Supernatural Justice: Ghostly Encounters in Legal History With Richard Sugg

Michelle: Hi everyone, and welcome back to Haunted History Chronicles. First of all, thank you for taking a listen to this episode. Before we begin, I just want to throw out a few ways you can get involved and help support the show. We have a patreon page as well as an Amazon link, so hopefully if you're interested in supporting, you can find a way that best suits you. All of the links for those can either be found in the show notes or over on the website. Of course, just continuing to help spread the word of the show on social media, leaving reviews and sharing with friends and family is also a huge help. So thank you for all that you do. And now let's get started. By introducing today's podcast or guest.

Michelle: In today's podcast, we delve into the unspoken corners of history to unearth the chilling tales that linger between the realms of the living and the dead, to unlock the cryptic files of the past and present, to explore unsettling encounters between the realms of justice and the supernatural. Our guest today, Dr. Richard Sugg, a renowned historian of the macabre, will guide us through a haunting procession of cases that blur the line between the earthly and the ethereal. As we traverse the pages of history, we'll uncover stories from the past to the present and discover where justice can sometimes take a supernatural form. And the living are not the only ones who seek retribution. Through a chilling method known as cruentation, an arcane practice rooted in the belief of divine intervention. We examine how this was used as a means to unearth the truth in cases of suspected murder and why. The belief was that the essence of justice calls through the veins of the deceased, their lifeblood holding the power to call out for retribution. In the early modern era, trials prioritized human testimony over forensic evidence, with exceptions reserved for divine testimony believed to come directly from the Almighty. However, not all murder cases could be resolved through mere confessions. When jurors found themselves grappling with uncertainty about a defendant's guilt or innocence, a trial by ordeal was invoked. And within this eerie repertoire of justice, cruentation stood as a dark specter. However, it's important to note that Cruentation alone rarely sealed the fate of a suspect. More often, it was the psychological weight of the ordeal itself that caused the accused to break confessing to their sins. In the face of this eerie supernatural trial, cruentation, with its eerie blend of belief and mysticism, serves as a haunting reminder of the lengths to which societies have gone throughout history to dispense justice and uncover the truth, even if that meant invoking the otherworldly to deliver judgment. The pages of the past are filled with accounts of ghosts or reference to ghosts and spirits in court cases. The Hammersmith Ghost murder case of 18 four stands as a haunting testament to how prolific cases of ghosts in courtrooms were and in some ways still are today. In the dark and eerie days of early 19th century London, the streets of Hammersmith echoed with tales of a ghostly apparition that terrorized its residents. From 1803 onwards, reports of ghost sightings and even violent attacks by this spectral entity spread like wildfire. Locals believed it to be the restless spirit of a suicide victim condemned to roam the earthly realm. Dressed in all white, sometimes adorned with a calf skinned garment horns and glass eyes, this apparition was both mysterious and menacing. The belief at the time was that suicide victims, denied consecrated ground, couldn't find rest in the afterlife. The terror reached its zenith when two women, one elderly and the other pregnant, claimed to have been seized by the ghost during separate encounters near the churchyard. Such was their fear that both women succumbed to shock and died within days. Thomas Groom, a brewer's servant, testified to an eerie encounter where the ghost lunged at him from behind a tombstone, gripping his throat in an icy grasp. As the panic escalated, a night watchman named William Gerdler attempted to confront the apparition on December 29. In a desperate bid to escape, the ghost discarded its shroud, vanishing into the night. With no organized police force in London at the time, alarmed citizens formed armed patrols to apprehend the malevolent specter. Then, on that fateful night of January 3 18 four, the spectre's chilling reign took a tragic turn. Francis Smith, a 29 year old excise officer and member of the armed patrol, encountered a man on Beaver Lane. Mistakenly believing him to be a ghost due to his white attire, smith confronted him with a shotgun in hand. The man in question was no phantom, but a bricklayer named Thomas Millwood, innocently clad in the typical white clothing of his trade. Tragedy struck as Smith, amidst his confusion, shouted menacingly, damn you. Who are you and what are you? Damn you, I'll shoot you. He then fired, striking Millwood fatally in the lower jaw. The tragic death of an innocent man set in motion one of the most infamous legal cases in British history. With questions of justice and self defense shrouding the events that unfolded the Hammersmith Ghost case of 18 four. In all, its eerie details would reverberate through the pages of legal history for almost two centuries, until a court of appeal decision in 1984 finally laid the matter to rest. It remains a chilling reminder that even in the most perplexing of circumstances, the courts must grapple with the boundaries of belief and reality. Ghosts, whether they haunt the minds of individuals or the halls of justice, continue to intrigue and mystify, revealing a spectral presence that refuses to fade away. If we journey to the heart of West Virginia, we unearth the eerie count of the Greenbriar ghost. This chilling tale proves that sometimes, even beyond the grave, the truth will not rest in peace. In 1897, the small town of Greenbriar County bore witness to a perplexing murder that left the community in shock. Elva, known as Zona, was found dead in her home and the initial verdict was death by childbirth. However, it was the testimony of a grieving mother that would forever alter the course of justice. In the aftermath of her daughter's untimely demise, mary Jane made a startling claim she had encountered the apparition of Zona's spirit at her bedside. According to Mary Jane, Zona's ghost revealed the shocking truth she had been murdered by her own husband, Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue, who had married her shortly before her death. This testimony became the linchpin of a sensational case that challenged the boundaries of belief and skepticism in the courtroom. Armed with this ghostly account, Mary Jane approached the local prosecutor, John Alfred Preston, and passionately pleaded for a reinvestigation into her daughter's death. While the veracity of the spectral encounter remained shrouded in mystery, it was enough to cast doubts in the minds of many, including the prosecutor himself. Fueled by public suspicion and growing skepticism about the initial verdict, an exhumation and autopsy were ordered, leading to a gruesome revelation on February 22, 1897, in a humble one room schoolhouse, Zona's remains were examined. The autopsy lasted three harrowing hours. Unveiling a horrifying truth, Zona's neck had been broken, her windpipe crushed and mark's as strangulation were found on her throat. Erasmus Shue, her husband, was arrested and charged with her murder. The evidence from the autopsy contradicted the initial cause of death. And the ghostly testimony of Zona, delivered through her mother had found an eerie echo in the halls of justice. The trial of Erasmus Shoe began on June 22, 1897, with Mary Jane as the prosecution's star witness. While the defense attempted to discredit her by questioning her reliability and her accounts of ghostly visits, mary Jane stood firm in her testimony. The judge struggled to separate the spectral narrative from the case and many in the community, captivated by the haunting tale, found it difficult to ignore. Ultimately, she was found guilty of murder on July 11 and was sentenced to life in prison. The Greenbriar Ghost case remains a haunting reminder of how the supernatural can intertwine with the world of jurisprudence. Challenging the boundaries of belief and reason, erasmus Shu met an untimely demise himself, succumbing to an unknown epidemic while incarcerated in the West Virginia State Penitentiary, where he was buried in an unmarked grave. Get ready to examine tales that offer a glimpse into the shadowy world where the past and present converge and where the spirits of the departed refuse to fade away quietly. With Dr. Richard Sugg as our guide, we'll unravel the threads of history that bind the living to the spectral realm. As we explore the courts and ghosts of history. Remember, the line between the living and the dead is thinner than you think. Now let's unlock the cryptic past and step into the world where justice meets the supernatural.

Michelle: Hi, Richard. Thank you so much for joining me this evening.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Thanks for the invitation. Back again. It's a great subject which I've been rummaging through for several years now and yeah, a lot of newspaper stories and quite a few personal stories actually.

Michelle: It is a really intriguing subject. I think there's some things about it that are really quite surprising and then snippets of things that maybe you've heard of that you just think well, maybe there are a few examples of that. But actually it's a subject matter that when you start researching ghosts and the law and cases where some aspect of the supernatural comes into play there are just hundreds and hundreds of examples all over the world. The more you look, the more you find. It seems to be this treasure trove of stuff that you start uncovering.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah, this is it. It's surprising how many cases of violent poltergeist where things are flying around inside a house. People's first response under extreme stress, unpredictability threat usually not actually the danger of injury as is oddly the case with all this psychokinesis objects if they ever hit anyone, don't harm them in the way that they should if someone had thrown it. But then the other one that you can see the point more strongly is from time immemorial probably particular lot in the Victorian press in the 19th century showers of stones from absolutely nowhere being held at properties. There might be suburban terraced, they might be detached right out in the wilderness and so forth. And understandably, people are calling the police here in a quite logical way. People who don't remotely believe in ghosts because they think their property is in danger, they might be in danger and somebody is persecuting them and over and over again with huge police presence day and night sometimes and in one case for actually years in Birmingham just a few decades ago you've got the police completely baffled. They simply cannot catch anybody.

