Strange Days at the Lamb Inn

The Lamb Inn was a large, comfortable establishment in Bristol, England, with a long history, from the mid-17th century until it was demolished in 1910,  Over the centuries, the inn undoubtedly saw many strange and interesting things, but undoubtedly its most famous episode began in late 1761, when all hell broke loose at the hostel.  And, yes, I am speaking quite literally.

Richard Giles had been running the Lamb Inn since the 1740s.  Aside from the inn, he also earned a living as a carrier--that is to say, he ran wagons back and forth from London.  Giles lived there with his wife, eight children, and several servants in perfect peace until the early morning of November 13, 1761.  (A Friday, for those of you who are superstitious.)  The two Giles daughters, thirteen year old Molly, and Dobby, aged eight, were still in bed when they were awakened by the unnerving sound of loud scratching at their bedroom window.  As the girls cowered under the blankets, the scratching sound seemed to travel to their beds.  Now thoroughly scared, they ran to tell their parents.  When Richard inspected the bedroom, he did not hear or see anything.  He shrugged and told his daughters that they had undoubtedly just heard pigeons on the roof.

Quiet resumed until December 6, when the scratching started up anew, this time accompanied by knocking noises.  The cacophony became a daily occurrence.  One day, while Richard was inspecting the bedroom, he not only heard the scratches and knocks, but saw a wooden clothing box start rocking violently.  It then fell over, emptying the clothes on the floor.

Molly and Dobby were moved to another bedroom, which seemed to only make things worse.  Whatever entity was making the noises now turned to physically harming the girls, biting them and sticking pins into their arms.  Various items of furniture were thrown around their room.

Inevitably, news of the sinister haunting spread through the city.  A chemist named Henry Durbin, desiring to play amateur ghost-hunter, got permission to spend the night in the girls’ bedroom.  The spirits put on quite a show for him.  A glass drifted across the room, smashing itself into a wall.  Molly’s nightcap was snatched from her head by an invisible force which “beat a tattoo on her with the skill of a drummer.”  Furniture and chamber pots were hurled about.  The curtains moved up and down.  Phantom voices murmured ominously.  It was all, Henry wrote, “contrary to the course of nature.”

The spirits--or whatever you care to call what was visiting the inn--then took to kidnapping Dobby.  One day, she disappeared, only to be found under her bed, pinned there by some unseen force keeping her from moving, or even calling for help.  She said that “a woman in a ragged dress, a brown chip hat and great holes in her stockings” had forced her there.

More outsiders came to inspect the house, which was now universally regarded as being haunted by some evil being.  They were greeted with an eerie squealing noise.  Questions were asked of the invisible presence, who answered by tapping out letters.  The spirit blamed its presence on a witch in nearby Mangotsfield, who had been hired by a business rival of Richard Giles to curse him and his carrier business.  The spirit appeared to be proven correct when one of Giles’ wagons became so badly stuck on a road that eighteen horses were needed to move it.  The following day, the same thing happened to another wagon.

Bristol’s clergymen were called in to try to exorcise the spirit.  This did absolutely nothing to rid the household of its presence, but these men of God were impressed by the entity’s ability to answer their questions in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, so there’s that.

On one occasion, the two girls were levitated out of their beds towards the ceiling.  The combined strength of three men were unable to stop it.  Molly was finally moved to one of Giles’ other homes, but the entity mockingly followed her there.

One day, Giles was traveling in one of his wagons when the harness on the gig suddenly and mysteriously broke, throwing him into the road.  He later said that at the time of the accident, he saw the apparition of a woman standing by the side of the road.  By the time he picked himself off the ground, she had vanished.

Soon afterwards, Henry Durbin was informed by a Mr. Jennings that he--Jennings--had heard voices mentioning the uproar at the Lamb Inn, and threatening him, as well.  The voices said that the spirit’s control over the Giles girls was weakening, but its power over “the old one” was increasing.  On Durbin’s next visit to the Lamb Inn, he found that Richard Giles was seriously ill from some ailment his doctor couldn’t identify, and was powerless to treat.  Giles died three days later, on May 16, 1762.

