Set behind its walls in the beautiful Oxfordshire town of Burford, Burford Priory has stood in one form or another for more than eight centuries. Medieval hospital, Tudor mansion, political power base, religious community and family home: generations have altered it, inhabited it, loved it and left their marks upon it. Historic England describes the present building as a largely Jacobean gentleman’s mansion incorporating fragments from the thirteenth century and around 1580, built on the site of the medieval Hospital of St John the Evangelist, first recorded in 1226.

It is exactly the sort of place around which ghost stories inevitably gather.

But Burford Priory: The Woman Who Watches Over Us, the remarkable new film from The Supernatural UK, is ultimately interested in something rather more intimate than asking whether an ancient building contains ghosts. It asks what happens when a haunting becomes part of a family’s relationship with home.

I was fortunate enough to be given advance media access to the film ahead of its public release, and having followed The Supernatural UK since its beginnings — and previously interviewed some of those involved about both the original Somerset Supernatural project and the philosophy behind the subsequent series — this feels to me like one of the clearest expressions yet of what John Shackleton and the team have been trying to create.

There are strange moments here. There are coincidences and apparent connections that made me sit forward. There are moments when scepticism is voiced rather than conveniently edited away. There are pieces of information that appear unexpectedly and subsequently acquire significance. There is history, experimentation, humour and genuine unease.

The 55-minute documentary sees Charlotte Freud open the doors of the house in which she grew up to filmmakers John Shackleton and Andy Bourne and an investigative team including sensitive Kate Ray, sceptical investigator Justin Cowell and paranormal investigator and historical researcher Karin Beasant. It premieres exclusively on The Supernatural UK YouTube channel at 7pm on Friday 4 September 2026.

And Burford Priory gives them an extraordinary canvas.

Long before the Freud family arrived, the site had already accumulated enough history for several documentaries. The medieval Hospital of St John the Evangelist stood here by at least 1226. Following the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, the property was granted in 1543 to Edmund Harman, one of Henry VIII’s barber-surgeons. It subsequently passed to Sir Lawrence Tanfield, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, who entertained James I here in 1603. In 1637 it was acquired by William Lenthall, Speaker of the House of Commons, who extensively remodelled and enlarged the house. Charles II later dined here in 1681 while travelling to the Burford Races. Burford itself also occupies an important place in the story of the English Civil Wars. In 1649, Leveller soldiers involved in a mutiny were pursued into the town by forces under Cromwell; three were executed there. The film uses this wider history carefully, allowing the politics, religion, wealth and violence surrounding the Priory to establish something far more interesting than a generic “old building equals haunted building” formula. The house subsequently endured periods of alteration and neglect. Historic England records that it was considerably reduced in size after 1808 and was rescued from near dereliction from 1908 onwards, with further restoration after Emslie John Horniman acquired it in 1912. It later became home to an Anglican Benedictine community. The building we see today is therefore not one frozen moment from the past but an architectural palimpsest — medieval fabric sitting beside Tudor and Jacobean work, later alterations and the imprint of successive inhabitants.

Charlotte moved into the Priory as a child and describes an atmosphere that immediately made an impression upon the family. She recalls certain rooms being frightening and says that her six siblings have their own stories from living there. Another family member describes footsteps, unexplained knocking and the particularly eerie experience of hearing what sounded like movement on a staircase that had once occupied the space subsequently converted into a bedroom.

Charlotte herself recounts perhaps the most striking visual experience: seeing what she interpreted as the figure of a monk in the grounds. She and another witness apparently observed it simultaneously, describing a seemingly solid, heavily clothed figure standing only a short distance away. The encounter lasted, she estimates, perhaps twenty seconds before the figure disappeared.

Elsewhere there are stories of footsteps, doors, unexplained noises, things being moved, uncomfortable areas of the property and a reported gamekeeper. Yet Charlotte’s relationship with the house isn’t one of uncomplicated fear. Quite the opposite. At one point she says something that subtly changes how we understand everything that follows. Despite the strange experiences, she says she has “felt God in this house more than I felt bad things”. She talks about periods of fear but also about asking whatever benevolent spiritual presence might be there to protect her.

When The Supernatural UK first appeared, I wrote about how refreshing its stated ethos was: “No agenda, no staged scares, and no exaggerated claims.”

When I subsequently interviewed John Shackleton for Haunted History Chronicles, we discussed why the project feels so different from much paranormal television. John described himself not as someone interested primarily in shock or jump scares, but in “wonder and awe”. More importantly, he explained that he had no desire to sensationalise or make an incident appear larger than it really was. When something apparently extraordinary emerges during editing, his instinct is to start questioning it and attempting to debunk it before presenting what remains to the audience. That philosophy is particularly visible at Burford. There is an important difference between documenting an investigation and producing a programme that has already decided what its investigation must discover.

As John explained when we spoke:

“It’s not an outcome that’s already been designed and created for TV and put into the location.”