Michelle: As I say, it's just such a fascinating topic to look through from a contemporary position but also a historical position to see this evolution, how things have changed but also to see what still is present, what we still see happening right up to today which I think might surprise people. But, yeah, I think kind of a place to start, maybe, because I think at the heart of a lot of what you see in older examples of cases where a report of the ghost comes through, either through testimony or through some kind of evidence given in a court of law, or if you have some other kind of supernatural element that is brought into the proceedings itself. At the heart of that, I think, is something very relevant for a long period of time, which is this blurring of lines of where life and death begins and ends, begins and starts with this feeling that death is gradual, that the soul can remain behind either through attaching to the body or through their blood where that vitality somehow remains. What you have is this sense of, well, something spiritual coming through is there to try and make things right, to get things back on the right course, to have their justice, to have that moment where things are righted in some way. And you see that playing out in so many different types of, like I've said, these different aspects of the supernatural coming through in court proceedings. Do you want to just explain that a little bit more what that kind of belief was around the soul and life and death and how death didn't necessarily it wasn't the moment that you stopped breathing.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah. This is a surprisingly universal belief from the Bible to almost certainly the present day in certain parts of the world that you don't just die like on off switch, in the sense that medicine tries to assert that the soul is likely to hover around the body. Sometimes in some belief that the soul is not quite sure that the body is really dead. And of course, when you think about comas and so forth, you can see the logic of this. And there's this three, four day window over and over again from the time of Christ to the time of vampire panics in Europe in the 19th, early 20th centuries, that, yeah, the soul hovers around the body. And in vampire country, this is particularly why the body is in danger of vampirization. You encourage the soul to leave the house, or you discourage the soul from getting back into the house, sometimes after the burial. And, yeah, the period goes in stages, a kind of sort of smoldering out of life like a dying coal from three days and then 40 days and then up to a year. And the Greeks are quite interesting with this because they would exhume bones of the dead on a routine basis to be sure that the body was decomposing. And, of course, you get what really well attested scientific accidents and various conditions where the body doesn't decay and sometimes for a surprisingly long time. And this caused horror in the Greeks, in vampire country, for the belief that the person was kind of trapped in the body and it was trapped in this life and couldn't pass on. And, yeah, choose your country, choose your folklore, choose your time. To a large extent, you get this sense of that being normal, really. It's normal that there's this blurred space between life and death, particularly for up to three days, and the extremity of it in Greece into the 19, early 20s, probably about 100 years ago. And people were remembering this in greece in about the 1960s or 70s on a Greek island not far from Athens, that you must watch the corpse of the dead person all the time, absolutely every minute, until it was buried because they were in danger of vampirization. If the corpse was left alone, it must never be left alone. The irony of this was that you also must never pass anything over a corpse. And you've got a large gathering of very sleepy people with their children and so forth in a circle around this corpse. And before you know it, at three in the morning, somebody has passed over the body, a cup of coffee, a cigarette, a child, and absolute horror electrifies the room. And in complete defiance of everything the church will tell these people, extremely pious Christians, the body has been vampirized, irrevocably, absolutely. There's nothing you can do about it except to destroy the soul. So in a kind of strange mixture of practical magic and absolute heresy, they might pour oil and vinegar, I think it was boiling through a hole in the coffin, with the body having now been buried as quickly as possible, or coffined, anyway. And, yeah, they would then destroy the soul. I think there's actually a word for this in Greek, a verb for the destruction of the soul. And after this, there's no memorials for it, no candles are lit and it's gone. It's not in heaven, hell, purgatory, anywhere. And this is one of the biggest heresies I can think of.

Michelle: Like I said, I think it comes through so strongly when you start unpicking this aspect of research, of belief system, because I came across such a fascinating case, and I'm sure you've heard of it, involving the murder of a young man called William Eden in the summer of 1829 in Buckingham. His two murderers were on trial, and his wife is basically there giving evidence. And there are kind of some really startling things that come up because of the evidence that she's giving. One is the fact that she talks quite openly as part of her testimony that she had visitations from her husband at the point of death. That's, first of all, something that is there in the transcript, in records reported at the time, in newspaper articles and so on, who are covering this case. The fact that she's openly talking about and submitting as evidence her husband coming to see her, to tell her what happened to him and how he died. But the response to that is also the remarkable bit, because in this court of law, where this is a case of murder, two men up for this very serious charge, I mean, her husband was very brutally attacked. He had his throat slashed, his chest was brutally butchered. And the response from the court, from the judge, from the prosecution, from the defense, from everybody listening, is not to somehow see that as well. Here is this witness, totally discredited, because how can we believe anything she says? Now she's talking ghosts. Yes, it is a matter of fact. It is taken as a matter of fact that this existence, this moment, her experience, happened. So therefore, they're not denying the existence of ghosts, they are accepting the existence of ghosts. That's the second really truly remarkable thing. And then the third is her testimony is that she carried out this test with one of those thought to be responsible for the murder, someone called Benjamin Tyler. She basically tested his innocence or guilt by bringing him to see her husband laid out. Deceased.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yes.

Michelle: To see if, as he approached her husband's body, if her husband would start spontaneously bleeding. Because the belief being that if they started bleeding near someone, that is proving their guilt, because the blood is that kind of representation of that person's soul, their spirit saying, pointing to the guilty party. And all three of those things come through in her testimony alone and they are taken as fact, which is fascinating.

Dr. Richard Sugg: It is. I mean, I think it was more formally recognized as law in the early modern period, where I first came across that, and there were quite a few stories about the corpse bleeding in the presence of a murderer. And murderers took this seriously and would keep away from the corpse or were reluctant to be summoned to it, to have their guilt proved by this. But as with so many things, it keeps going longer than you'd think, into context, where you're pretty startled that this is still happening. I mean, I honestly don't know what to make of the mechanics of it. Stranger things do happen on behalf of the dead, of course, and they might be less wronged than that. It might just been buried in the wrong place or in the wrong fashion. But it does remind me that, again, you seem to be at the mercy of particular judges, juries, lawyers in these cases, because one of the cases I was pretty startled by when rounding them up for a century of ghost stories was amazing. One in which a chap called Dunn D-U-N turns up in 1826 at the local magistrate's court, I think it is, and he's very agitated and he wants to explain what's happened to him last night in his lodgings in Tuley Street, where somebody has come to his room and you get this extraordinary kind of slippage between worlds. Because the ghost, which he sees as a tall, grave looking figure dressed in black is visibly there and also speaks. And first off, the ghost simply says, Wetherel clean my boots and prepare my supper. And the character Dunn doesn't really know what to say and then sees the ghost vanish through the wall and goes through the wall and has gone. He waits and presently it comes back again. And now we've got a completely different scenario where the dead man is telling him, I am the body of a murdered man and I was murdered near here and you can seek for my body and find it. And he clearly wants justice. And yet you've got that weird kind of sense that at one point he's in his normal I don't know that I'm dead. I'm that kind of ghost and I'm just giving my instructions to my valid as I would in life. And in the next he's kind of jolted somehow that, hang on, this is a living person and I can get my story across. And, yeah, he gets poor old Dunn gets short shrift in this case and they're just kind of impatient to have him out of the court. So I think it doesn't go anywhere, but, yeah, over and over again, ghosts do make their way into court, into the lives of police, into the lives of lawyers, judges. And, of course, the fact being, I think, that when you realize how common ghosts and poltergeist occurrences actually are, the ODS are that, yeah, solicitors, barristers, judges, police are going to be victims of them. As in fact, in the case of a police station. I haven't managed to trace it recently, but eight years, up to 1978, a lady in black, so kind of obeying some decent ghost film etiquette, haunts a police station in Painton, Devon. Fairly new building, I think, erected on the site of a house where women said to committed suicide and rooms are mysteriously ransacked, papers are hurled across corridors, lights are switched on and off. And we have a police investigator, Leslie Skinner, saying several police officers claim to have seen the ghost and to have been shaken by, you know, it's visible, it's active, and it's up to tricks for eight years.

Michelle: Yeah, I mean, I have to say, it's something that I kind of feel like I'm going to have to talk to my brother and his partner who are both in the police now, because I kind of want to know what they would do if they were presented with something like this. Because like you said, the more you look, the more you find that this is something very much that sits within this fear. And yet we don't seem to talk about how it impacts on law, on what the police do, how they handle it, how it's recorded, all of this stuff. It's just kind of happening, but nobody's really aware of it. And like I said, it's so fascinating when we think about what we were talking about here. You've got really interesting parts of history that, again, I don't think are particularly well known and spoken of, but really does speak to belief systems around the dead and spirits coming back. Because this whole point of crentation, which is that touching of a corpse to see if they bleed, is on the premise of, well, it's almost the blood calling out for justice. That the soul, the spirit of that person is remaining in the blood. And it's almost like a process of divination whereby as that person gets closer to them, it's going to be attracted to the person who's killed them or done something to them because it's crying out for justice. It's their moment to set things right. Again and again, you see that kind of echoing through in other examples, whether it's a death premonition, whether it's the sighting of a husband, a spouse coming through a child, where they're coming through to tell what has happened to them. You have this kind of coming through time and time again of somehow this spirit wanting to be heard in death. And it's so fascinating when you start uncovering these stories, because they are literally everywhere and like you mentioned, they go really, really late. I mean, in terms of Creentation, this belief that if you touch the corpse or if you get close to it's going to bleed if you've done wrong, that went on until 1869 in America.

Dr. Richard Sugg: 1869, yes. I guess if it was going to be anywhere that late, as far as the developed world goes, it would be America. But that is still quite surprising. Yeah.

