District Intelligence. Bilsington and Bonnington.
These usually quiet little villages have recently been thrown into the utmost consternation owing to a report being circulated that at a certain house about two mile down in Romney Marsh most wonderful and unheard of circumstances had occurred. It is said that the furniture has jumped about the rooms in a most unaccountable manner until it has dashed itself to pieces against the walls. The crockery-ware has danced about the place like puppets hung upon wires, and after performing some extraordinary evolutions, has sprung with a sudden jerk up to the ceiling and destroyed its intended usefulness for ever.
Pails of water have flew about the house like soap bubbles in a high wind. The flour crock, without any visible cause, was broken in pieces, and the flour scattered in all directions, something like a snow storm on a small scale. Boots and shoes gallopped out of one room into another, as though they were looking about for some one to put them on and wear them. Bedroom ware has walked down the stairs step by step, and although full to the brim, strange to say not a drop was spilt. The beds that were made in the morning ready to receive their occupants at night, were found long before that time turned topsyturvy, with the sheets and blankets tangled together like a colt’s mane after it is said to have been ridden by witches. The Bible, although put away at the very top of the house, to prevent, if possible, its being torn to pieces in the general destruction, came rumbling and tumbling down the staircase, and on reaching the bottom, with a sudden bound it cleared the kitchen, flying straight through the already smashed window out into the garden, and what became of it then our informant could not tell; but it might then have been said with truth that the household gods had departed, and that the place was given into the hands of his Satanic majesty.
A great number of persons have been to the house to investigate this mysterious affair, and one very esteemed minister of the church of England came and grieved at the “wreck of matter and the crash of ” crockeryware. Absurd though this story may appear, there are a great many persons in the neighbourhood who give credence to the whole of it, and also to a great deal more than is here stated. One thing is quite certain there are the broken things; but by whose agency they were destroyed at present is only known to the destroyer, or if any one else is in the secret they will not divulge it.
[some of the report below is appended, originally from the Ashford Express]
Kentish Gazette, 23rd June 1863
Extraordinary Ghost Story.
The secluded village of Bonnington, in Romney Marsh, has been of late the scene of great commotion, in consequence of a rumour having obtained currency that the house occupied by a Mrs. Gates, was haunted, and that part of the furniture in this wonderful domicile had been capsized and perform various and astounding anticks. We should not have referred to the subject if the report had not obtained a certain credence in those whose position in society would rebut the notion that belief was engendered.
The house is inhabited by Mrs. Gates, her son, and a servant girl. The first scene in the remarkable house is reported to have been enacted on Sunday week, when several articles of household furniture were removed by the “unseen” and placed in strange places. We will narrate part of the extraordinary feats and leave our readers to place their own construction upon the spurinty [sic] or genuineness of them.
The clock, which has stood in one of the apartments for many ysears, suddenly changed its position for one more airy, and selected the garden. Three cans of water, it is asserted, “walked” into the kitchen, and discharged themselves to the horror of the inmates whose mind reverted to a second deluge. Upon one occasion the breakfast table was covered with crockery, and directly the servant left the apartment it was removed to the floor, but without sustaining any breakage. Panes of glass have been broken without the slightest discrimination, and out of the 25 panes or more in the house few are remaining whole. The snuffers are alleged to have moved about with the greatest celerity. The crockery have been thrust from its repository and hurled to the ground, smashing it with a vengeance which our correspondent’s narrator stated to be “horrible to hear.”
Strange as these things might read, it is equally strange that so many living in this age of enlightenment, the 19th century, should be found to have faith in the monstrous supposition that the house is haunted. There is evidence to show that part of the events enumerated are true, as the remains of the crockery are open to inspection, and also the damage sustained to many articles of furniture.