Instead, he described allowing what actually happened during the hours of investigation to provide the spine of the story. I think that distinction goes to the heart of the ethics of paranormal filmmaking.

Burford Priory is perhaps the clearest example of that approach yet. On paper, its eight centuries of history offer any number of ready-made paranormal narratives: the medieval religious foundations, political upheaval, the Levellers, stories of a spectral monk and gamekeeper, reports of poltergeist activity and generations of unexplained experiences. Any one of them could easily have been chosen in advance as the story of the episode. But that is not what happens. The history provides the landscape in which the investigation begins; the investigation then determines where the film goes.

Gradually, connections emerge that could not have been known at the outset would become significant. Some lead backwards into the history of the Priory. Others move unexpectedly towards the much more recent and personal history of the family who call it home. The film follows those threads rather than forcing them back towards the haunting it might originally have expected to find.

Before arriving, Kate conducts what she describes as a psychic scan or remote viewing exercise, recording a number of impressions without knowing how — or indeed whether — they will relate to the Priory. As the team begins to explore the house and grounds, some of those impressions start to acquire unexpected significance. There are apparent links to aspects of the building, its history and spaces she had not previously been shown, while other threads lead somewhere considerably more personal.

I am deliberately not going to catalogue them here. Part of the pleasure of the film is watching those connections emerge in the order that the investigators themselves encounter them. Some are intriguing in isolation; others become far more interesting because of what subsequently follows. And, importantly, the programme does not demand that the viewer interpret every correspondence in the same way.

That is precisely where Justin Cowell becomes such a valuable counterpoint to Kate. His scepticism is not the rather tired television variety in which somebody is brought along simply to dismiss everything. He participates, experiments and is perfectly willing to acknowledge when something puzzles him. Equally, when there is a mundane explanation available, he says so. At one point an uncomfortable sensation within the Priory is investigated and an architectural feature provides an entirely plausible reason for it. It is a small moment, but one I particularly enjoyed. Not every strange feeling is required to become a ghost.

That balance is one of the film’s strengths. Kate approaches the location intuitively; Justin continually interrogates what is happening; Karin Beasant brings paranormal and historical experience to an investigation taking place within an enormously complicated historic site. Around them, John Shackleton and Andy Bourne allow the camera to observe rather than constantly instructing the viewer what to believe.

It creates an investigation in which very different approaches can exist alongside one another rather than competing for victory.

There are experiments with environmental monitoring and trigger objects, as well as objects discovered within the fabric of the Priory itself. There are moments when equipment behaves interestingly and others when the investigators stop to consider perfectly ordinary explanations. But the technology never becomes the star of the programme. Burford itself remains central: its architecture, its past, the people who have lived there and the experiences attached to it.

That also reflects something John discussed with me previously: approaching locations relatively “light footed”, rather than saturating investigators with every piece of folklore and every reported haunting before they begin. It matters methodologically because paranormal investigation is extraordinarily susceptible to suggestion. Tell somebody exactly where the monk is supposed to stand and every shadow in that doorway risks becoming a monk. Tell someone a particular room is oppressive and they enter it already waiting to feel something.

The investigation at Burford is at its most intriguing when information emerges before anyone knows why it might matter. I am going to leave most of what happens there for viewers to discover. What begins to emerge is not particularly frightening. In fact, it is surprisingly warm. Details surface during one of Kate’s sessions that appear to resonate very strongly with Charlotte. There are further attempts to explore what has happened, and there are later discoveries that add another layer to it. To describe them all here would rob the film of the very thing that makes the final section so effective: the gradual accumulation of information and the moment at which seemingly separate threads begin to sit alongside one another.

Producer-director John Shackleton perhaps describes what emerged at Burford better than anyone:

“It became a film about home, family, memory and the possibility that the people who matter to us may never entirely leave.”

Burford Priory: The Woman Who Watches Over Us premieres exclusively on The Supernatural UK YouTube channel at 7pm on Friday 4 September 2026.

It is beautifully made, intriguing, funny, thoughtful and, by the end, unexpectedly moving.

5 stars, you won’t be disappointed!

Haunted History Chronicles

Watch the official trailer TRAILER: Burford Priory - The Woman Who Watches Over Us

Visit The Supernatural UK on YouTube TRAILER: Burford Priory - The Woman Who Watches Over Us

For more about the ethos behind the series, you can also revisit Spotlight On: The Supernatural UK, listen to my conversation with John Shackleton in Filming the Paranormal: The Making of The Supernatural UK, or return to the project’s earlier roots with Somerset Supernatural: Discovering the Paranormal.

31 August 1977: The Night the Enfield Poltergeist Began

On the night of 31 August 1977, something began inside an ordinary council house in Enfield, North London, that would develop into one of the most famous — and fiercely disputed — poltergeist cases in history.