This tragic event only intensified Durbin’s desire to investigate whatever it was that insisted on plaguing the Giles family.  The spirit had once told him that its name was “Malchi.”  Durbin consulted with a local “white witch” about “Malchi.”  She told him that the entity was the head of the “familiar spirits,” knowing all human languages and knowledge.  “There are some learned spirits and some ignorant.”

On a more practical level, the “witch” gave him a recipe for banishing Malchi.  It involved emptying the Giles girls’ chamber pots into a pipkin (an earthenware cooking pot) and placing it on a fire, after which, “beautiful colours came out of it like a rainbow.”  Chamber pot soup sounds like the sort of thing which would get rid of anybody, and, sure enough, by December 1762, Malchi had departed the Lamb Inn, for good.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

Meanwhile, the Strange Company HQ staffers are hoping to make the 2028 U.S. Olympics gymnastics team.

Navigating the Pacific, ancient Polynesian style.

How to make a medieval king fall in love with you.  Although, considering what most medieval kings were like, I'm not sure that you'd want this.

A murder that was "solved," but remains unresolved.

The "Oz factor."

Some writing systems that will probably never be deciphered.

UFOs and "missing time."

A non-Good Samaritan at sea.

An undertaker provides a parade float.

We now know when Vikings reached North America.

Elite suburban villas as a center of 18th century politics.

What (possibly) destroyed the Library of Alexandria.

A Canadian island that just won't sit still.

Nothing to see here, just golden-haired, bare-skinned aliens.

Clever Hans, the psychic horse.

Things we still don't know about ancient Egypt.

A weird family tragedy.

The diary of a food-loving Renaissance adolescent.

The time when Edgar Allan Poe tried to get a government job, and things went sideways very quickly.

Victorian Paris' "Temple of Money."

A string of murders in Oregon.

Josephine Baker, Resistance spy.

The last of the Spitalfields Market Cats.

A bizarre "runaway nun" story.

A heroic Great Dane in WWII.

A mysterious murder on a shanty-boat.

17th century villagers were terrified of the occupant of this grave.  So naturally, archaeologists had to dig her up.  Stupid archaeologists.

The life and career of Aphra Behn.

That eternal search for the Abominable Snowman.

The latest in Biblical archaeology.

Why we say "o'clock."

Alan Turing and "jump jets."

How we got the word, "weird."

The hairstyles of ancient Egypt.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll meet a poltergeist named Malchi.  In the meantime, here's some Telemann.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

File this one under “Life’s random little oddities.”  The “Miller County Vidette,” May 6, 1875:

A correspondent of the Toledo Blade, writing from Hastings, Michigan, says:

About ten miles south of this place, a farmer, while driving some cows through a deep forest adjoining his fields, unexpectedly came upon an unusually large buck, stretched out upon the ground, and moaning away the last moments of its existence. The animal was evidently very old, and in a sadly emaciated condition, so the fact that the farmer immediately put a bullet through its head should rather be looked upon as an act of compassion than otherwise. Just as he was about to leave he observed a round lump upon the animal's side, which so attracted his attention that he stopped to examine it. Quickly discovering that close under the skin was deposited a round, hard body, he used his knife and brought to light a silver bullet, such as was used in olden times for the inclosure of secret dispatches.

He carried this curiosity to his house, where, after considerable trouble, he succeeded in opening it, and found to his great surprise that it contained a message written in cypher upon paper attenuated to a high degree. Otherwise than that the paper was slightly discolored, not sufficiently, however, to obliterate the characters. Neither the bullet nor what it inclosed bore any evidence of its late surroundings or of the strange vicissitudes through which it might previously have gone. Several men of science have carefully inspected this relic of the past, and are as much at loss to decipher the message as they are to satisfactorily explain when and how the bullet came to be lodged in the side of the buck.

In Which Senator Sharon Makes Some Poor Romantic Decisions

Sarah Althea Hill

That old, old story:  “Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy dumps girl.”  Whenever I encounter it, I usually shrug and move on.  However, present me with a sequel that says, “Girl takes boy to court, practices voodoo curses, with everything ending in a shootout,” and I start to take an interest in the situation.

During the 1860s, William Sharon was lucky enough to make a tidy fortune from Virginia City, Nevada, silver mines, wealth that he augmented through shrewd investments in California and Nevada railroads and real estate.  Before too many years had passed, Sharon was a multimillionaire.  In 1875, he was elected to the U.S. Senate.  On a darker note, in that same year, Sharon’s business partner William C. Ralston was found floating in the bay off the coast of San Francisco.  Ralston had recently suffered catastrophic business losses, which led his death to be ruled a suicide.