Michelle: Which is just an absolute marvel to think that you've got. And again I've come across I can't tell you how many cases of someone being picked up, literally being taken straight round to the coroner's inquest where they are then forced to touch the corpse or get close to the corpse so that those who are there that day the magistrate, the judge, whoever else is there present, can see what happens to the corpse. And that's enough evidence then to say, yes, enough here to say, we think we can prosecute, that there's evidence here of murder. Which is fascinating.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah. I really must I'm making a note here. I must ask Michael Bell, who's a veteran, he's now 80 American folklorist and he's written a couple of books now on American Vampire beliefs, so that will be something he will probably have come across and we can see if we can get it a bit later. Still, I wouldn't be surprised. But, yeah, in terms of recent testimony from the other side, and they never quite got to the bottom of who it was trying to get through, but there was a possible suspect for it, identified by a medium. Things have changed dramatically in just the last I'm trying to think of the date now. I think about 1011 years since Caroline Mitchell had the courage to publish an epic Poltergeist account, Paranormal Intruder. And September 2010, you had a visitor to her house watching Liquid appearing. Anyone who knows Poltergeist be fairly familiar with this kind of trick. Liquid was appearing from midair, just below a ceiling. You think, in common sense terms, well, hey, it's coming through the ceiling. They checked the ceiling, it was dry. They checked the floor above and that was dry. Also, this witness signed a statement to say that he had seen this and he was Paul Brassy, a police officer and colleague of the householder Caroline Mitchell. And I'll be interested to know what you find from your inquiries, because Mitchell endured this with her family and young children and her partner Neil for years, actually. Years. And she almost cracked up. She was a veteran police officer and this was the most terrifying and the most stressful thing she'd ever dealt with. They were forced out of the house very, very quickly, particularly because they've got young children and were constantly staying in quite cramped conditions with, I think it was Neil's or Caroline's parents, but fleeing to them because they simply couldn't live there. And it went on for years. It actually centered on Neil so far from a typical kind of poltergeist agent, but it's very much persecuting him. It followed him out of the house. Talk about showers of stones, showers of stones kind of falling on him as he ran down the drive into his car to escape. And then as he sat there in the car, they fell through the car on top of him in the car. It followed him to the pub. They got tables jerked about, glasses thrown about in, I think, more than one pub locally. And, yeah, absolutely appalling ordeal in which they had, I think, two or three police witnesses. They give their accounts at the end of the book and, yeah, Mitchell got tremendously useless help from the local Catholic church. Was actually cracking moment, would make a lovely TV drama moment. One day, they finally managed to get the attention of a local father and this character was telling Neil that she and Caroline must live, quote, as brother and sister until they were actually married because they weren't. So, having given this helpful advice, he suddenly gets the poltergeist in his church office hammering bang, bang, bang on the walls and jumps out of his chair as though for the first time ever. This character who makes his living out of it believes in ghosts.

Michelle: This is where I think it's so fascinating because I think we can look at historical examples and think, oh, gosh, what a load of superstition magic that they believe all of these things. I mean, how incredulous is it to think that you can touch a corpse and it's going to tell you if someone's a murderer or not? Or are they really going to believe a witness who has a visitation from someone they love and they're using that as testimony. We can kind of think that that's really quite absurd. But the fact is, the existence of ghost is there in the law. It's common law of ghosts. So you have common law roads, common law housing, all of these things. So you have that in law. So they're not denying the existence of ghosts.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Sure.

Michelle: They are simply expecting that the case presents some credible witness to either highlight that this is an example of a haunting or disprove that there's nothing happening in this instance, within that scope, they're not denying that ghosts don't exist. So, in other words, there is nothing written anywhere in law saying ghost is a preposterous thing. There's no scientific evidence that it's real. Therefore we're not going to ever discuss. It in a court of law. The fact is it's there. The existence of it is undeniable. It's the position of those taking part to be credible enough to prove their case for or against. And that's the really interesting bit. Because when you know that and then you start looking at contemporary sources, you get all manner of different examples, whether it's people upset that their house is haunted by a poltergeist that they've just taken over and they're trying to do something about it because they think the previous owner should have informed them of that. They've got huge amounts of records around property disputes when it comes to haunted locations, whether they think that they should have been told something or not, or whether they, as the person trying to sell a property, have the right to not say anything because it might impact on them being able to sell their house. I mean, you've got so many different.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Examples in modern courts, extraordinary kind of maze and minefield, really, because one example that's become famous or notorious in the last few years and came into the press in 1999 is Lowe's Cottage in Derbyshire, which was occupied by Josie and Andrew Smith and fairly young children. And they found the place to be severely haunted as a classic bit of psychokinesis, where Andrew is at his desk and he sees his typewriter starting to vibrate. Now, this is not the kind of thing you see in horror films, but it's well known if you studied enough poltergeist that you can on occasions a Matthew Manning saw it, it's happened in Scotland. You'll see the objects that are going to suddenly go flying with tremendous violence. This is an old fashioned typewriter. They'll vibrate as though something's building know, a force is building up within them and it takes a little while before it gets strong enough that then whoosh your ornament your glass, your chair, your typewriter in this case, goes hurtling across the room. There's pretty active ghosts involved here. I mean, people get kind of groped, the walls, sweat, moisture. A medium gets involved and has more success, really, than the local minister who comes by and does his best, but doesn't really solve the problem. But the medium finds that there's been, I think, a suicide and or a murder on the property which dates back to the 18th century. Anyway, the thing goes to court because point you've made here, the vendor of a house does have a duty to inform any prospective buyers about anything which might affect the property. Obviously, it'd be things like substance or historic problems with the yeah, I mean, I know of a haunted house, not kind of violently active, unlivable, I don't think, but a haunted house in England where yeah, the owners don't really want the story to get out too much. It's a very valuable house. It's probably worth well over a million pounds at ordinary valuation now. Anyway, the case with the smiths and the vendors. It's two sisters in their late 30s, early 40s, goes to court and they run into about the most unsympathetic judge you could hope for in this case. I mean, bear in mind you have the Vicar testifying in court and I think if this had been a Victorian case, actually, the evidence of the Reverend Peter Mockford, vicar of Blurton in Staffordshire would have had a lot more weight. Whereas he's derided, not quite as badly as the Smiths. But the Smiths are described by Judge Stratton as devious and stratton sorry, devious and unreliable. And one of the pieces of evidence against them is the fact that they've read The Amityville Horror, which basically boils down to people living in a haunted house, have started reading up on ghosts and, yeah, they're thrown out of court. They're slandered, arguably, you could say, and made a bit of a laughing stock in the press. And The Guardian, traditionally, in recent decades, one of the worst papers for taking anything paranormal seriously. It's just not ironic and cool enough, has a jolly good laugh at their expense, as does the judge, and cut to 2019, 2020. But pretty recently, they talk to the buyer of the house, who in fact gets it at a bit of a knockdown price. I think it's maybe 50,000 cheaper than it should have sold for. This character seems a very rational, hard headed guy. He's living there with his dog and after he's been living there about 20 years, he gets in touch with The Guardian and says, yeah, I'm living in a haunted house. He's clearly not as haunted as it was with the Smiths, but he describes odd changes in temperature, the dog being pretty spooked, which is a classic index. He describes the walls sweating moisture, and he's a reliable character. He's been there for two decades, and having waited that long, he comes forward and says, yeah, this is a haunted house. This isn't going to affect the judgment retrospectively. But I think what's fascinating about this is you do wonder if the sisters actually did sell the house in completely good faith, because they just weren't the type of people to attract ghosts. The fact was that the Smiths got the biggest whacking of this haunting and they had young children. The character Tim Chilton in there afterwards was on his own, he was middle aged, just him and his dog. So, yeah, it certainly makes sense when you look at the instability of paranormal problems in houses. You've got the case of Denton Hall in the 19th century, and the 20th century is thoroughly haunted as far as lots of visitors are concerned. In the 19th century. It's got a big stately home near Newcastle. It's full of socialites theater people, glamorous, Well hilled types coming to stay from London and then coming down to breakfast in the morning saying, we're leaving straight away. I'm not going to tell you anything that happened. I'm never staying here again. And cut to the early 20th century, I think it is. Couple of elderly ladies live there very happily and comfortably with their silky, which is a kind of brownie or benevolent fairy that sweeps things up for them, drops some little bunches of flowers as Prestons of the stairs, I think makes the fire for them, possibly. But anyway, there'll be a problem with this character when they move on or die, I'm not sure which. The family around the Second World War is a wealthy family with a fairly young boy, and particularly in the boy's room, there's a violent hammering and the family simply can't stay there. Lovely big grand house, historic place, and they simply have to move out. So when I say a minefield, you've not just got to believe in ghosts, you've got to understand how a ghost like kind of litmus paper reacts or haunted house reacts to new tenants and they are touchy.

Michelle: The case that you were just sharing, I think, is a really interesting one. And it reminded me of another one from Ireland, almost very similar in the sense that you had I don't know if you're familiar with the house on the marsh.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yes, I've been looking at this again today, actually.