At around 9:30pm, 11-year-old Janet Hodgson and her brother Johnny told their mother that something was moving in their bedroom.

Peggy Hodgson went upstairs to settle them.

Then she heard the knocking.

According to the witnesses, a chest of drawers appeared to move roughly 18 inches across the bedroom floor without anyone touching it. Alarmed, Peggy took the children downstairs and called neighbours Vic and Gary Nottingham into the house. They searched for an explanation for the mysterious knocking but could find none.

Eventually, the police were called.

What happened after they arrived would provide one of the most intriguing pieces of testimony associated with the entire case.

WPC Carolyn Heeps later provided a signed statement describing what she witnessed in the Hodgsons’ living room:

“I saw the chair slide across the floor towards the kitchen wall. It moved approximately 3 to 4 feet and then came to rest.”

After examining the chair, she added that she “could find nothing to explain how it had moved.”

The police eventually left. Whatever was happening at 284 Green Street, it wasn’t a police matter.

But it was only the beginning.

49 years ago today, the Enfield Poltergeist began.

To mark the anniversary, I’m returning to my conversation with Tony Hayes, an experienced investigator of spontaneous paranormal phenomena and member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR).

Tony has investigated reports of spontaneous paranormal activity since 1989 and brings a background spanning science, physics, government service and policing to his examination of unusual cases. His work has included involvement in the investigation of an ongoing poltergeist case in Essex, where hundreds of coins have reportedly appeared — or been apported — inside a property.

In our conversation, we return to Enfield not simply to retell the story, but to ask what happens when we look carefully at the evidence, witnesses, recordings, investigators and controversies that have accumulated around it.

You’ll hear original recordings connected with the investigation and commentary from those involved in examining the extraordinary events. We consider the arguments of sceptics who believe incidents were fabricated or exaggerated, alongside the evidence cited by those who argue that acknowledged trickery cannot adequately account for everything that was reported.

And that distinction is important.

Enfield does not have to be either “everything was paranormal” or “everything was a hoax.”

Could genuine anomalous experiences, ordinary events, frightened children, investigator expectations and deliberate trickery all have become entangled within the same case?

Furniture reportedly moved. Knocks travelled through the house. Objects were thrown. Extraordinary voices were recorded. Witnesses came and went. Investigators spent months inside the property. Some incidents became deeply controversial.

Others remain considerably harder to explain.

So, 49 years after that first night, what do you think happened at Enfield?

Was it an elaborate hoax that grew beyond the control of those involved?

A complicated mixture of genuine phenomena, human behaviour and occasional trickery?

Or does the surviving testimony suggest that something genuinely anomalous happened to the Hodgson family?

Whatever your conclusion, Enfield continues to invite argument nearly half a century later.

On this anniversary, return with Tony and me to 31 August 1977 — and the night it all began.

🎧 Watch the full conversation here:
The Enfield Poltergeist Revisited with Tony Hayes - YouTube

or here: The Enfield Poltergeist Revisited with Tony Hayes

Hello, and welcome to the August newsletter.

August seems to have disappeared remarkably quickly, but it has been a particularly busy month at Haunted History Chronicles. We’ve moved from some challenging conversations about possession and altered states of consciousness to cold spots, haunted landscapes, witchcraft and folklore — while over on the blog there has been everything from the Enfield Poltergeist to a journey to an in depth book review Jamaica Inn: The History, Hauntings and Folklore.

And behind the scenes, I’ve been preparing something rather special for the final three months of the year...

On the Podcast This Month

August began with a subject that is probably familiar to almost everyone through horror films, but considerably more complicated once we leave Hollywood behind.

In Possession: Psychology, Demons or Altered States?, I was joined by PhD researcher and Society for Psychical Research investigator TyLean Tuijl to ask what possession actually looks like when we move beyond cinematic stereotypes. We explored psychological explanations, altered states of consciousness, religious and cultural interpretations, and the difficult question of whether any single framework can adequately explain the extraordinary experiences people report.

That conversation naturally led somewhere else: into the night.

Dreams, Sleep Paralysis and the Paranormal returned to TyLean’s research to consider why so many extraordinary experiences occur while we are sleeping, dreaming, waking — or occupying that peculiar territory somewhere between the two. What happens when consciousness itself becomes part of the paranormal puzzle? And does identifying an experience as hypnagogic or sleep-related necessarily tell us everything about what was experienced?

Later in the month, Ciaran Farrell returned for Walking With Ghosts: The Presence in the Cold Spot. Cold spots are almost a cliché of paranormal investigation, but what happens when we actually stop and examine them? Ciaran joined me to explore their association with apparitions, shadow figures, feelings of dread and the sensation of an unseen presence — alongside the practical difficulties involved in separating genuinely unusual temperature changes from perfectly ordinary environmental causes.

And we finished August by stepping outside.