Soon after this tragedy, Sharon moved to San Francisco, taking a suite in the Palace Hotel which he had co-owned with Ralston.  By this point, Sharon felt he had enough money to ignore business and devote himself to pleasure.  The personable widower became one of the city’s most notorious womanizers and general men-about-town.

William Sharon

At some point in his social whirl, Sharon met Sarah Althea Hill, a beautiful Southern socialite.  Although she had inherited a handsome fortune from her rich father, it did not take her long to squander it on San Francisco’s many opportunities to enjoy the high life.  When a pretty, pleasure-loving woman in need of cash meets an older, stinking rich man with an eye for the ladies, it is not hard to guess what usually happens next.  Sarah soon became Senator Sharon’s maîtresse-en-titre.  Sarah was gifted with luxurious clothes, exquisite jewelry, and access to the most elite circles in California.  Sharon often introduced her to acquaintances as “my little wife.”

This last habit of Sharon’s was to get him into a good deal of trouble.  After three years together, Sarah found out that Sharon was cheating on her, and indignantly filed for divorce.  How could she do that if they were not married, you ask?  It’s simple:  Sarah presented the court with a handwritten marriage contract, dated August 25, 1880, that she claimed Sharon had dictated to her.  Although the bulk of the document was in her handwriting, Sharon’s signature was at the bottom.  She also produced a number of letters Sharon had written to her where he addressed her as “My Dear Wife.”  Sharon countered with the claim that the letters and his signature on the marriage contract were all forgeries, and the lawyers were off to the races.

The “Sharon v. Hill” trial opened in 1884.  Sordid brawls between wealthy and glamorous elites are always catnip for the public, and the newspapers had an excellent time giving readers every embarrassing detail about the legal battles between the former lovers.  The courtroom arguments went on for years.  Sharon’s lawyers declared that not only had Sarah forged all the relevant papers, but her whole story about their irregular “marriage” was a giant fantasy.  Unfortunately for the Senator, Sarah was able to present a parade of witnesses testifying that on numerous occasions, he had referred to her as “Mrs. Sharon.”

Despite the fact that Sarah had a plausible case, she had a hard time finding lawyers willing to fight a wealthy and influential man.  Enter David S. Terry, an attorney bold--or, perhaps, insane--enough to do just that.

David Terry

Terry, a former justice of the California Supreme Court, was, to put it most politely, not a man who feared trouble.  In 1856, he stabbed a member of a vigilante group.  Even more notoriously, in 1859 he fought a duel with California Senator David Broderick over the issue of slavery.  Terry had wanted the state’s Southern Democrats to be allowed to own slaves, while Broderick advocated for California to remain antislavery.  The two men were so bitterly opposed on the issue that they finally resorted to pistols at dawn.  The duel left Broderick fatally wounded.  Many believed that his pistol had been secretly disabled in order for Terry to win an unfair fight.  Ironically for Terry and his pro-slavery allies, the public wrath over the allegedly rigged duel did much to ensure that California remained a free state.

Terry won the case for Sarah.  Although their relations had started as strictly attorney/client, by the time the trial was over, the pair had fallen in love.  In the meantime, Sharon--who had announced that he would sooner throw everything he had into San Francisco Bay than give another nickel of it to Sarah--prepared to contest the court’s decision.

As a side note, when I was reading about this case, you can imagine how delighted I was to encounter the name of my old pal Mary Ellen Pleasant, a woman who clearly attracted dysfunctional relationships the way a magnet attracts iron filings.  Sarah and Mary Ellen were long-time friends.  Pleasant bankrolled Sarah's lawsuit, and appeared in court with her nearly every day.  The newspapers enjoyed spreading assertions that San Francisco’s notorious “Voodoo Queen” had also been providing more unorthodox legal assistance in the form of various unpleasant-sounding spells and rituals.  Sarah denied most of the more lurid details, but she did finally have to admit to bribing a gravedigger to bury a pair of Sharon’s socks in a freshly-dug grave.  Apparently, once the socks rotted, the Senator would die.  Everyone laughed at this story…until Sharon suddenly and unexpectedly dropped dead not long afterwards.  

