7. The Wesleys Believe Their House Is Haunted
The Wesleys Believe Their House Is Haunted
In less than a year the rebuilding work on the rectory was completed. But the house was still in a very unfinished condition, though Samuel expressed his intention of having the rest of the work done as soon as his finances would permit.
The family returned and took up residence in their new home. They were clad in used clothing and the only furniture they now possessed was provided by the charity of neighbours. But other furniture was needed for even the most basic standard of living and though Samuel was already heavily in debt over the rebuilding of the house, it was imperative that further items should be purchased. So the debt grew even larger.
Susanna’s task of training her children was also now made more difficult. She says, ‘Never were children better disposed to piety. . . till that fatal dispersion of them, after the fire, into several families. In those they were left at full liberty to converse with the servants, which before they had always been restrained from; and to run abroad and play with any children, good or bad. They soon learned to neglect a strict observation of the Sabbath, and got knowledge of several songs and bad things . . . a clownish accent and many rude ways were learned, which were not reformed without some difficulty.’[1]
In an effort towards restoring the children to their former behaviour, Susanna arranged a special private conference with each child once a week. She said, ‘On Monday I talk with Molly; on Tuesday with Hetty; Wednesday with Nancy; Thursday with Jacky; Friday with Patty; Saturday with Charles; and with Emilia and Sukey together on Sunday.’ This was important training, over and above the academic instruction they received in the school, and it enabled the mother to know her children individually and to show them the evil of the habits they had learned and teach them the better way of Christian practice. Here again her efforts met very largely with success.
The Old Rectory, Epworth. (This is the rectory which Samuel had built after the fire.)
About this time Samuel began a mighty literary undertaking: a commentary on the book of Job, written in Latin. He anticipated that it would be the chief literary accomplishment of his lifetime and that it would be such a financial success that it would enable him to pay off all his debts. He continued to labour at it till his death twenty-five years later, and even then it was not quite finished.
During 1712 Samuel had a curate named Inman to help him in the parish. This man, who normally preached only when Samuel was absent, usually held forth on the subject of the sinfulness of being in debt. On learning of this practice Samuel thought he would put him to the test and asked him to preach on an occasion when he would be present. Samuel also supplied the text: ‘Without faith it is impossible to please God.’ The curate began, ‘Friends, faith is a most excellent virtue, and it produces other virtues also. In particular it makes a man pay his debts.’ He then proceeded to rail against being in debt for some fifteen minutes. Nevertheless he was not discharged for publicly denouncing the rector’s chief fault.
Inman is remembered especially for a series of events that took place in 1712 at a time when Samuel was in London. Susanna, whose soul had recently been stirred by reading an account of certain Danish missionaries, was not satisfied with seeing the people left with nothing but Inman’s fatuous discourses. Since she was a woman and not allowed to preach, she began to read a sermon aloud from a book each Sunday afternoon. Using her kitchen, she read to her family and to any neighbours who came in, and soon the room was overflowing.
Inman, aroused by her success, wrote to Samuel telling him that she was conducting a conventicle — an illegal meeting. Samuel replied directly to Susanna, complaining and stating that she ought at least to have a man do the reading. She answered, ‘You do not consider what a people these are. I do not think one man among them could read a sermon without spelling a good part of it.’[2] Again Samuel wrote, saying she ought to desist. But Susanna was almost defiant, asserting: ‘If you do, after all, think fit to dissolve this assembly, do not tell me that you desire me to do it, for that will not satisfy my conscience; but send me your positive command, in such full and express terms as may absolve me from all guilt and punishment, for neglecting this opportunity of doing good, when you and I shall appear before the great and awful tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ.’[3]
Susanna holding a meeting in the Rectory
Samuel said no more. Susanna spoke of her audiences being many more than her kitchen could hold and she stated that they sometimes numbered as many as 200. When Samuel returned home he found his own Sunday congregations much increased and a new measure of good will in the parish as a result of Susanna’s services.
Two years later, in 1714, John, now a boy of eleven, left home to attend Charterhouse School in London. Besides having been in his mother’s school since he was five, he had been given instruction in Latin and Greek and the literature of those languages by his father. He was in an excellent measure prepared for the studies that now lay before him. Although the sons of many of the aristocracy were enrolled at Charterhouse, like most schools it was a place of bullying and rough behaviour, but in spite of the sheltered life he had known at home, John proved well able to withstand the treatment to which he was subjected on his arrival there.
At about this time, a series of strange events took place at the Epworth rectory. Susanna and Samuel and their family became convinced that their house was haunted. The parents had both already manifested their belief in ghosts, apparitions and hauntings. Samuel had declared his certainty of the reality of the spirit world, saying that ‘The soul, after its separation from the body, may again be clothed with some sort of aerial, fiery or cloudy vehicle, and be visible to our senses.’[4] We also recall that, following her father’s death, Susanna had spoken of his presence still inhabiting the house and of frequently communing with his spirit.