In Walking the Borderlands: Ghosts, Folklore and Witchcraft, author and researcher Hugh Williams took us into the old landscapes of Mercia — ancient tracks, ruined churches, caves, woodland and those wonderfully difficult-to-define places where history, folklore and the supernatural seem to overlap.

We explored forgotten traditions, witchcraft and cunning folk, ghost stories, strange encounters and the enduring relationship between stories and the landscapes in which they are told. It is also a conversation about something I find endlessly fascinating: why do some places simply feel different?

If you’ve missed any of August’s conversations, you can find them all here:

Explore the latest Haunted History Chronicles episodes

From the Blog: Enfield, Altered States and Jamaica Inn

There have also been two substantial new pieces on the website this month.

Sleep, Trance and the Enfield Poltergeist: Why Altered States of Consciousness Deserve Closer Study grew directly from my conversations with TyLean.

The spectacular elements of Enfield understandably dominate popular retellings — moving furniture, thrown objects, voices and apparitions — but what happens when we pay closer attention to sleep, trance and unusual states of consciousness?

The article returns to one of the twentieth century’s most famous paranormal cases and asks whether these less dramatic details might actually deserve considerably more attention than they have traditionally received.

Then came something rather different.

I recently had the enormous pleasure of reading Karin Beasant and Lisa Jane Holman’s new book, Jamaica Inn: The History, Hauntings and Folklore, and shared my thoughts in Jamaica Inn: A Treasure Trove of History, Mystery and Memory.

This is much more than another collection of ghost stories about a famous haunted inn. The book draws together the people, architecture, landscape, documentary history, folklore and paranormal traditions surrounding Jamaica Inn, including wonderful material that has rarely been seen before.

For me, what emerges is somewhere that exists at the meeting point between landscape and people; fact and memory; history and folklore; the living and — perhaps — the dead. The August blog currently features both this piece and the Enfield article.

Read the latest Haunted History Chronicles articles

Meanwhile, Over on Patreon...

Patreon continues to be the place where I can wander down some of the stranger historical and paranormal rabbit holes that don’t always fit into the main podcast.

There are now more than 3,000 posts in the archive, with podcasts, articles, historical cases, ghost stories, folklore, book discussions, archive discoveries and additional material accompanying subjects explored on the main show. You can also join the Patreon community for free, while paid membership currently begins at £1 per month.

One of the ongoing projects has been my chapter-by-chapter journey through Guy Lyon Playfair’s This House is Haunted, revisiting his account of the Enfield Poltergeist slowly rather than reducing an enormously complicated investigation to its most famous incidents.

Explore Haunted History Chronicles on Patreon

Something Special Is Coming...

And this is where I can finally give you a little glimpse of what I’ve been working on behind the scenes.

From October right through until the end of December, there will be short daily podcast episodes appearing on Patreon — available across all tiers.

Yes, daily.

Think of them as small excursions into the Haunted History Chronicles archive: strange historical incidents, ghosts, folklore, witchcraft, curious beliefs, paranormal accounts and some wonderfully obscure stories that deserve to be dragged back into the light.

Some will be eerie. Some will be peculiar. Some are likely to leave you wondering what on earth our ancestors were thinking.

Rather than waiting a week between journeys into the strange, there will be something new to discover each day throughout October, November and December.

And with October inevitably drawing us towards Halloween before November and December bring their own darker traditions, ghost stories and winter folklore, it feels like the perfect time to try something a little different.

There will still be plenty happening elsewhere too, so consider these daily episodes an extra for Patreon members rather than a replacement for the usual content.

Looking Ahead

There is already a great deal taking shape for the months ahead, with more interviews, investigations, historical research, folklore and some fascinating guests waiting in the wings.

As ever, though, I also love hearing where you would like Haunted History Chronicles to wander next.

Which August episode stayed with you?

Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis, an unexplained cold spot or a place that seemed to carry an atmosphere you couldn’t quite explain?

And with three months of short daily Patreon episodes approaching, what would you most like to encounter when you press play each day — ghosts, forgotten folklore, witchcraft, strange history, curious newspaper reports, paranormal cases... or something else entirely?

Let me know. Some of your suggestions might just find their way into the schedule.

As always, thank you for listening, reading, commenting, sharing and supporting Haunted History Chronicles. Whether you listen every week, dip into the blog, join me on Patreon or simply appear whenever a subject catches your eye, I’m enormously grateful that you’re here.

Until next time... stay curious, keep questioning, and never stop exploring the stories that refuse to be forgotten.

Take care,

Michelle
Haunted History Chronicles

There are landscapes where history never seems entirely past — where an ancient track, a ruined church, a lonely cave or a stretch of woodland can feel like a threshold between what we know and something altogether stranger.

In this episode, we journey into the old borderlands of Mercia, exploring a Midlands steeped in folklore, witchcraft, ghost stories, strange encounters and centuries of belief. We discover how stories become embedded in the places where they are told, why certain landscapes seem to invite the supernatural, and what can happen when we leave the familiar path behind and begin to look at the countryside through older eyes.

