A golden age for ghouls

The 17th century was the heyday of the English ghost. Up and down the kingdom during those ‘distracted times’ of the Gunpowder Plot, Civil War and Commonwealth, spectres, revenants and phantoms were at their most restless and fretful. Church bells rang without human agency, invisible armies clattered to and fro in the darkness, drummers sounded a ghoulish tattoo through midnight bedchambers, a whole menagerie of ectoplasmic beasts terrified kitchenmaids or sent children into hysterics. Meanwhile the spirits themselves, a decidedly noisy crew, specific in their demands and inclined to be peevish if not paid serious attention, forecast political events, indicated the whereabouts of buried treasure, confounded atheists and sceptics or simply did the customary ghostly business of carrying messages from beyond the grave.

Somerset, with more than its fair share of such visitations, witnessed one of the most famous of them in 1634. The death of Susan Leakey, a Minehead widow ‘of a free, pleasant and cheerful temper’ and noted for her godliness, was followed by her several reappearances, first to her daughter-in-law Elizabeth, then to the local curate, while making water outside the Leakeys’ back door, and finally to the family’s Welsh maidservant, who identified the old woman’s black gown and wrinkled face. When the ghost condescended to speak, it issued a mysterious set of instructions, culminating in an order to ‘Go to Joan Atherton in Ireland and tell her these things. Bid her do them and see them done.’ On Elizabeth daring to ask ‘whether you be in Heaven or in Hell’, the apparition disobligingly groaned and vanished.

Joan, Leakey’s younger daughter, was married to a career clergyman John Atherton, formerly vicar of the Somerset parish of Huish Champflower and now Church of Ireland bishop of Waterford.