On the first day of December 1715, a new maid, Nanny Marshall, claimed to have heard a strange and terrible noise in the house. It was, she said, like the dismal groans of a man in the pains of dying. Then two of the Wesley sisters, Sukey, aged twenty-one, and Anne, fourteen, stated that they heard something rushing by on the outside of the house, followed by three knocks, repeated three times, inside. Two nights later Emilia, who was twenty-three, thought she heard the sound of several bottles being broken and of a large lump of coal being dumped onto the kitchen floor, but when she examined the area she could find no broken glass and no pieces of coal. She also discovered that the large mastiff watchdog had slept through the time when the sounds were made. Then a youth, who lived in the house and did manual work for the Wesleys, told of hearing someone walking up and down the stairs, trailing a long garment and gobbling like a turkey cock. He also stated that he saw something that looked like a rabbit run out of ‘a hole in the copper’, spin round three times and run off, but it eluded his attempts to catch it.
Samuel himself heard none of these strange happenings. At the end of two weeks of disturbances the girls told him about them, but at first he gave little heed to their report, stating that the noises were the result of trickery by themselves or by their lovers. Susanna believed the noises were made by rats and she had a neighbour come in the daytime and sound a horn throughout the house to drive them away.
But after another week the noises were no longer heard only by the girls. The parents began to hear them too.
First, Samuel and Susanna were startled by hearing nine loud knocks. Samuel said, however, that they may have come from outside the house. Two days later Emilia took Susanna into the nursery, where she heard noises under the bed. She also saw an animal like a badger without a head run across the room and hide under Emilia’s skirts. On another night Samuel and Susanna were awakened by noises so violent that sleep was impossible. They got up and went through the house but, repeatedly, the sound seemed to come from the room they had just left.
Samuel soon took over the search himself and he acted with his usual determination. He thought he heard a rattling among a number of bottles and then the sound of several coins being poured out at Susanna’s waist and jingling down to her feet. Wanting a witness to the strange events that were going on in the rectory he asked a fellow-clergyman, the Rev. Joseph Hoole from Haxey, to come and spend the night with him. Wesley and Hoole went through the house together and, hearing the usual tappings, Samuel was about to shoot his pistol in the direction from which they came, when Hoole urged him not to do so, stating that a spirit could not be hurt by a bullet.
Wesley states that he defied the spirit, challenging it with the words: ‘Thou deaf and dumb devil, why dost thou frighten children that cannot answer thee? Come to me in my study that am a man!’ Immediately it replied using the same sequence of knocks as he himself used when he came to his outside door in the night and wanted to let Susanna know that he was there. On the next night Samuel said that as he entered his study the door was thrust back on him with such force as almost to knock him to the floor. He called on his daughter Anne to stand by him and he once again challenged the spirit to speak. But it made no sound.
Samuel then said to Anne, ‘Spirits love darkness; put out the candle and perhaps then it will speak.’ Despite being left in total darkness, Anne courageously obeyed. He repeated his challenge, yet all remained silent. But he continued the contest, telling Anne, ‘Two Christians are an overmatch for the devil; go downstairs, and it may be, when I am left alone, it will speak.’ He waited but still he heard nothing. Then, supposing that the spirit’s visits to the home indicated that his son Sammy in London had died, he solemnly charged it, ‘If thou art the spirit of my son Samuel, I pray thee knock three knocks and no more.’ There was no response.
For the next twenty-seven days no noises were heard, but then they began again. While the family were at their devotions knocks were heard during the petition for the king, and when the prayer was concluded, the ‘Amen’ was accompanied by a mighty thump. The next day Samuel omitted the prayer for the king and there was no sound, but the following day, when he again mentioned the monarch, the tappings were heard once more.
On one occasion Samuel’s plate began dancing on the table during supper, and he said that on several nights the latch was lifted on his door. Another time Emilia attempted to hold the latch on the back door of the kitchen, but she claimed it was still lifted and the door pushed violently against her. Three times Samuel declared he was pushed, either by a door or by an unknown force which drove him against his desk. As a rule, the noises began at a time when the wind was strong; it whistled loudly around the outside of the house, and inside it rattled the pewter, banged the doors and moved the curtains.
Samuel believed the girls were frightened by the spirit. This was possibly true when the noises first began, but after a while they joked about it. They called it ‘Old Jeffrey’, the name of a former occupant of the rectory, and after going to bed they would say, ‘Old Jeffrey is coming; it’s time to go to sleep.’ They also reported an occasion when three girls were in the nursery and the bed was lifted up to a considerable height. Anne was sitting on it and said, ‘Surely Old Jeffrey won’t run away with me!’ It seems that it had become a cause of merriment for them.