From forgotten traditions and the realities behind witchcraft accusations to haunted ruins, liminal places and the enduring power of local legend, this is a conversation about the magic that can still be found in the landscape — and the stories waiting there for those willing to walk into it.

My Special Guest Is Hugh Williams:

Hugh Williams was born in Worcester at the heart of the Midlands of England. He has spent years exploring, discovering and researching the stranger places of the Midlands and beyond, telling their stories and musing on their magic. With four books and regular appearances on TV and radio under his belt, you can find him at the liminal space where folklore, history and the supernatural converge.

You can listen to the full episode here:

Walking the Borderlands: Ghosts, Folklore and Witchcraft With Hu…

Every so often a book arrives that you find yourself completely absorbed by. You start reading a few pages, perhaps intending to come back to it later, and suddenly you are somewhere else entirely.

In this case, somewhere on Bodmin Moor.

Jamaica Inn: The History, Hauntings and Folklore by Lisa Jane Holman and Karin Beasant is quite simply a joy. It is beautifully researched, wonderfully produced and absolutely overflowing with the sort of details that make me want to stop reading, go back three pages, examine a photograph again, follow another historical thread and then tell somebody else what I have just discovered.

For anyone who assumes this is simply another book about a famous haunted inn, think again. This is something much richer. The book draws upon more than a decade of research, investigation, historical evidence and first-hand testimony. Its scope is extraordinary, moving through the history of Bodmin Moor, Captain John Broad and his family, piracy and free trade, crime and punishment, class, transport, religion, temperance, changing landlords, Daphne du Maurier, the Second World War, the development of the Inn itself and, of course, its remarkable collection of reported hauntings and folklore.

What I particularly love is that Lisa and Karin don’t hurry us towards the ghosts. They allow the Jamaica Inn to earn them. Before there are mysterious footsteps in corridors, shadowy figures, unexplained voices or strange encounters in bedrooms, there is a landscape and there are people. There is a history. And Bodmin Moor is almost a physical presence within these pages.

The opening takes us back to before the Inn existed, when this was a considerably wilder landscape: wetter, rougher and less controlled, crossed by old tracks and shaped by geology, weather and time. The authors describe it wonderfully as being “less countryside and more upland relic”. It immediately changes the way we understand the building that eventually appeared within it. That is something the book does repeatedly. It doesn’t merely tell us what happened at the Jamaica Inn. It tries to recreate the world in which it happened. We explore what life at sea might actually have meant for a man such as Captain John Broad. We are taken into the political and economic upheavals of eighteenth-century Britain, the changing nature of class, trade, smuggling, justice and punishment. Even events seemingly far removed from a lonely Cornish inn become part of the wider picture. And I loved this. It would have been so easy to write: John Broad was a sea captain who established the Jamaica Inn in 1776. Instead, Lisa and Karin ask us to understand what becoming a merchant captain actually meant. What sort of experience would that have required? What dangers might such a man have encountered? What position would he have occupied within society? What opportunities were available to someone attempting to improve his circumstances in eighteenth-century Britain? Suddenly John Broad isn’t a name attached to the beginning of a building. He starts becoming a person. And that attention to people is one of the book’s greatest strengths.

Some of my favourite moments are the seemingly smaller histories tucked between the famous ones. Take Thomas Pring, alias Thomas Coombe, the wonderfully described “Incorrigible Thief”. Having already been convicted and sentenced to transportation, behaved sufficiently well for his sentence to be reduced, escaped from Bodmin Gaol on his first night, stolen a horse, robbed the Jamaica Inn and committed further burglaries, his downfall ultimately came after stealing a bottle of spirits and falling asleep drunk on a hedge. He was hanged at Bodmin Gaol in June 1828. You couldn’t invent some of these lives.

These are precisely the stories that make history breathe. They remind us that the Jamaica Inn wasn’t sitting silently on the moor waiting for Daphne du Maurier or paranormal investigators to arrive. Generations of ordinary—and sometimes decidedly extraordinary—people were already passing through its doors.

There are wonderfully unexpected diversions throughout. A coach crash. An illegitimacy scandal. A place of worship. The arrival of the railway. The hunt. A paymaster’s assistant. The temperance movement. A naughty parrot called Percy. Potter’s Museum of Curiosities.