Michelle: Yeah, just this really interesting example of almost a similar example whereby you've got the owners who don't have children, and she's renting her property out to a married couple who have children, and it's the family moving in, who then suddenly experienced from day one, quite severe disturbances. I mean, Mrs Kinney, who was the wife who moved in, had things physically being thrown at her while she's in bed asleep. And this was documented by so many other people coming to the house, who knew the house, who lived near the house, who would hear all of this, hear this noise in the middle of the night. And the family basically said, we're not paying our rent because you didn't tell us that we would be living and I quote, you didn't tell us we would be living with a supernatural tenant, which is a fascinating way of describing it. And it went to court because they obviously they didn't want to pay their rent. The person who owned it wanted to claim that money. She thought she was entitled to it. In her mind, she'd had no experience or knowledge of this ghost or what they were experiencing. And it went before an Irish judge. She had to prove, basically, you had one side that has to prove that it's real and the other side that proves that it's not real. And in the end, she didn't get her money, did she? Which is fascinating.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Judge Kisby was I'm sure he was a good Catholic or a good Protestant, but he wasn't taking ghosts seriously. And, yeah, that does not matter was the bit that I got quoted, particularly in the report and certainly the aftermath, if you look at the papers after the judgment in England and elsewhere.

Michelle: I was going to say the English reporting of it is fascinating to then see the judgment of what judges here in England had to say on the matter. It is fascinating to see that difference play out.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah, I mean, you've got a situation so common in Britain, particularly, where very few people hold far too much power, go back 400 years, and your problem was not convincing people about the existence of ghosts. It was convincing that you weren't a witch. And the law thoroughly encouraged people to imagine, report these cases, persecute anybody they didn't like, assault them, lynch them, scratch them, you name it. And in fact, one of the things that occurred to me today when I was thinking about this again was that, in fact, the law probably I mean, there were a lot of other factors in play because people were deeply superstitious, but the law probably actually created paranormal phenomena. And I'll give you the example which I was thinking of here. You may know and people may know, and God help you if you sat through a performance of it. The play The Witch of Edmonton which is a strange work drummed up very fast by a few playwrights in the 1620s on the basis of an actual case in which poor old lady who's rather persecuted and alienated from the rest of her community is labeled a witch, has an argument with one of her neighbors about something absurdly trivial, like some soap that a pig's eaten and says something that's construed as a curse. Basically after the act, in the heat of the moment. And the woman who is Agnes Ratcliffe, the woman who conceives that she's been cursed, goes to her bed, is witnessed by her husband foaming at the mouth in a state of absolute terror and dies in around I think it's about three days they dress this up and mess around with it in the play for dramatic effect. But that's what actually happens in the pamphlets that you've got on the case. Pretty famous at the time. And this is obviously a case of voodoo death. It happens all over the world, time and time again. Terror of vampires, terror of ghosts, terror of dark magic of one sort or another. And, yeah, the symptoms are over and over again exactly the same. People die in around three to four days. They're terminally hopeless, they won't eat, they won't drink, they quite often foam at the mouth, have kind of fit and, yeah, this was going on just after the time of Shakespeare in England, in the time of James. I was, of course, notorious for kicking off witch persecutions in Scotland and then bringing them to England. So I would say that although there's a lot of factors in play here, if the highest in the land from the great universities and all the rest of it are encouraging belief in ghosts, then it's probably going to encourage the level of terror. And you can't rule out them having some role in this woman being terrified to death.

Michelle: I think you hit on something really important there, which is that even though this is something obviously written into law that's not denying the existence of ghosts, there is an element of who is there sitting over that judgment, who is there watching the whole thing unfurl as to how they steer it and where it goes. I mean, an example being the Hammersmith Ghost case, which is a fascinating, fascinating account because here you've got something really very much changing legal precedent in terms of a defense being able to put forward. Well, here's a community that's been terrorized by potential ghost sightings and ghost attacks. Here's someone who has gone out and shot and killed somebody dressed in their work uniform. So he was a bricklayer, wasn't he? And the bricklayer uniform was white, wearing white, yeah. And he was shot. He was murdered. And the defense was he genuinely thought he was shooting a ghost. He was defending himself against a ghost attack. And this is before you have really formalized policing. So it was very much up to the individual. But the defense was precisely that. And it was there in law that this could be used as a defense mistaken identity, thinking that something could be a ghost. And the jury were the ones who came back with initially saying, well, we believe him. He genuinely did believe that he saw a ghost. This is a case of manslaughter. And the judge then stepped in to kind of move them towards the judgment of finding him guilty of murder. And then he was subsequently obviously found guilty and sentenced for murder instead of manslaughter, which is where the jury were going with it.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yes.

Michelle: And there's a really good example of how one person can influence the direction of the verdict based on what's happening in their courtroom. Based on what they believe. Yeah, not necessarily the law.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Absolutely, yeah. This was, I think, among other things, a very, very powerful example of how general and how intense terror of ghosts could be among rather more among ordinary people, I think, than the educated. But, yeah, this was a big, big precedent. And that kind of level of terror was something that coroners courts were familiar with right through the 19th century. Because you have a case right in the middle of Victoria London, 1860s, I think it is, around Regents Park where a young girl goes into employment in her teens, I think, in this grand house. And she's only been there a few hours, I think, or certainly just a day or so, when one of her fellow servants for a Jape sort of pick on the new girl perhaps darts out at her boo. I don't know if she's even covered in a white sheet or anything, but darts out at her boo from an alcove or a doorway on a darkened staircase. And the girl, the victim, goes into that terminal shutdown that. You see with voodoo death. And she dies. She simply dies in bed. I can't remember if she goes back to her father's house or not, but she never recovers. She never gets out of bed, and she dies. So it goes to court. And imagine the poor girl who's played the prank is absolutely distraught. But this was not the only case where this occurred. There were court cases where someone plays a pretty crude hoax. I don't know. If it's even dark, they jump out over a fence in a country lame with a white sheet on them as a ghost. And, yeah, the victim dies of terror. There was a case of somebody on the Isle of man. This was actually when I was researching disgust and the kind of reactions to lunacy in the Victorian period, which was a tragic thing for so many people. And this character was shut up in an outhouse by his. Family on the Isle of man character called Dick Waterson in I think around the 1850s or sixty s and he was almost sort of bricked in it's just hole for him to take food through and the conditions in there were unimaginable, as witnesses attested. And the argument was he'd been terrified into madness by a ghost prank. And if you just read that cold, you think absolute rubbish. But when you've read the cases where they've been terrified, to death by a ghost prank, then you think, yeah, it makes sense. So, yeah, the law had good reason to have to deal with this time and time again.

Michelle: Absolutely. And, I mean, it's still a case. The Hammersmith ghost murder case is still something I think that gets talked about and disputed today in terms of how it played out and the precedent that it set. Because, as you mentioned here, you've got a community totally and utterly. Being terrorized. And this was the response that they formalized as a result of that and completely changed the criminal defense routes that you could take afterwards.

Dr. Richard Sugg: It is one of those cases where you can imagine a modern judge saying this was manslaughter committed under the influence of extreme stress or something like that?

Michelle: Absolutely.

Dr. Richard Sugg: It could have been completely different causes or triggers, but the kind of moment of panic where they lose all ordinary kind of control. Is the same. I don't know if this has happened much in America, where whipping out a gun is bit like whipping out a comb, unfortunately. But I imagine it must have done as well.

Michelle: You only have to look. At again articles and things from that time. The terror that people had and to put it into know you've got parts of London terrorized by serial murders, jack the Ripper, et cetera. And here you've got a community where pregnant women are being frightened on their way home, people being attacked and experiencing this level of terror just out in the streets. Ordinary things, them getting on with their lives. And, yeah, it went on for such a long time, didn't it? And just a fascinating response that when someone was frightened to death, to the point where they were arming themselves and going on the streets to patrol for this particular phenomena yeah, I think took matters in their own hands.

Dr. Richard Sugg: The 19th century is fascinating because you've got such a polarization of attitudes. You've got people who are never going to believe in ghosts, even if one sets up camp in their house, and you've got people who will die of terror, and in between you've got all these people exploiting that. And there were a lot of pranks, there were a lot of very silly pranks. There was a character who was quite a respectable old soldier, a tide soldier or something, was going about with a mask and horns and the foolish old Jack and apes was jumping out on Timid know, after dark and things he was had up in court. You've got the whole thing with Spring Heeled Jack, which I can't remember all the endless stories about it now, but I think this was probably a hoax. And yet the consequences could time and again be fatal. And it eerily reminds you of the degree of terror of vampires in Central and Eastern Europe. You're talking about hardened soldiers here, people who dauntless against the Turks, but yeah, will die of terror of what they believe to be vampire, which, funnily enough, a lot of the time probably is actually a ghost or a poltergeist.

Michelle: But don't you think in some ways this is very much evidence of just how very much popular opinion was that most people believed in ghosts or the supernatural to some extent, that these things could happen, and thereby the fact that they were coming through court systems isn't so surprising. And certainly the volume of which they were coming through during the last few hundred years yeah. Is not surprising.