The extraordinary communications have actuated many persons from Hythe and other places contiguous to repair to the scene. Some are satisfied with an exterior view of the house, and the fright with which it is viewed by the incredulous is really amusing, and yet pitiful withal to witness. The hearsay appears to have affected the equanimity of a worthy rector, who was actuated to visit the house “to seen before he believed,” but nothing transpired to induce faith. We remember to have read of an amusing colloquy in a ghost fable [written by Miller], part of which we subjoin, and advise the dubious and superstitious to believe. “I don’t believe in ghosts, just for this reason; first, because when we are dead, if we go to heaven, we shall never want to come here again to toil and moil; and if we happen to go to the other place, why, they’ll never let us come back, whether we want or not, so for these reasons I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Maidstone Journal and Kentish Advertiser, 30th June 1863
The Romney Marsh Ghost. (From a Correspondent).
In June last the Ashford News and others of the Kent local papers, contained an account of certain extraordinary occurrences which had disturbed the peace, and produced great excitement in the quiet little villages of Bilsington and Bonnington, in Romney Marsh.
[…] The following is the result of the personal inquiries I have made on the spot into these circumstances; my stay at the sea side having given me the opportunity of a day’s excursion (August 22) into the neighbourhood:
The villages of Bilsington and Bonnington lie midway between the Smeeth station of the South Eastern main line, and the Ham-street station of the Ashford and Hastings branch. Bilsington is the site of a lofty monument, in the obelisk form, erected by the reformers of East Kent, in 1835, to the memory of Sir William Richard Cosway; a useful landmark to a stranger rashly venturing to leave the high road and try a short cut across the marsh meadows. The house alluded to is at the extreme end of the adjoining parish of Bonnington, and is a double one-story cottage, brick and timber built, about 200 yards from a small inn of the better sort called the Royal Oak. This cottage has long been occupied by the families of two labouring men, Gates and Luckhurst, whose humble occupation in life has been that of shepherds, or “lookers,” as shepherds are called here. Gates at one time had been well to do in the world, having some sheep of his own; but he had become chargeable to the parish and requiring medical attendance, he had been ordered into the union workhouse, where he subsequently died. The occurrences in question, or whatever formed the foundation of the reports, commenced before his death and soon after his removal.
The substance of the facts, prosaically told, is that for several days in succession, beginning on the Saturday and ending on the Tuesday or Wednesday, and chiefly when no one was on the premises (or known to be so) but women and children, strange noises were heard in the house; sometimes in one room, sometimes in another; after which furniture was found thrown down or displaced, bed clothes in confusion, articles of wearing apparel, with bowls, pails, &c., tossed about, and glass and crockery broken, principally the window panes (fifteen in front, and some at the back), and five or six large earthenware milk jars, the fragments of which and other utensils are lying in the yard.
These things always happened in the daytime; sometimes in the presence of scared neighbours; nothing occurred at night; and the annoyances were confined to the side of the house in which Gates had lived, and which was still occupied by his wife and son. The wife (Miss Gates as she is called here, the Kentish peasantry ignoring among themselves the use of the word mistress), an old woman of 75, very feeble, walking with difficulty on crutches, unable to mount the stairs without assistance, and dependent in smaller matters upon the services of a little maid-of-all-work, Ann Smith, a girl of 14.
Inquiring what had been seen when the different articles moved were in actual motion, I was informed that when the Bible flew down the stairs (the proper place of which was on the bed-room drawers), it struck as it passed one of the Luckhurst’s children, a girl of eleven, with sufficient violence to leave a black mark on her shoulder. The girl herself, coming forward, pulled up her sleeve to show me where the mark had been, and her word might be taken for it; but there was nothing to prove that the Bible had not been thrown at her from the stair-head. The two families, living in the cottage, have their own separate front and back doors, but the same staircase is common to both; and the rooms thus communicating internally, offer great facilities for the unobserved ingress and egress of any active person playing a mischievous trick. We have to get up, however, another theory to explain some parts of the evidence.
Mrs. Luckhurst was standing in the yard by the palling when the earthenware crock was broken, and the flour it contained scattered. She saw (as she says) Ann Smith carrying the crock and setting it down by the kitchen door, when the crock seemed suddenly jerked out of her hands, and the flour “steamed up” to the ceiling in a sort of cloud, Ann Smith at the same time crying out, and turning pale with fright.