Even the question of why somewhere approximately 4,700 miles from Jamaica should be called the Jamaica Inn becomes an opportunity to explore history and folklore. One gloriously charming theory apparently suggested that a landlord found himself with a barrel of smuggled fruit that was beginning to spoil, turned it into jam, and produced something so delicious that people travelled to the “Jam-maker Inn” to buy it. Is that why Jamaica Inn received its name? The book doesn’t pretend that it is. And that brings me to something I admire enormously about this work: its integrity. History, folklore, tradition and paranormal testimony are allowed to coexist without being artificially forced into agreement. There is a refreshing willingness throughout to distinguish between what can be demonstrated, what has been reported, what has been handed down and what remains unknown. That matters. Particularly with somewhere as famous as the Jamaica Inn where stories become repeated and repetition becomes tradition. Tradition can eventually masquerade as historical fact. Lisa and Karin are prepared to pull those threads apart. Sometimes the answer is wonderfully satisfying. Sometimes it is tantalising. And sometimes the answer is simply: we don’t know. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, I trust a book far more when its authors are willing to tell me what the evidence cannot establish.

That same care becomes particularly important when the book crosses into its extensive section on The Hauntings. And extensive really is the word. There are individual sections covering Rooms 3 through 12 and beyond, alongside the gift shop, toilets, restaurants, main bar, snug, attic, museum, stable block, reception, managers’ flat and grounds. I rather love that even the toilets haven’t escaped paranormal scrutiny. But again, these aren’t simply spooky stories dropped onto the page. By the time we reach them we understand something about the building beneath those stories. And here there is another remarkable feature. The changing layout of Jamaica Inn has been painstakingly reconstructed. The book contains beautifully produced plans showing how the Inn has altered over the centuries. These are not merely small illustrations buried between paragraphs. There are tangible inserts that can actually be removed, unfolded and pored over while reading. For someone like me, they are irresistible. You can sit with the plan beside the book, trying to understand where something happened, what occupied that space at another point in the building’s history, how rooms relate to one another and how the physical Jamaica Inn changed around the generations living within it. It transforms reading into something almost investigative and I suspect I am going to spend an unreasonable amount of time puzzling over them.

The visual material throughout is another absolute treasure trove. There are photographs I had never seen before, historical images, documents and pieces of writing that bring you physically closer to the people being discussed. Most extraordinary are examples connected with Daphne du Maurier, including handwritten notes previously unseen. There is something extraordinarily intimate about inclusions like that seeing the actual marks their hand made on a page somehow collapses the distance between you and them.

And Daphne’s presence is important, but crucially she doesn’t overwhelm the real Jamaica Inn. The book explores her connection and the enormous cultural impact of the novel, but the historical Inn is allowed to exist independently of the fictional one. That distinction between Jamaica Inn the place and Jamaica Inn the legend runs beautifully through the book.

Then there are the hauntings. Reported figures. Sounds. Footsteps. Experiences associated with particular rooms and areas. First-hand testimony. The work of the Jamaica Inn Paranormal Team. The rise of paranormal television and its influence upon how haunted locations are perceived. Even the deceptively simple question: What is a ghost? That last question tells you quite a lot about the approach Lisa and Karin have taken. They haven’t written a book whose only purpose is to convince the reader that Jamaica Inn is haunted. They have documented. They have researched. They have listened. They have compared. They have preserved accounts. And they allow the reader room to think.

There is also a fascinating final movement into folklore: the Signal of the Moor, stories surrounding the naming of the Inn, tunnels, a smuggler’s skull, the Old Smuggler and Hannah’s Room. Here again, history and storytelling sit side by side. Some things can be traced through records; others have survived because people remembered them, repeated them and passed them on. And somehow that feels entirely appropriate for Jamaica Inn.

Because by this point in the book, you realise that none of these strands truly exists separately. The history gives meaning to the hauntings. The landscape gives atmosphere to the folklore. The folklore becomes part of the history, while memories, experiences and stories continue to accumulate around the building with every generation that passes through it. Layer upon layer, they have become part of what Jamaica Inn is.

And perhaps that is what the Jamaica Inn ultimately is: a meeting place. Not merely between travellers, as it once was, but between landscape and people; fact and memory; history and folklore; the living and—perhaps—the dead.

What Lisa and Karin have achieved so beautifully is to capture the essence of that place and make it almost tangible within the pages of this book. The atmosphere is here. The emotion is here. But, most importantly, the people are here. Their stories and memories, their hopes and hardships, their ordinary lives and extraordinary moments. Alongside them are the ghosts, the legends and the stories that have gathered around Jamaica Inn across generations.

You don’t simply come away knowing more about Jamaica Inn. Somehow, you feel as though you know it a little better—as a building, as a landscape, and as a place shaped by all those who have crossed its threshold.

Lisa and Karin understand that beautifully. Their affection for the Inn is unmistakable. This isn’t detached research into a building they happened to choose as a subject. Jamaica Inn has become part of their lives, and that emotional connection runs quietly through the book without ever overwhelming the history. If anything, it makes their determination to preserve its stories—and to tell them with honesty, care and integrity—even more powerful. That combination of passion and intellectual honesty is enormously appealing.