Dr. Richard Sugg: No, I mean, it's a very good point. I mean, the sheer volume of witnesses in some cases. I think if you were a lawyer taking this kind of thing seriously, or a police officer taking this kind of thing seriously, you would mainly look for a poltergeist that hammers the hell out of a house. It's one that is banging, crashing, smashing after dark for several hours, perhaps. Sometimes you'll get huge running footsteps, you might get screams as well. But there was a building next to the White Hart Pub in Poplar in London in the 19th century, where there were hundreds of people out in the streets, because people genuinely were superstitious. I mean, you could just have a sort of branch swinging in front of a lamp at times and this would trigger crowds of hundreds of the police had to deal with. But in this case, what you're listening to in the reports really sounds like a poltergeist. It sounds like a classic hammering poltergeist. And the noise is so colossal that you can't believe it isn't damaging the building. And yeah, the lady here is complaining to local authorities because you've got such vast numbers of people, you've got actually hundreds of witnesses. If you start to take this seriously, you've got hundreds of people. Now, if this had been an apparition that's kind of fairly shy and appears for a few minutes every night or something, the ODS of hundreds of people seeing are very slight. But if you've got a noise that, as we know from other reports, can be heard at least 500 yards away, then you've got hundreds of witnesses just by them standing around in the street. And because you've got a vast kind of unruly crowd public order problem, you've got tons of police as well. So you've got two levels of witnesses at least. And yeah, that case was epic kind of free horror film entertainment in the early 19th century. Just one of many.

Michelle: To sell. Celebrate heading into the spookier season. Autumn nights, howling wind and freezing rain. Halloween spookiness in the dark depths of winter. Haunted History Chronicles will be posting daily podcasts on Patreon on all tiers over there, as well as the usual additional items offered. Signing up now will gain you access to these, as well as all previous archived content. For as little as one pound, you could be getting hundreds of podcasts to enjoy writing source material and more, and know that you are contributing and helping the podcast to continue to put out more content. You can find the link in the episode Description Notes as well as on the Haunted History Chronicles website or social media. So why not come along to enjoy a rich web of accounts perfect for this season dark tales of corpses, ghosts, folklore, Christmas and Halloween, macabre traditions and connections, and a whole lot more. A very special thank you to Renee who came and joined us over on Patreon this week. Here's to celebrating lots more interesting and spooky conversations that we get to have. Thank you so much for your support. And now let's head back to the podcast.

Michelle: I came across a fascinating account from America, I think it was some somewhere around 1905 where I think her name was Mrs. Naggy or Mrs. Naggy, something like that. I can't quite remember the exact spelling and pronunciation. Basically a local newspaper had written an article where they'd mentioned her house being a haunted house and she took offense to that and decided she was going to sue the newspaper because this was untrue, her house was not haunted. And so you have a court case where one side is trying to prove that her house is haunted and she is trying to prove that her house is not haunted.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah.

Michelle: And again, given that the premise of the law is that we're not trying to deny the existence of ghosts. You just have to prove it one way or the other. She lost. She lost completely because there wasn't enough evidence. She failed to prove her burden because the other side, the newspaper had people who could come forward with stories, their own sightings, apparitions, sounds, experiences from before she'd moved in, things they'd heard on the street, hence why they'd put it into the newspaper. And so she lost.

Dr. Richard Sugg: That's a really interesting one, because there's so many cases where, you'll know, like myself, what Keith Linda's endured from simply moving into the wrong house simply as a 42 year old man with his girlfriend of about the same. Age, moving into the wrong house, having had no paranormal experiences in his life until then and now being a kind of encyclopedia of paranormal paranormal possibilities. I was almost going to use the word craziness, but it sounds crazy. I don't imply that he's crazy, but it doesn't stop to this day. It's happened in hotels all across America, his workplace, on planes, in clubs, in bars. The witness level there is extraordinary. And he was clearly aware fairly quickly that the landlord was pretty cool about a lot of damage to the property in a way that he probably wouldn't have been if he hadn't known that this had happened over and over again. Had a lot of tenants for a pretty new house in a short period of time. And of course, over here in England, we've got I was mentioning it to you, I think, the other day, the cage in Essex. I mean, this is one where, if ever a house simply should not be a know, it should be a site for paranormal investigation and not much else. That is the cage. This building built on the site of a prison that used to house alleged mean, absolutely unlivable. And the owner, Vanessa Mitchell, with a young baby, tries to live there amongst a lot of other stuff happening, sees somebody standing over her child's cot and clearly finds she can't stay there much longer. She tries to let it. She gets responses that she understands from the tenant or tenants. She decides presently that it's, I think, in 2010, that it's unlettable, it's unlivable. And she gets in touch with the SPR guy called John Randall, who's written about this very usefully in his recent book on poltergeists. And the degree of strangeness in that building corresponds with the sense that this is not a haunted house where you can come to terms with the ghost and just kind of get used to it. People do in a surprising number of cases. But this is a haunted house where people go in for the first time. They feel like the air is so thick they can barely walk through it. They get violent bursts and spurts of rage towards friends and colleagues out of absolutely nowhere. They're violently reduced to tears or black depression just walking into the house. So yeah. It comes down again to an individual. She's done the right thing here with a property that in Essex nowadays, I imagine could be very valuable, especially if you would sell it as not a foully, haunted dwelling, but a beautiful ancient heritage site with original know here's, original graffiti from the witches and so on. Yeah, it's questions like that, where it really should be a legal matter and it's a very, very difficult matter. I can see that. But if somebody can't live there, this is far worse than a house that's got a bit of damp, that's got a few leaks in the roof, that's got slightly bendy staircases, what have you. This is going to make your days and your nights an utter nightmare torment.

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if you've come across this case before, and this particular ruling called the ghostbuster ruling, have you ever heard of it?

Dr. Richard Sugg: I don't think so, no.

Michelle: Okay. I promise. Anybody listening? I am not pulling a fast one either. This is genuine. You can look this up. It happened in 1991, it was in New York, and it's precisely what you were just talking about. And we've been discussing what do you do if your home is haunted? You're trying to sell it. Do you tell them, do you not tell them you want to get rid of your house, you don't want to live there, but they're going to have to take it over. That kind of what happens in this situation. Well, you have this house up for sale and someone came to view it. They loved it. According to the estate broker who was taking them around, she informed them that the house was haunted based on things that she'd been told by the current owner. And at the time of telling this person, as they're going around, he made a joke of it, saying, oh, we'll have to get ghostbusters in, or something to that effect. Took it completely lightly, signed the contract. So this is now a legal document. A week later, he wanted to meet up with the owners to discuss the haunting in more detail.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah.

Michelle: And they obviously told him all the things that they'd been experiencing, which were quite profound by all accounts. And his response was he didn't want to own that property anymore. He didn't want to be going into buying this property. Now, whether that's a case of he just changed his mind or he got spooked by what he was being told, but he had signed a legal document, he'd paid a down payment, it's legally binding, and he wanted out of it. And so at that point, what he basically did was to not go through with the final stage of completing that purchase and he lost his down payment, which was a sizable amount of money, to which he tried to sue to get that money back, saying he hadn't been told about the haunting in enough detail or hadn't. Been told about it at all. And it went before the court and it played out. You had all the evidence, all the testimony, all the people dragged in to say, no, we told them all the rest of it. And the judge ruled. And it is called the ghostbuster ruling. It's not the responsibility of the owner. There is nothing legally binding, nothing legally forcing you to disclose things to do with the nature of ghosts haunting, to do with your house. And therefore this man had to deal with the fact that he'd lost his money by refusing to go through with the sale. And this case, during the kind of the height of it playing out, apparently caused such controversy because people were really worried about what this meant for them. You had people who were buying houses, calling up local courthouses or their local estate brokers to kind of see what that would mean for them if they're trying to buy a house. On the flip side of that, they were being inundated with people selling their houses, going, oh, my God, do I have to tell people that there's this, this and this happening in my house? Or can I keep it quiet?

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah.

Michelle: And it sparked this real thing of people were obviously having this kind of a situation happen. What do they do? Where were they in terms of the law at that point with this kind of playing out?

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah.

Michelle: Fascinating.