Mrs. Luckhurst (a striking contrast to her neighbour) is a fine specimen of a strong hardworking woman in vigorous health ; although the mother of nine children living, mostly grown up and on their own hands, without counting those she has lost, more than she could remember, and she stood before me with her arm akimbo, denouncing with an eloquence which Gladstone might envy, the absurdity and injustice of the suspicions that had been directed against Ann Smith – I was not the person to tell her that she was romancing, or “saying the thing that was not.”
Nothing would persuade Mrs. Luckhurst that what was done was not the work of an evil spirit; and she regretted she was no scholar, for she “had heered say there was a certain chapter in the Bible, which, if properly read, no evil spirit could stand.” What chapter it was she did not know, and unhappily I could not inform her. Luckhurst, the husband, was in the fields at the time, and laughed at what was told him of “the goings on” at home in his absence, but became as grave and frightened as the rest on his return.
The excitement increasing, the new rector of Bilsington and Bonnington, the Rev. P. Cameron, came, saw the broken things, was shown the disturbed beds, had them re-made, locked the door, and went away with the key in his pocket, returning at ten, when he found everything as he had left it. Another girl has replaced Ann Smith, and since she left, and Gates died, there has been no renewal of the disturbances; but a subsequent investigation through the police has failed to bring them home to their author.
I have noted these particulars because although it is “beleft” by the magistrates, as I was told at the Bilsington National school, that the noises heard and mischief perpetrated originated in natural causes, there is now sufficient evidence that we are not yet conversant with all the natural causes which may be connected with similar facts, some of which reminded me of the supposed magnetic influences of Angelique Cottin, to which the attention of Arago was drawn, in 1843, and others of the tossing about of bed-room furniture preceding the death of General Lefort, mentioned in “The Diary of an Austrian Secretary of Legation,” recently published.
Moreover, if we are to object with some writers to Mr. Home, that the manifestations of his alleged powers have been confined chiefly to the higher ranks, we must not blow hot and cold with the same breath, and refuse the testimony of the poor, when offered, to analogous effects. If ignorant and superstitious, we have in the Romney Marsh peasantry the advantage of witnesses who had never heard of “spirit rappings,” and are certainly none of them readers of the Spiritual Magazine. We know absolutely nothing of the source and nature of our vital powers, and while it is perfectly true we shall not clear up the mystery in which they are involved by referring everything new and strange to the supernatural, it is equally certain that we shall never extend our knowledge by generalising and dismissing one set of effects as those of “involuntary motion” (which explains nothing), and getting rid of others which we do not understand by the too easy method of attributing them to imposture.
When some friends of Dr. Black were first shown the buoyancy of a bladder inflated with hydrogen gas, they had to be taken into a room above the laboratory of the chemist, to be convinced that there was no hole in the floor through which the bladder might not have been drawn up to the ceiling by a fine thread. There was, however, no fine thread, and there was nothing in the bladder distinguishable by the friends of Dr. Black from common air. We now admit gases as “things invisible” that may yet act as efficient causes. May there not be others?
London Daily News, 1st September 1863.
A wild marsh country, a secluded village on the confines of civilisation, and a haunted house, are capital elements of romance, and at this dead season of the year one is very glad to find them making their appearance among more prosaic items of news. Ghosts, indeed – not ghosts adapted to the stage, but good old-fashioned ghosts – almost invariably come in with the autumn, as green peas with the early summer. When Parliament has adjourned, “Satan’s invisible world” is pretty generally discovered by hundreds of explorers. Coeval with the sittings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Social Science Congress, we have commonly to record a profound agitation of the supernatural regions.
If there is a spectre anywhere unlaid (and in want of an engagement), it is now that he walks. Country newspapers are full of strange details of things heard and seen out of the ordinary experience of mortals. The Spiritualists are alert and watchful, and their organs are more than usually disputatious and bellicose. Even London not unfrequently catches the fever, and some old churchyard or shut-up house becomes the nightly centre of eager gazers. We have no time to think of these things when we have to get through twelve or eighteen columns of debates every morning, to attend the Opera in the evening, to keep pace with all the novelties of theatre and concert-room, and to dine out as often as we are asked.