So.

Sarah and Terry married just weeks after Sharon was socked, so to speak.  Meanwhile, the late Senator’s appeal of the case carried on.  Justice Stephen Johnson Fields of San Francisco’s U.S. Circuit Court eventually overturned the lower courts’ ruling.  Fields, blithely ignoring the fact that several handwriting experts had testified that Sharon’s signature on the “marriage contract” was genuine, took it upon himself to declare that it was a forgery.  After Sharon had died, Sarah had produced a will she claimed he had written, in which he left everything to her.  Not surprisingly, Fields said that was fraudulent, as well.

Sarah did not take the ruling well.  When Fields’ verdict was read in the courthouse, she stood up, yelled some very unladylike epithets at the judge, and wailed that Fields had been bribed by Sharon’s son.  She opened her purse, and reached for the revolver she always carried with her.  When security guards began hustling the outraged woman from the room, Terry pulled out a knife and ordered the guards to release his wife.  He hit one of them, knocking out a tooth.  This bit of misplaced gallantry got Terry arrested and imprisoned for six months.  Sarah got thirty days for contempt of court.  Later, the pair’s courtroom antics also caused them to be indicted by a federal grand jury.  The California Supreme Court upheld Fields’ verdict, also stating that Sarah and Sharon had never been legally married.

After their release from prison, Mr. and Mrs. Terry retreated to their Fresno ranch in apparent defeat.  However, the tragedies were just getting started.  On the morning of August 14, 1889, the couple boarded a train in Fresno.  Through a stroke of appallingly bad luck, Justice Fields happened to be on that same train, accompanied by Marshal David Neagle, whom the court had appointed as Fields’ bodyguard.  At 7 am, the train paused in Lathrop, and the passengers disembarked to eat breakfast at the railroad station’s dining room.

When Sarah and her husband entered the dining room, they immediately spotted Fields.  Sarah dashed back to the train, apparently to get her trusty revolver.  Meanwhile, Terry menacingly approached Fields from behind, raising his hand to slap the justice.  Neagle stood up and yelled, “Stop that!  I am an officer!”  Neagle then drew his gun and shot Terry through the heart.  He died almost instantly.

Neagle was arrested at the scene, but was soon released thanks to a writ of habeas corpus.  The courts eventually ruled his actions had been within the scope of his authority as a Marshal.

After Terry’s shocking death, Sarah--who does not seem to have been the most stable personality even at the best of times--went completely to pieces.  She became obsessed with hiring mediums in an effort to contact her dead husband.  She took to aimlessly wandering the San Francisco streets, convinced that she was being hypnotically attacked.  There were periods when she would physically assault anyone within range.  Finally, Mary Ellen Pleasant--one of the very few people who had stuck by Sarah--felt she had no choice but to have her friend committed.  After a brief hearing in front of the Insanity Commission, where she was diagnosed with “dementia praecox” (what we now call “schizophrenia,”) 41-year-old Sarah was committed to the Stockton State Hospital on March 11, 1892.  It would be her home for the rest of her long life.

During her first few years in the institution, Sarah was often so violent that she had to be restrained, but she eventually settled down, buoyed by the delusion that the hospital was her grand mansion, and the staff and other patients were her servants.  She died of pneumonia at the age of 86, on February 14, 1937.  Compared to Sarah’s fate, the two men in her life got off pretty easily.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

Just watch out for Strange Company HQ's resident flirt.

How the California Gold Rush birthed the modern world.

The sound of King Tut's trumpets.

I suppose the moral here is, if you're going to commit murder, make sure that the victim is someone nobody will mourn.

"Enigmatic tablets" from the Bronze Age.

How a kitten joined an Ohio construction crew.

19th century Yankee adventurers in the Pacific.

The shame of beardlessness.

Cyborg cockroaches.  With syringes!

Those wicked Amazonian dolphins.

The complexities of ancient cave art.

The women of the Crusades.

The execution of an alchemist.

D-Day in contemporary newspapers.

The latest in the search for Noah's Ark.

The Vegetable Marrow Riots.

One man's obsession with a jar of spicy mustard.

The queen who used King Arthur as a marketing tool.

The disappearances of two elderly women.

Letters from medieval students who could use a little cash.