Dr. Richard Sugg: It's a great one. It's going to seem crazy to a lot of people, perhaps, but the best ODS there is when you go to view a property, you take a medium with you. You pay them good money, and you were better off spending that money on a medium than on a very heavyweight survey in a lot of cases. Because a brand new house that barely needs surveying can be built on the site of a very, very haunted area or disaster or whatever it might be. Graves End is one case. Keith's house is a notorious case. And the ghostbusters thing reminds me of something rather different, which I think we ought to talk about because it's an absolutely huge legal case. But I did also want to share the on this kind of note more directly comparing. I don't know if you know, there is a lovely example from Lancashire Chingle Hall, which this title is thrown around rather carelessly, the Most Haunted House in England. It's been described as pretty ancient property. And Professor Trevor Kirkham, a Canadian eye specialist, sued the vendors of Chingle Hall for 71,000 pounds because it was not haunted as had been claimed. So, yeah, it can cut either way. I think that Ghostbuster Gusta's ruling gives you that sense that everybody really has something to gain from a much more open conversation about stuff that is affecting thousands of people in a given city, but which they don't talk about in this age of proud transparency, proud breaking of taboos. They do not talk about this kind of thing. But yeah, the ghostbusters thing comes into focus for me. In a case which was an epic trauma for a young woman, carol Compton left a fairly sheltered experience. I think she was barely out of her teens in Scotland when she fell in love with an Italian who was visiting Scotland and she was so smitt with him, decides to become engaged, wants to get married and off she goes with him to Italy. He's busy a lot of the time serving in the army and she gets herself employment as a nanny so as to support herself prior to marriage and perhaps after. And yeah, she's apparently a very good nanny in most respects. The families like her, the children like her and she for some reason we don't understand, I mean she's perhaps a little bit highly strung, she's roughly the kind of right age. Perhaps it is more likely that poltergeist agents are female. Historically it seems to have been the case for whatever reason, fires break out around her. There's a little bit of minor poltergeist stuff in the account where a picture will fall off the wall as she passes Vase, an ornament or shoot off stand as she's walking down the corridor. So there's a little bit of nerviness from her employers when they witness this. But yeah, the really big stuff is when you get serious fires and they occur in the bedroom of the child who is in her care. Now, this happens in three different locations with two different families and with a baby seemingly threatened by deadly fires. I mean, fortunately nobody has actually hurt baby or anybody in the family. But the fires are pretty heavyweight stuff. I mean, they destroy big parts of properties. You can see that she's going to be put in the spotlight and because of the Italian legal system, she spends a tremendous amount of time simply in know she goes over there with what seems to be the love of her life, all of her future before her young experiencing Italy for the first time and she finds herself in prison. She finds initially that her cellmates are actually quite frightened of her as well. There's all sorts of stuff about witchcraft flying around not only in Italy but back in Scotland. Her mother loses her job up in Scotland because of local kind of gossip flying around about witchcraft and the paranormal and yeah, this runs and runs from spring 82 to the trial in December 1983. Now this was absolutely extraordinary affair because Compton refused to believe that the fires could have been classic poltergeist fires. She had lots and lots of weight on her side. She had Guy Playfair, and I'm trying to think who else it might have been one of the people from the Max Planck Institute who dealt with the Rosenheim poltergeist, but it was certainly some heavyweight stuff. And Playfair was very willing to speak up for her as an expert witness who'd seen plenty by this time with Enfield kicking off in the late seventy s. And she also had fairly independent of that two fire experts who had called in to the sites of the fire simply to analyze them as they would have done with any other case of fire, whether it's believed to be accident, electrical, malicious arson, whatever. And they both said more or less, in 20 years, in 40 years of studying fires, I have never seen a fire that behaved like this. I think one of the things one of them said was that the fire burned through a sofa downwards, not upwards. I mean, try and fake this if someone is paying you to do so. She was lucky to escape not going to prison, she was lucky to escape not being convicted of manslaughter or attempted manslaughter. And in the end she was sent home just after December 1983 because she'd spent so much time in prison that they discounted this off any kind of sentence. But this was stuff that wrecked her life for quite a long time and could have wrecked it for far longer. And yeah, there was so little knowledge about these things. I mean, you and I have seen crazy, crazy accounts of fires where in a farm in America in the 1940s, hundreds of fires break out in a week. I mean hundreds. And they start like this. A brown spot forms on a wall, gets darker and darker, it gets hotter and hotter, bursts into flames. Fires don't behave like that in normal cases, electrical or malicious or deliberate or whatever it might be. And I'll always remember the fire chief from Illinois there saying the whole thing is so wacky and crazy I'm almost embarrassed to talk about know. And there you are. If people could talk about these things, compton might have known that, yeah, these people are on your side and what they're saying makes sense. And what they're saying is far from the only case. They may not have seen this before, but this has happened over and over again.

Michelle: I can't agree with you more. I think it's really telling the more you look into these things, the sheer volume of examples coming through the court system that really do highlight the need to keep that discussion open as to the types of experiences that people are having. Because you see it coming through in so many different ways and it's really revealing. And the response to it is really quite vast and spread and polarizing and different depending on who's in charge, which country, et cetera. But it's happening all over. I mean, I found cases literally all over the world right up to now, like literally right up to now.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah. And as that implies, really, if it's so widespread, if it's so common, the one thing that every country has got, they vary a lot and they can be better or worse but every country has got a legal system. It has got judges, jurists, solicitors, barristers and police. And I got a lovely one, which I hadn't seen until I started rummaging about for this show just a few days ago, 1910. A judge has moved into a lovely big, remote house with his wife, who I think was quite a bit younger than him. So your judge is probably fairly senior as they are, but the wife, if there's a possible kind of agent for the activity, is a lot younger. Anyway, this house near Cumbra in Portugal looks a lovely, desirable residence, very peaceful and all the rest of it. And, yeah, they're forced out of the property in no time from a severe haunting, with the result that probably because this is a person of some status, particularly he's a judge, the police get quite heavily involved and three men are set to watch for a night in the bedroom, which has been particularly haunted. So, again, you can see the possibility of the wife acting as an unwitting agent and along the nearby corridor. And as soon as the light has gone out, the man in the corridor is wildly shouting and the others rushed to, his assistants find him hammering at the walls. And I'm quoting here from the newspaper report, quite insane. So, yeah, I mean, people who, out of professional pride, are trained to keep their cool under stress. And this one in 1910, I mean, what happened to this character? Do you recover? I don't know. But bearing in mind that you have these Victorian cases of people perfectly happy and sane and then terrified into lunacy, apparently in more than one case a strange little detail here, which is something very occasionally comes up. But I'm quoting here an extraordinary feature of the manifestations, if the newspapers may be relied upon is that the servants who have slept in another wing of the house had never heard the slightest noise or witnessed anything unusual until the night when they were aroused by the struggle in the bedroom. So it's a tricky one. There's not enough data to go on, I think, but certainly cases where veteran investigators like Scott Rogo found that you could hear a noise on one side of an open doorway, but not on the that close that locally. So I don't know if it had that going for it as well. But yeah, I just think it's such.

Michelle: An area under talked about and it's such a shame that there isn't a database where you can really pull these types of experiences that have come through the judicial system because it really is so very fascinating. And it kind of almost shows an evolution in some degrees, in the sense that cases that are more contemporary very much seem to be focused around an element of a contract, either will or a housing dispute. As I kind of mentioned, some of those examples I've shared compare that to earlier, and you've got far more cases involving some kind of aspect to do with a murder or poltergeist, taunting effectively when you look at the type of things being shown. But there is a real kind of movement then towards really people are using this to report things that they're experiencing based on a document of law, be it a contract for a will or some kind of contract around a house, which I don't know. That in itself is quite an interesting movement, a sea change. And maybe it's just a reflection of society and how our attitudes have shifted and where we kind of have these experiences or where we feel we can talk about it or where we feel maybe we I don't know. It's an interesting movement. It's something that's a bit of a conundrum.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah.

Michelle: Are you taking more seriously if you're bringing it up with regards to your house? As opposed to if you mention, oh, this terrible tragedy has affected my family and the person came to visit me in the moment of their death. Is it to do with not being believed again, this kind of notion that you can't really say some things anymore without being fear of persecuted as someone who's not going to be taken credibly. I don't know.

Dr. Richard Sugg: I thoroughly agree with you about the database when you think that law in its own right is all about precedents and previous cases and previous experiences. And yet it would also be a hugely valuable thing for paranormal investigators, for people who are suffering this kind of problem, to feel that they're part of a community and they're not sort of some batty lunatic fringe. But yes, certainly the thing about the document was focused very powerfully in 1925 in the Chaffin family in America, whereby the will of the deceased James L. Chaffin, which was originally drawn up in 1905 when he was 57, was contested by different members of his family. I won't go into all the details about who was receiving what, but it was quite surprising that a lot of people had been left out of the first will. And presently one of these people who's been left out sees the father who's by this time dead, and he's instructed by James to look in his old Bible and yeah, allegedly finds a new will. And the whole thing goes to court and has been running on and on down into the hands of Mary Roach, who I think has got it wrong. I have to say respectfully, has had a handwriting expert in and. Seems to find that the kind of forensic argument against the ghost of Chaffin having turned up with this. You know, it's a pretty heavyweight one in court with a family divided around the visit of a ghost.

Michelle: I came across a really interesting one where I think it was around the same time, around 1905, so similar kind of time frame that you were just reporting about and it's McClary versus Stool Stul. And basically, the widow was asking to invalidate the will based on the fact that she had received information from her deceased husband who wanted to make changes by a communication on a Ouija board.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah.

Michelle: And it was granted.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Right.

Michelle: It was allowed to happen. It was allowed to be changed.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Okay.