It is quite another matter when the languor of autumn has settled down upon the land. Then we are very glad of “that strong provocative, a ‘ghost;’ and, at the present moment, ‘the Romney Marsh Ghost,’ whose antics we recorded on Tuesday, on the authority of a correspondent who writes from the spot, will do as well as any other.
It appears that on the borders of the little villages of Bilsington and Bonnington, situated in the Kentish marsh country, is a small cottage, long occupied by the families of two labouring men (shepherds), named Gates and Luckhurst. The former is now dead; but the proceedings for which the house has obtained a local notoriety commennced before his decease, and after his removal to the workhouse, where he died. In the month of June the village gossips talked of strange things happening at the residence of the two shepherds. It was the Stockwell case over again. Articles of household furniture jumped about the rooms without any visible agency. The crockery ware was seized with St. Vitus’s dance, and finished its capers by breaking into fragments. Boots and shoes were suddenly endowed with a faculty of voluntary motion. Beds were provokingly unmade after having been properly made in the morning, and the sheets and blankets were knotted together, as though some mischievous Puck or Kobold had been bent on “frighting the maidens of the ‘villagery’. Even the Bible did not remain safe from annoyance, for on one occasion it flew downstairs from the bedrooms and struck a little girl, the daughter of Luckhurst, on the shoulder, so violently as to leave a black mark.
Another girl, Ann Smith, who does household work for old Mrs Gates, was one day carrying a crock of flour when suddenly the vessel was jerked out of her hands, and the flour “streamed up” to the ceiling. This latter girl, it appears, is the object of considerable suspicion – the more so as the phenomena have ceased since her dismissal; but there are those in the house who take her part, and a police investigation has failed to criminate her.
The Stockwell vagaries seem to have been the contrivance of a maid-servant; but of course we are not on that account to fly at once to the same explanation in every such case. One fact, however, is noteworthy – viz., that when the rector had the beds re-made, locked up the bedroom, and carried away the key, no disturbance took place in that particular chamber from the time of his leaving it to the time of his returning. The ghost or devil was baffled by the locked door.
The story would hardly be deserving of comment were it not that it illustrates the absence among the uneducated classes of the habit of investigation. If a similar set of incidents had happened in more cultivated circles they would have been the subject of immediate inquiry, and it is not improbable that some trivial and common-place cause would have been discovered. A subsequent police inquisition is of very little use. The police only judge at second-hand. They can simply summon before them the persons who have witnessed the circumstances, who have not themselves sifted them, and who are generally disposed to believe the diabolical theory.
What is wanted is a careful scrutiny on the spot, and at the very time, by all who witness the alleged supernatural occurrences. But a correct appreciation of the value of evidence is not too common in any walk of life, and is absolutely wanting in the humble and unlettered population of a remote country village. The utter inability of such persons to tell a plain story in a clear and straightforward manner is sufficient proof of the mental confusion under which they constantly labour. Logical sequence – the necessary dependence of one thing on another – the reasonable inferences that result from the mere collection and arrangement of facts – these are matters of which they have no conception. In the case of ghosts, they are especially liable to be led away, because they like to believe in the marvellous, and resent any natural explanation of a seemingly mysterious event; and because at the same time they are bewildered by the hysterical fear which the belief inspires.
The imposture which went under the name of the Cock-lane Ghost was detected by the close and persistent observation of a few intellectual men. Dr Johnson, though habitually inclined to the miraculous, and an avowed believer in ghosts, was one of those who helped to enlighten the public on the true causes of the knockings and scratchings which brought all London, in the year 1762, gaping and wondering to the neighbourhood of Snow-hill. But the mind of Johnson, though almost morbidly sensitive on the side of the supernatural, had also a keen perception of the value of facts, and of the duty of investigation into all matters in dispute. Those are qualities not always found even among the instructed; in the uneducated, as we have said, they are totally wanting. It must have occurred to most people to be at times surprised by little incidents which at the moment have seemed unaccountable, but which even a superficial inquiry has been sufficient to refer to the ordinary laws of physics.