The "desire paths" of the East End.

Pro tip: Never take a cookie from a scientist.

Medieval animals on trial.

The haunted Cariboo Trail.

A 1900 visit to London's dog cemetery.

An ancient cave sanctuary and "the Lady."

18th century Jesuits meet Chilean UFOs.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a very bad romantic breakup.  "Bad" as in "lawsuits, voodoo curses, and shootings."  In the meantime, speaking of breakups...

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

The following story goes in that bulging file known as “restless ghosts of murder victims.”  The “Ithaca Journal,” August 12, 1922:

Painesville, Ohio, Aug. 12--A "ghost" which farmers living near Paines Hollow say has been haunting them for seven years, is "at rest" today. It disappeared several days ago with the burial of the body of Henry Lipenstick, found in an abandoned well on a farm. Lipenstick, a farm hand, disappeared seven years ago. Since then the farm is said to have had poor crops.

A farm house burned down and the "ghost" was blamed for that. Owner after owner has come and gone. Carl Logies purchased the farm about a year ago. Whenever he went to his barn at night, Logies said today, he would see "a white wraithlike figure" walking about. At times he declared, he followed it with his gun in hand and it always disappeared in the direction of the well. Determined to find out what caused the apparition, Logies cleaned out the old well, which had been filled with stones.

He came upon the body of Lipenstick. Sheriff Spink was called and he and his deputies suspected murder. The next day the sheriff ordered the body buried and now the "ghost"' is gone. Frank Loerman, who owned the farm at the time Lipenstick disappeared, is in Lake County Jail. He was bound over to the grand jury on charges of murder.

The actual evidence against Loerman (his name was most often given as “Lerman” in contemporary accounts) proved to be virtually nonexistent, and he was soon freed.  Lipenstick’s murder was never solved, but the ghost apparently vanished for good.  Perhaps just seeing the body given a decent burial was enough to satisfy his spirit.

The Welsh Servant

The 1883 book “Shropshire Folk-lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings” included a story about what we today would call a “poltergeist” which appeared to center around an enigmatic farm servant.  While the tale purports to be true, at this distance of time it is impossible to say how much of it is fact, and how much is legend.  Still, it’s such a quaintly charming little curiosity that I wanted to bring it under the Strange Company tent.

It is perhaps a hundred years or more since a certain Mr. Nichols lived at Yockleton Park, some miles west of Shrewsbury, farming his land and bringing up a large family of sons and daughters. One summer he engaged a Welshman to help in the harvest, and as he proved industrious and a good workman, he was allowed by his own wish to stay on through the winter, till the usual West Shropshire “changing time,” in May. He was lodged and boarded in the house, of course. “The men”—i.e. the unmarried farm-labourers—were an important part of every homely country household in those days. Well, time went on; the Welshman continued to give satisfaction, and nothing unusual occurred during his stay, till one night during “the Christmas,” the whole family were suddenly aroused just after midnight by an extraordinary noise downstairs, something like heavy chains being dragged about, clanking and rumbling. Hours were early in those days, every one had long been in bed, and they were perplexed and frightened. The farmer’s sons got up and called the men, and all went down in a body to see what was the matter. Everything was perfectly quiet; the furniture was all in its place, no one was about, nothing was to be seen or heard. Then the Welshman proposed to go out-of-doors; but his masters, unnerved by finding it impossible to account for the mysterious noise, refused to allow the door to be opened. Still the man persisted. “I must go out,” he said, “I cannot rest in!” He urged his request with so much earnestness and anxiety, that at last, impressed by his excited manner, they opened the door. Out went the man at once into the black darkness, all alone. The door was shut and barred behind him—the awe-stricken watchers waited and listened — 

He never came back!

What became of him no one ever knew; his wages lay unclaimed in his master’s hands, put carefully aside in readiness for his return: but alive or dead, the Welsh servant was never seen nor heard of more, 

This story was long afterwards related by one of the daughters of the house to her grand-daughter, now an old lady, from whom we have it. She gave it as a narrative of facts, believed in the family to be perfectly true, with no hint of any supernatural character attaching to the Welsh servant; yet I cannot but regard him as a modern rationalized version of the trusty “drudging goblin,” who takes service with an earthly master, and generally vanishes mysteriously at last.