Michelle: Because, again, she had evidence that that was true. The only thing she had to prove was that it had happened. She'd experienced that the other side was to try and disprove that it had happened to her at all, and they couldn't. So the will was amended to suit those changes and those reflections. And so, yeah, it is fascinating to see this movement towards it being much more contractual, something tied to something of significance, property will, probate, anything of those that kind of nature, where maybe it seems more credible to kind of use the court for that. Can people go through some of the other things that people were doing, using the court for and kind of sharing their beliefs and ghosts and apparitions in the way that they had been 200 years before that? I don't know.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah. Well, of course, the point that's really reverberated throughout so much of this for me and this is beyond just the actual courtroom scenarios, is that so much of the evidence I've got is simply things that people have told me, people who are complete strangers. A lot of the time in good weather, you can walk around the park, you can ask people about ghosts. You can get two, three, four credible ghost stories, which sometimes they'll follow up for you on email. In a day, I was getting my bike from the library, and there was a young woman having a smoke. I'll ask her if she's got an experience. Immediately, her eyes lift up. She's been waiting to talk about this for a long time. She lived in a haunted school. The gym equipment, heavy weights would be thrown around the gym in this boarding school. She saw it. Her friends saw it. And to this day that she's speaking to me very keen to talk about this, her boyfriend won't believe that it ever happened. I know you think you saw what you say and so on, and I think that's a very big thing about the gendering of a lot of this, and perhaps partly women being just more open about things generally, whether or not they're more psychic. But yeah, the fact that in a court of law, when somebody simply says something, they are taken seriously. An awful lot of people, if I present them these stories, of which got a colossal number, will say, oh, this is purely anecdotal, as though the word anecdotal is an automatic kind of downgrade insult, flimsiness and so on. But it's anything but in a court of law, and amongst many paradoxes, what do you do in most courts of law in the Western world? Throughout history. You swear on a Bible, you swear on that thing whose core belief is the survival of the soul into an afterlife problem, admitting that it's going to come back a surprising amount of times from that afterlife. But people who would swear on the Bible that it has in their house, their life, their garden in more than one different property and yeah, there's the court of law, there's the will, there's to many people, rather excessive respect for property in Western legal culture. And yet there's also ones where people try to bypass the police. A case which is a lovely one for all sorts of reasons is Dr. Elizabeth Mayer in California. A straightforward materialist, very straight, conventional academic psychologist at the university living near Oakland has a young daughter who becomes infatuated with a harp that she plays. And it's a particular kind of beautiful instrument, this one that she's got. But she plays a school concert just before Christmas one year and while people are milling about taking congratulations after performance, the harp is stolen from the backstage area. Daughter's absolutely distraught. She won't accept a substitute, she won't accept anything else, which mayor can probably afford to buy her. And so mayor goes to the police. It's probably gone out of the area long ago. I'm very sorry, it's awful, but our experience is that you're not going to get this recovered. So she really is a young girl in her early teens or younger, distraught, does everything she can think of. And then finally, at a wit's end, a colleague, I think at the university says, well, look, you'd be surprised, but there are these dowsers, these people call themselves dowsers and they can locate objects of all sorts from a distance. So she gets in touch with a guy called Harold McCoy, who lives in, I think, our Kansas, around 2000 miles away, and simply over the phone very quickly, within minutes of talking to him, McCoy says, yeah, it's still in the area. And then he gets a bit more precise with a map and he narrows down, I think the street, possibly the house, she simply goes with some money to a parking lot after having put a poster or two around, pays the money, gets the heart back. And this is one thing in its own right, but it changes Maya's life in terms of the paranormal. And she has her own paranormal experiences afterwards. She writes a whole book on this called Extraordinary Knowing. And yeah, I think this is probably one example that could easily have slipped under the radar if she was too embarrassed to talk about it. She wasn't. She's a strong character. But it is said that the police do rely on these kind of people, whether they're called remote viewers. Some of them, I think, are ex policemen or women themselves. And yeah, they are used to find missing persons, bodies, the sites of where a murder victim is buried and so, you know, been used by the CIA on the one side, by the FSB, the KGB on the other side, to spy from thousands of miles away on Russian or American military installations. So there's another legal problem in its own right, but, yeah, it's not the kind of thing the police want to talk about again. It's kind of gray, it's muddy, it's a bit embarrassing, but if it works, use it.

Michelle: But I think this is the part of that sea change, isn't it? Again, go back 100 years, 200 years, go back longer. And that would have been different. It would have been accepted as somewhat normal, whereas now it's a bit more hush hush and taboo, but yet it's still there. There's still evidence of it, and it's just gone underground. And that's the difference. And it doesn't have the same kind of popular attention. If we're being really very clear as to how prolific this was, you could look into an awful lot of cases and find evidence of this. There's evidence of paranormal activity and death, apparitions and sights of ghosts and victims. In the Jack the Ripper case, I mean, an awful lot of people gave testimony to seeing their loved one at the moment of their death or seeing that person on the street corner. That's in the scant documentation that survived from the inquests. And then you've got other cases that are really kind of well known. Things like the Red Barn murder in Suffolk, where the stepmother was having dreams that her stepdaughter had been murdered the year before. And what she was being told, these letters that she was receiving weren't actually from this poor girl. And she sent her husband out to investigate this barn where she'd seen the body concealed. Lo and behold, she finds the body. And that person, well, they weren't actually married. He was trying to avoid the marriage. That was the problem, was put on trial. It garnered huge amounts of attention all the way through to when he was executed, because it had every element of ghosts, sightings of ghosts being reported in the trial. This sensational story in itself with this murder and how it was revealed when he's executed his corpse is so valuable. They're selling locks of his hair. There are portions of his scalp with the ear attached in shops for people to buy. They were people buying parts of the rope for a guinea.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah.

Michelle: This was so noteworthy and interesting and so believed people were really invested in this. This was a case of the truth has come out, this ghost has come through, this apparition has come through to tell her story, and the bad guy's gone down. And it's that. But if that happened today in a modern court of law, can you imagine if someone dared try and suggest that a loved one was coming through to them and explain what happened to them?

Dr. Richard Sugg: Well, the funny thing is, although you've got this very polarized situation with the reporters are clearly very sardonic in a lot of these cases. They're tediously quoting old hoary bits of Shakespeare and Hamlet and Macbeth about ghosts. They don't need to say it kind of in so many words, but they clearly think it's a load of absolute rubbish. But it'll make a good story for certain kind of readers, so they'll go with it. Then you've got judges who can be, again, skeptical, derisive, incredulous, what have you, but you've also got the crisis apparition. So one there where somebody is never exactly clear. They see the relative, husband, wife, son, mother, et cetera, at the moment of their death in the condition in which they've been killed, perhaps if it's, say, violence or warfare. And, yeah, there's a case in the Victorian period where a soldier in the Indian Mutiny, obviously a long way from London, is killed. I think the Siege of Luck now, and his wife and also friends in London see him looking terrible with blood coming down his chest in their houses in London. And the poor widow presently has the official certificates of his heroic death of the siege, the date of the death, the exact time, pretty much from witnesses. And she says, no, this is not right. She kind of subtracts the time difference and everything between India and Britain, and she's still convinced that he died at this time because she saw him at this time, allowing for the time difference, and the other witnesses say the same. So the War Office or the military, whatever, corrects their records after a bit of investigation and said, yeah, we've talked to some other people, and you're right. So I don't know how much this you'd call this legal, but it's pretty official stuff because the army is about as OCD as any lawyer can ever be. And the question with the educated came to light in 1881, when there was a ghost in a possible ghost in Shropshire, a copper hole ghost, and an awful lot of kind of digging and rummaging in the hole to find the body of a murdered person was done. And things were a bit inconclusive. But the fact was, the ghost story got a lot of press ran and ran, and because it did, a lot of other people suddenly started putting forward their ghost stories. And a lot of these reports come from the Daily Telegraph. So you've got a lot of people of status, often male, often no nonsense characters. They sound like kind of ex military types, or legal types, for that matter. And in terms of a crisis apparition, one of the best I've ever seen is one of these no nonsense Victorian gents writing into the Telegraph with this sense of a kind of critical mass. Incidentally, you know, that we, the educator, can now talk about this because the first two people have done it. So we'll follow suit and they come and come. These letters and yeah, this chap is simply having a nice holiday in Brighton and he goes out for a meal with friends. It's a nice moonlit night, warm and pleasant, so he walks back along the seafront to his hotel some distance, and suddenly, as he's walking along the other side of the railings, he sees a carriage pulling up and he hang on, that's my aunt. I think it's his aunt whose grandmother was one of the other. He sees this carriage he knows very well, he knows the particular servant who's driving. I think there's somebody also riding on the outside and he sees his arm. I think, what the heck is a very elderly lady in her 80s doing in Brighton at this time of night? It's about twelve or one in the morning when she actually lives in Cheltenham. And sure enough, in a matter of hours, he gets the telegram that she's died. And although this kind of looks like an outtake from an Mr. James story, really, the whole carriage, the horses, the servants if you think about it, the fact that's well known across ghost cases over and over again is that the ghost, the poltergeist, exhibits its human personality, sometimes malicious, sometimes violent. You might even call it evil, but a lot of the time, just quite ordinary. And know a case in Ireland where the guy who was causing trouble as a poltergeist just wanted to have his debts paid because he died suddenly and he felt bad about it. So, yeah, this old lady appears in death with all the status that she expected in life. And over and over again you get these cases. People are actually hundreds or thousands of miles away turning up at somebody's door. For a few moments, their carriage is hurt again, bringing them there and hang on, I thought this chap was in India. And then he disappears and you get the notice of his death. But they come back to say goodbye. A startling amount. And, yeah, if they get kind of enough backing and enough company, the most kind of no nonsense, educated, sort of hoary old Victorian gents will come out about this.

