reasonable explanation of them. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” – Daily News.
Southern Reporter, 31st December 1896.
Edithweston.
The supposed “ghostly” manifestations at this village have been attracting considerable attention during the Christmas season in some of our London dailies. Writing on Friday, the Daily News says:-
We are so fortunate as to be able to present our readers with a new and original ghost story for Christmas-day. The scene of it is a village near Stamford, and a correspondent at that place is able to assure us that it is a thoroughly good story, according to the rules. There are mysterious knocks, there are terrified villagers; there are investigators who are “accustomed to attach to evidence its proper value”; and still the knocks go on. Practical jokers are believed to be out of the question. The investigators have looked everywhere above ground. But why not look under ground? In the last century the inhabitants of Rayleigh, in Nottinghamshire, were much disturbed by the ringing of bells out of church hours, and indeed from a peal which manifestly had no connection with the village belfry. It was finally discovered that the sounds came from a steeple which had been swallowed up by an earthquake hundreds of years before. There is no ultimate mystery in these things if they are once made the subject of a thorough and a rational examination. It is quite probable that sunken Saxon Edithweston is simply celebrating Boxing-day according to the old style of the calendar.
The Daily Chronicle of the same date is rather facetious at the expense of its correspondent. It remarks: –
The closest investigation, we are assured, “has been made by persons of all ranks in society,” including the local policeman, but though nearly every person in the parish had heard the knocks, nobody can explain them. Whether a bull-terrier – we can recommend a friend of this office, who answers (rather abruptly) to the name of John James O’Reilly – has been shut up in the house, to try his powers of identification, we are not told. … We would not treat even Edithweston, however, with entire levity, for it is a fact wholly beyond question that noises of this kind, accompanied or not by strange psychical phenomena, have occurred at many places and times. At present science has failed to explain them, but then there are many things that science fails to explain at the time. The mysteries of one generation form the basis for the toys of the next. To-day, for example, we are all astounded at Mr Marconi’s feat of telegraphing without wires. Next Christmas we shall be buying wireless telephones for our sons and nephews. So it may well be that next century the cure for such noises as those of Edithweston may be as familiar as the cure to-day for an odoriferous drain. In the meantime, however, we must have a little more evidence. We place every confidence in our Stamford correspondent, who sends us the news, but we must point out to him that he goes too far when he say s that the “investigations have been made by doctors, clergymen, journalists, schoolmasters, police officers, and other men who are accustomed to attach to evidence its proper value.” We will let doctors and clergymen speak for themselves, but so far as journalists are concerned, we may as well be frank. The evidence upon which a properly-trained journalist would accept the existence of a first-class ghost on Christmas-eve would not suffice to hang a dog whose pedigree, in Mr Phil May’s phrase, was “by a railway porter out of a third-class carriage.”
In its issue of Monday the same paper devotes considerably over a column to the subject, and in a sub-editorial paragraph it says:-
The ghost of Edithweston seemed so promising and seasonable a topic that we felt reluctantly obliged to spoil the Christmas holidays of a member of our staff by dispatching him to the remote little Rutlandshire village to investigate the matter. But the ghost evidently saw him coming. He reports that the knocks have ceased as mysteriously as they began. But that there were knocks and that they are not explicable on any grounds familiar to the combined wisdom of Edithweston, he fully declares. Otherwise his visit, as his account shows, is a fresh proof of the truth of Mr Andrew Lang’s dictum that – When the glum researchers come, The brutes of bogies go.
The knocks of Edithweston must be added to the already rather long list of noises probably not to be explained until our knowledge of the physical world connects it more closely with the psychical.
Stamford Mercury, 1st January 1897.
The Well Cross cul-de-sac at Edith Weston which echoed for five days and nights to the sound of the phantom knockings emanating from Christian’s Farm which is in the left background of the picture.
The Edith Weston knockings occurred 89 years ago. That they did occur can be in no doubt. They were heard by a great many people. Two local brothers, Albert and Louis Tibbert, who still live in the village, recall their parents telling them they heard the ghost of Christian’s Farm. Albert, who is 75, remembers as a young boy, around the outbreak of the First World War, seeing strangers who were still visiting Edith Weston to look at the haunted house and listen for noises.
Now living next door to 16 Well Cross are George and Margaret Tyler. George, whose family once owned Christian’s Farm, has lived nearby all his life but has never heard anything unusual. He feels that it was a family named Annis who lived in Christian’s Farm around the turn of the century. Both sons of the family were killed in the First World War.
Has George any explanation for the ghostly sounds about which his parents spoke now and again? “I’ve heard it said in the family over the years that there was a murder in the house – somewhere in the back; probably in the cellar.” He spoke somewhat reluctantly and in low tones about the murder, as though not wishing to do or say anything that might reawaken those terrifying happenings at the turn of the century.
The present occupier of Christian’s Farm, which was created from two small cottages, is Mrs Grace Hogarth. She has lived there for 19 years and has experienced “no hint” of anything supernatural. “It doesn’t feel like a haunted house,” she said. “And when we have cats and dogs here they have never acted strangely as they are supposed to do in the presence of spirits.”
A murder in the dim and distant past could provide a reason for those otherwise inexplicable sounds. Could it have been that the unfortunate victim had been left for dead in the cellar and had struggled to stay alive and summon help for what must have seemed an interminable period? Were the unearthly knockings an echo from the past? Did the spirit of the murdered person have to go through those five days of torment before being set free at last, to disappear once and for all from Christian’s Farm?
The present occupier of Christian’s Farm, Mrs Grace Hogarth, standing in the doorway of the house where there were such strange happenings 89 years ago.
What the papers said.
[…] Daily Chronicle, January 1st, 1897.
“The ghost of Edith Weston seemed so promising and seasonable a topic that we felt reluctantly obliged to spoil the Christmas holidays of a member of our staff by despatching him to the remote little Rutlandshire village to investigate the matter. But the ghost evidently saw him coming. He reports that the knocks have ceased as mysteriously as they began. But that there were knocks, and that they are not explicable on any grounds familiar to the combined wisdom of Edith Weston, he fully declares. Otherwise his visit, as his account shows, is fresh proof of the truth of Mr Andrew Lang’s dictum that: ‘When the glum researchers come / The brutes of bogles go
Grantham Journal, 8th February 1985.