As someone who loves history, folklore and accounts of both historical and contemporary hauntings, this book had absolutely everything for me. There are books you read for information. There are books you buy because they are beautiful objects. There are books you keep returning to because they contain so many strange little pathways that you missed something the first time. This manages to be all three. It is a history book. It is a paranormal casebook. It is a collection of folklore. It is social history. It is local history.It is a visual archive. And above all, it is a celebration of place and of the countless human lives that have accumulated around that place since a lonely inn first appeared on Bodmin Moor in 1776.

10/10. I really cannot recommend it highly enough.

My only disappointment? I only bought one copy for myself. It is that good.

Where to buy

Jamaica Inn: The History, Hauntings and Folklore by Lisa Jane Holman and Karin Beasant can be purchased online directly from Lisa Jane Holman’s website:

Buy Jamaica Inn: The History, Hauntings and Folklore

And, rather wonderfully, you can also purchase a copy at Jamaica Inn itself, from the museum. There is something rather fitting about buying this particular book in the very building whose extraordinary history fills its pages.

If history, folklore, ghostlore, paranormal investigation or simply the strange accumulation of human stories within old places fascinates you, this one deserves a place on your bookshelf.

Just perhaps learn from my mistake.

Buy more than one.

Walking With Ghosts: The Presence in the Cold Spot With Ciaran F…

Why do some places suddenly feel unnaturally cold—and could there be more to it than a simple draught?

In this episode of Haunted History Chronicles, I welcome back psychical researcher Ciaran Farrell to explore one of the most frequently reported yet least understood features of paranormal encounters: cold spots.

Far more than a simple drop in temperature, Ciaran explains why investigators have long associated cold spots with feelings of dread, nausea, unease and even the sensation of an unseen presence. Drawing on decades of research, he discusses how cold spots can be investigated using both scientific methods and eyewitness testimony, and why he believes they may provide important clues in understanding hauntings, shadow figures and apparitions.

The conversation also explores whether environments can retain traces of past events, and examines how investigators attempt to distinguish between naturally occurring temperature changes and genuinely anomalous phenomena.

Join us as we ask a simple but fascinating question: when the temperature suddenly changes, are you feeling nothing more than the environment… or something that shouldn’t be there?

Why do so many reports of hauntings, apparitions, possession experiences and encounters with the seemingly impossible occur while people are asleep—or in that curious threshold between sleeping and waking?

It is a question that arose repeatedly during my recent conversation with TyLean Tuijl, a PhD researcher in psychology investigating possession and altered states of consciousness, as well as a Council Member and case investigator with the Society for Psychical Research. It is also a question that takes us directly back to one of the most intensively documented paranormal cases of the twentieth century: the Enfield Poltergeist.

Much of the popular discussion surrounding Enfield understandably focuses on the spectacular. Furniture reportedly moved. Objects were thrown. Strange voices emerged. Janet Hodgson was photographed apparently airborne above her bed. Yet running alongside these dramatic events is another strand of the investigation that receives comparatively little attention: the extraordinary number of incidents involving sleep, dreams, trance-like behaviour and other altered states of consciousness.

This is important because the Enfield material does not present us with a neat division between someone being awake or asleep. The surviving descriptions instead suggest a shifting and sometimes ambiguous range of states. The children could appear deeply asleep while speaking, crying or apparently responding to one another. At other times they displayed what witnesses described as trances, periods of regression, unusual physical strength or an apparent awareness of things happening around them despite seeming unconscious. Guy Lyon Playfair and Maurice Grosse themselves struggled with terminology. In a discussion with Professor Hans Bender, Playfair and Bender considered whether some of Janet’s states could even be called “possession”, but decided the word was too easily misunderstood. Even “dream” and “trance” could imply more certainty than the evidence allowed. The safest conclusion was simply that some form of altered state of consciousness appeared to be involved.

That uncertainty makes TyLean’s comments particularly relevant. Speaking about extraordinary experiences more generally, she observed:

“I think that the vast majority of people who have an extraordinary paranormal type of experience, it is highly likely to happen during the nighttime, a nighttime waking, a sleep paralysis event, et cetera. And so it is something of an entry point for paranormal experience.”

TyLean went further, suggesting that altered brain states themselves may be important to understanding why such experiences cluster around sleep:

“I believe that there is something really important happening that we don’t entirely understand yet in terms of entering these brainwave states and why things become more accessible to us at that point.”

That is not an assertion that a paranormal explanation has been established. Rather, it is an argument for taking the state of consciousness itself seriously. Enfield provides an unusually detailed historical example of why that matters. The investigators did not simply look at Janet lying still and assume she was asleep. They repeatedly tried to establish her responsiveness. Playfair later wrote that they used every simple test they could devise: shining torches into the girls’ eyes, tickling their armpits and the soles of their feet, forcing their eyelids open and observing the pupils. Tape recordings contain repeated references to these checks. On one occasion Grosse manipulated Janet’s eyelids and obtained no response. On another he noted that her eyes were turned upwards. Peggy Hodgson remarked that Janet’s eyes had remained closed “the whole time”, while apparently still showing some awareness of people nearby. During another episode Grosse concluded emphatically that there was “no doubt” the girls were asleep. Importantly, however, the investigators were not always so certain. In one voice experiment Grosse felt confident that Margaret was asleep but remained unsure about Janet. That inconsistency is useful evidence in itself: it shows that they did not automatically label every strange episode a trance.