Michelle: Yeah. And again, I think it's one of my takeaways, having looked into this, is this sense of when was it okay? When has it been okay to talk about things? And why has that changed? There does seem to have been this movement from kind of this belief in magic or things of the supernatural and things of this kind of nature almost moving towards a bit more let's only think of it as contractual, a bit more precise, and a bit more kind of closeted in. I think the other takeaway that I've got is just that if we think about the paranormal field and researchers, investigators, everybody along that spectrum, there is this thing, isn't there, where I don't believe you. Show me the evidence, show them the evidence. Well, I don't believe that. Evidence because I wasn't there. And that could be faked and that could be a hoax. Right. You hear it all the time. If you don't have anything, it's anecdotal, but if you give something, it's kind of rubbished away. And yet, actually, if you look at the court system, if you look at law, if you look at what from what I can see is there in the wording and actually how it should play out, the opposite is true. It's the other way around. And that I find fascinating, that there is that reversal within kind of this umbrella that actually it's not about trying to prove the existence of ghosts. That's, taken as fact, the opposite. You've got to prove that it doesn't exist, really, in a court of law, if you go by the wording. And that kind of shift is so fascinating to me to know that it's there. But whether it actually happens is something different. But, yeah, it's just such an interesting topic. Fascinating.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah. It's been great to go back to this.

Michelle: I'd love lawyers and barristers and people with experiences. If they've got stories, if they know.

Dr. Richard Sugg: More well, I think they will have. I mean, three cracking ghost stories I got from Durham or from a student of mine who is now a barrister, and they were important ones. He got three in his own family alone. And, I think law, the church, the professions, this tiny elite that's run Britain, really, particularly England, for such a long time. It's been a mess from the time of god knows, some people would say it all went rotten with the Norman Conquest, but certainly it was a very corrupt elite in lots of ways in the time of James I or Charles. I mean, look where that ended. But it got particularly kind of strange, I think, to take up your point about people's belief in magic, or what would be construed as magic. In about the mid 18th century, I came to realize, when studying the decline of corpse medicine or medicinal cannibalism, people like Dr johnson and other educated characters started to turn violently against us. And it was really because it didn't fit the Enlightenment, it didn't fit this clean, rational, materialistic drive into some brave new future. And so there was a kind of false desire to shut out all sorts of phenomena, which some of them, of course, were genuinely superstitious. I mean, they were genuinely malign and harmful. People were still being murdered, persecuted, attacked as witches, men and women, right into the late 19th century in Britain. But having kind of decided on this brave, new, grand, clean, rational Protestant philosophy, the educated failed to give anything else to about the other 90% of the population who carried on using whatever was to hand and relying on magic in all sorts of situations, whether it's for stolen goods, lost goods, illnesses, et cetera. Et you know, when you talk about the relics from that case, people buying bits of the rope, People were touching corpses in huge numbers at Know as long as public hangings lasted all across Britain to cure skin complaints and unsightly disfigurements and so on. So, yeah, I think there's a kind of lingering guilt you see sometimes in these furiously indignant accounts about peasant mass, working class superstition because these people perhaps actually dimly recollect that they were responsible for a lot of tyranizing of supposed witches. And then when they changed their minds, they were so cut off from ordinary people that they had no idea how they lived, how difficult their lives were and yeah, how natural the paranormal was or superstition was, whether it was one or the other or a kind of mixture of both.

Michelle: Yeah, it's just this disconnect, isn't it? And I think we still see it. I think it's that bit in between of the stuff that we don't talk about enough.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, coming closer to our own times. Not long before Ghostbuster, which I brought in a while back know, shortly after Carol Compton's recovering from all this trauma back home in Britain. The paranormal is one big whopping great joke on cinema streams all across Britain and America. Ghostbusters coming out in 984. I can remember the damn song. He never got the damn thing off the radio for weeks and weeks. But yeah, a little bit before that. Although probably actually running quite close to that. The film must have been in production by the time that this ended in Thornton Road in Birmingham in 1981. Three houses, I think, in a terrace so kind of singled out pretty tightly and exactly were pelted with stones night after night after night. Residents wore tin hats, they tacked up chicken wire across the windows. And sure enough, presently the police are involved. Frozen police officers during the winter perch in trees. And presently Chief Inspector Len Turley admits to the press we have spent more than 1000 man hours on this case. If we even knew the reason for it, we would be one step nearer. And Turley never got any nearer. This case went on for three mean, you know, three nights having stones hurled at your house could cause some people to crack. But three years? One of the victims thought it hastened the death of his elderly mother. And yeah, they can roughly see where these stones are coming from. They think, what sort of technology would you need to hurl things from that distance? Because obviously they get as far as they can in that direction to try and find anybody in Canon. And it looks like so many other cases stone throwings going on, I mean, overlapping. In 1983, there was one going on in the Tucson desert and it's a completely lonely, detached house. Burke Bigler family out there. You've got police, vigilantes, floodlights and the only kind of COVID was scrub bushes. But at such a distance that you'd have to stand up, to get the stones to hit the house, so you're completely visible in the glare of the spotlights. And again, two months of bombardment is a bit shorter, but must have felt like a lot of the time, no results, no culprits, no rational, as it were. Solution.

Michelle: Honestly, I just think it is such as I said, I just think it's a topic so lacking an area of discussion, so underutilized in terms of researching, looking at these different examples and cases all over the place and then talking about what it's showing. Again, I just think it highlights the need to really look at what we've got and be able to talk about these things a bit more openly and for people to feel like they can actually share their experiences a bit more openly, if they're having them. Where do they go? What do you do? Who do you speak to without fear of ridicule or someone looking at you strangely?

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah, I think that's, know, Caroline Mitchell deserves a medal, really, for publishing her account. She had to self publish it because she just couldn't get a publisher, which speaks volumes in its own right, really, it was an extremely valuable account, first person account, very courageous. And, yeah, you're at the mercy of the kind of police, I think, that get called out. I think in cases like that Thornton Road thing, it goes on so long, it's so undeniable, it's so sustained, that the police, they're going to covertly admit among themselves that something's happening, something we cannot explain. We've had a very long time to solve it, to explain it in any kind of mundane way, and we simply cannot. And this probably changed their lives. And, yeah, some are just going to be kind of embarrassed and perhaps contemptuous. Case near Glasgow a little while ago, where the police officers are absolutely shocked to hell. Reporting from the Poltergeist house. The guys at the station are laughing their pants off at them, say, Right, we'll come down and see it. So the guys at the station come down and see it and change their tune. But there was a long running one just to end on in Scotland. Again, Balornot Poltergeist, it was known as 1974 to 75. And, yeah, you've got young kids, boy of 14, boy of eleven, parents and grandmother, perhaps. Fairly crowded house, which is not always a good thing. And this was aggravated enough to call in the police. And officer is not named here. He's quoted in the Glasgow Herald, says, pitholi, there is something strange going on in that house, something we cannot logically explain. You get it to materialize and I will lock it up.

Michelle: That's fantastic. That is brilliant. I would love to see that. That would make some good headlines. Yeah, amazing. Honestly, this is just such a fascinating discussion. It's been a real joy to talk about this with you and I think we could keep going because there is just so many examples, from funny examples, serious, sad, really quite intriguing things coming through and being reported. I mean, it literally covers the spectrum of experiences and responses from judges, from defense lawyers, from prosecution, the prosecutors in the case or the police, and their response, the public reaction. I mean, it really does cover that gambit of emotions and responses on every level. And it's so intriguing to kind of look at that and examine that and see some of that play out the way that it does. So if anyone has anyone listening, if you come across a really interesting case or an account or an article, I'd love you to send it over. I'd love to see it. It's something that I've really enjoyed having a look at in a bit more detail, to be honest. So if you come across anything, feel free to send it my way.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yes. Seconded, be very gratefully received. I think there's a lot probably out there that's not been heard.

Michelle: Yeah. And like I said, all over the world. I came across one in Australia as kind of recent as 2013, where there was a marriage dispute over their house and whether it was haunted or not. And, yeah, there's all kinds of really interesting cases there if you go looking. Sometimes they're hidden away because, like we said, they're not really always publicly out there in the way that other stuff gets reported, but it is there if you go looking and you kind of take that time. So maybe that's what I'll be doing for the next few weeks, because, like I said, it's just a bit of a treasure trove.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah, I think the precedents need to be added to.

Michelle: Definitely.

Dr. Richard Sugg: It's waiting, definitely. But, yeah, thanks for a terrific, great range of cases and history.

Michelle: And obviously all of your details will be on the podcast, description, notes, et cetera, because you've got such a range of books that cover some of these things that we've been talking about to some degree or other. And yeah, just lots of interesting things that you say so people can come and find you and have a look at some of the other things that you've written and talked about, because they're equally interesting and relevant to what we've been saying today, I think.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Yeah, no, that would be great. Yeah. Century of Ghost Stories is the one to go to for the moment, and a lot of detail, I think, helps make the craziness seem a bit more credible in there.

Michelle: Absolutely. And I will say goodbye to everybody listening. Bye, everybody.

Dr. Richard Sugg: Good night.