In the Romney Marsh Mystery the only man of educated common sense who seems to have examined into the facts at the time of their occurrence was the clergyman; and the effect of his simple measures we have already seen. While easy explanations lie ready to our hand we can perceive no necessity for seeking, with our correspondent, for occult causes in the nature of undiscovered vital powers. The field of the possible is of course an enormous one, and no man would wish to place a limit to scientific discovery. But it is surely not desirable to search for extraordinary causes before ordinary ones have been exhausted and shown to be impossible.
Our correspondent remarks, that “when some friends of Dr Black were first shown the buoyancy of a bladder inflated with hydrogen gas, they had to be taken into a room above the laboratory of the chemist to be convinced that there was no hole in the floor through which the bladder might not have been drawn up to the ceiling by a fine thread.”
No doubt all scientific men have had to meet with similar incredulity; but the difference between scientific discoveries and the manifestation of so-called mysterious powers is, that in the former case the results are capable of explanation, of reference to some positive law, and of methodical and infallible reproduction whenever the right conditions are observed, whereas in the latter the manifestations are fugitive and capricious. If there is any unknown power in Nature capable of moving heavy objects without visible influence, we cannot but regret in the interests of science, that it should declare itself only by fits and starts, in obscure neighbourhoods, and amongst illiterate and dull-witted hinds.
Daily News (London), 3rd September 1863.
The quiet little village of Bilsington and Bonnington, in Romney Marsh, has been much agitated by a “ghost” and strange tales are told about a “haunted house,” moving furniture, dancing crockery, and so forth. Police investigation has hitherto failed to bring home the disturbances to their author, but suspicion attaches to certain individuals. The noises, &c., have ceased.
Daily Review (Edinburgh), 4th September 1863.
[This is an extract from ‘The Diary of an Austrian Secretary of Legation at the Court of Czar Peter the Great’ as mentioned above. .v1, p269, 1863 – Lefort died in 1699.]
March 10th. Every day General Lefort is in more imminent danger of death. The increasing heat of the fever allowed no interval of rest or sleep, and, wearied with pain, his mind had gone astray, and he was raving. By order of the doctors, musicians were called in, whose sweet strains at length reconciled sleep to the sick man.
March 11th. General Lefort having quite lost the use of his senses, raved and shouted, now for music, now for wine. When mention was made of calling for the pastor, growing hotter in his madness, he allowed nobody to come near him.
March 12th. General and Admiral Lefort died at three o’clock in the morning. After his death many and incongruous rumours were spread about. It is doubtful whether any of them be true. When Stumpf, the Protestant pastor, was admitted to see him, and was admonishing him to be converted to God, they say he only told him, “Not to talk much.” To his wife, who in his last moments asked his pardon for her past faults, if she had committed any, he blandly replied: “I never had anything to reproach thee with; I always honoured and loved thee;” and without saying more, he shook his head several times, by which they believe he meant to allude to a certain other connection. He commended, in the first place, his domestics and their services, desiring that their wages should be paid in full.
Some days before his death, when he was sleeping at another person’s house, where he had an amour, a frightful row was heard at his own house in his usual bedroom. The wife was horror-stricken, and supposing her husband might have changed his mind and come home in a great fury, she sent to ascertain what was the case: and the persons sent came back again, asseverating that they could see nobody in that room. Nevertheless the uproar went on, and if the wife’s assertion may be credited, next morning all the chairs, tables, and seats were found, horrible to behold, lying scattered topsy-turvey, all about ; besides which, deep groans were constantly heard all through the night. A messenger was immediately despatched to Veroneje, to acquaint the Czar that General Lefort had departed this life. In the interim Boyar Golowin had everything sealed up, and had given the keys to the kinsman of the deceased.
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