Virtually all of these supposedly supernatural events took place at night and the only light was the feeble illumination from a candle. Moreover, nothing was seen apart from the reports of the rabbit and the headless badger, and the only sign of the ghost’s presence was noises — chiefly knocks — and these the family said sometimes came from outside the house. Samuel attempted to get the ghost to speak, but there was never any response, except for a squeak on one occasion.
This series of happenings was not of long duration. It began on the first of December and apparently continued for three weeks, then was interrupted for twenty-seven days, began again and came to an end early in February. It stopped as suddenly as it had started.
The Wesleys attributed a particular significance to these goings-on. At first the girls were afraid to tell their father about the noises because they feared the sounds indicated that either he or one of their brothers was about to die. Susanna also expressed her fear that they portended the death of one of her sons. And as we have seen, Samuel addressed the ghost demanding, ‘If thou art the spirit of my son Samuel, knock three times.’
So what was the real cause of these strange events? At that time the vast majority of people everywhere were fully convinced that ghosts really existed and all the Wesleys were strongly of that conviction. Because of their background, when they heard the unaccountable sounds in the darkness, night after night, they readily believed them to be supernatural. It was more natural for them, even though they were highly intelligent people, to accept this view than to reject it.
Dr Joseph Priestly, who was in possession of the letters written by the Wesley family concerning this matter, ‘thought the whole affair was a trick of the servants, assisted by some of the neighbours, for the purpose of puzzling the family and amusing themselves’. One or two people inside the house, conniving with others outside, could have produced the knocking and this, combined with the strong winds, could have caused the superstitious family to believe them to be the activities of a ghost. The sudden way in which the phenomenon started and stopped lends credence to the view that it was the work of a human hand.
Who on the inside would have been involved in such trickery? The young manservant, Robin Brown, or the new maidservant, Nanny Marshall, may have taken some part in these events, but not enough is known about them to speculate further.
On the other hand, a member of the family may possibly have been involved. This was the daughter Hetty. At the time of the fire which destroyed the rectory Hetty was a girl of thirteen and she had spent the following year with her Uncle Matthew, a successful physician in London. Freed from the control of her parents, she had enjoyed the greater liberty in her uncle’s house and when she returned to Epworth she felt the restraints under which she was placed at home. Since she was now nineteen and beautiful in face and figure, young men were attracted to her company and her father’s suggestion that the noises were the result of his daughters entertaining their lovers would have applied to Hetty more than to any of the others. She was full of animal spirits and, being given to mischief, she could well have agreed with one or two young men to play tricks on her father.
It may be significant that, although there is a written statement on the ghost affair from virtually every other member of the family, there is none from her. Either she left nothing about it, or whatever she wrote was deemed inadmissible and was destroyed. We shall look in more detail at the character of Hetty in a later chapter.
Dr Adam Clarke, a personal associate of John Wesley, reported the following possible explanation: ‘One night, after the family had gone to bed, the maidservant was finishing her work in the back kitchen, when she was startled by a noise, looked up, and saw a man working himself through a trough which communicated between the sink-stone within and a cistern without.’ Clarke goes on to say that the servant struck the escaping intruder on the head, that Samuel shouted and threw the fire-irons down the stairs and that the man left a trail of blood for some distance.[5] This concept agrees with the idea that the neighbours were involved in perpetrating the trickery.
Although John was a boy of only thirteen and was at school in London at the time, this series of events had a lasting effect on him. He was certain that it was supernatural and stated that he considered it to be God’s judgement on his father for having forsaken Susanna and her children fourteen years earlier. It also burned into John’s consciousness the certainty that the spirits of departed ones are alive and although unseen are active among mankind.
Charles, who was also at school in London at the time, makes no mention of Old Jeffrey, leading one to wonder if he seriously believed in his existence.
Susanna and Samuel, together with their children, were creatures of the century in which they lived, when it came to their conviction of the reality of the spirit world. The vast majority of their contemporaries would have joined them in this superstitious belief.[6]
Several writers have made suggestions as to the identity of ‘Old Jeffrey’. ‘Coleridge discovers in the Wesley family “an angry and damnatory predetermination” to believe in the ghost. . . Dr Salmon accuses Hetty Wesley of playing tricks on her family and producing all the noises. . . Priestly offers the theory of imposture by servants and neighbours; Isaac Taylor resolves “Old Jeffrey” into a monkey-like “performing droll” of a spirit. Mr Wesley had preached for several Sundays against the “cunning men” of the neighbourhood whom the ignorant peasants used to consult as wizards; and Andrew Lang thinks the performances of “Old Jeffrey” were the revenge taken by these “cunning men”.’[7]