Grosse’s notes from 8 September 1977 provide a particularly interesting early example. Following a loud bang, he rushed upstairs and found a chair displaced and damaged. Daily Mirror reporter George Fallows then examined Janet while Grosse watched:

“He found her to be in deep sleep (he used the word ‘unconscious’). He lifted her hand, then let it go (it appeared to ‘flop’ - his words), and he gently pushed her head to one side and found no resistance whatsoever. From her sleeping position and posture I felt that she could have been in a trance-like state (her mouth was open and her breathing very shallow). She was securely tucked in bed.”

That report does not prove that the displaced chair had a paranormal cause, nor does it establish exactly what Janet’s neurological condition was. It does, however, make the incident more complex than a simple picture of an alert child pretending to sleep after moving an object. Any conventional explanation has to account not only for the movement but for the observations made immediately afterwards.

By November, the altered states had become far more disturbing. Playfair later described them to Hans Bender in unusually emotional terms:

“We found the girl screaming, yelling, lying on the floor. She was underneath the table, trying to kick it over…The mother was absolutely desperate, you know. She didn’t know what to do. And Luiz [Gasparetto, a Brazilian medium] spent about half an hour with her [Janet], and she immediately became quiet. I have all this on the tape. He talked to her very quietly in Portuguese, and she went to sleep. She went to sleep at 7 o’clock in the evening and she woke up the next morning only at 9 o’clock. That’s fourteen hours of sleep. And she never had another hysterical fit. She just had one bad dream, and, after that, there was no more….The mother told me that she doesn’t mind the tables falling over, but these hysterical attacks were absolutely too much, you know. She was really very, very distressed. And, I must say, that I was, too. It’s one of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen, because they would go on for three, four hours. They would go on until 3 o’clock in the morning. And she would even wake up in a conversion. She was completely out for four days…Twice we called a doctor, emergency doctor, who gave her an injection of Valium…An interesting detail was that half an hour after she was given an injection of Valium, she was thrown out of bed, right across the room….the two girls would dream together….And we would open their eyes, and we would shine the torches [flashlights], and the pupil [wouldn’t] contract. And we would also tickle under the arms, and they were completely asleep. And they would talk to each other….Again, we have it on tape.”

The importance of that passage lies partly in Playfair’s reaction. He had already investigated unusual cases in Brazil and had encountered material he regarded as deeply disturbing, yet described Janet’s condition as “one of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen”. These episodes were not entertaining séances for those present. They were prolonged, exhausting and frightening experiences involving a distressed child and an increasingly exhausted family.

The surviving tapes reinforce that impression, while simultaneously showing how strange and inconsistent these states could be. They could involve screaming and apparent terror one moment, laughter or childish nonsense the next. Some seemed like nightmares; others were almost absurd. Margaret sometimes appeared to adopt an unconvincing childish persona. Janet called for “Mummy” in an unfamiliar pronunciation and, according to the recordings, at times sucked her thumb while Grosse remarked that she appeared to be “regressing”. This mixture of terror, regression, childish language and apparent normal awareness makes any single explanatory label difficult to sustain.

That ambiguity is important. An altered state of consciousness does not necessarily mean total unconsciousness. People can retain partial awareness during dreams, dissociative states, anaesthesia and other conditions. TyLean made a similar point throughout our conversation: extraordinary experiences need not be reduced to either “completely normal consciousness” or “completely supernatural”. There may be intermediate states that are poorly understood, culturally interpreted in different ways and experienced with extraordinary intensity.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Enfield is the claim that the two girls sometimes appeared to enter related states at the same time. Playfair described finding Janet “crying and moaning in her sleep”, only to enter another bedroom and discover Margaret doing the same:

“It was as if the girls were sharing a nightmare.”

Elsewhere, the tapes contain references to the girls undergoing apparent “convulsions” and other phenomena at approximately the same time while in different rooms. In another alleged shared dream, their bodily movements were described as nearly identical. Margaret was also reportedly thrown from her bed in one room at roughly the same time that Janet became more violent elsewhere. None of these observations demonstrates telepathy or a shared paranormal dream, but their recurrence makes them worthy of careful analysis rather than dismissal.

One surviving tape gives us an unusually immediate sense of what these episodes sounded like. During a shared dream on tape MG30B, the following exchange was recorded:

Janet Hodgson: [panting and groaning for several seconds, followed by screaming] “Margaret! Help!” [panting and groaning]

Maurice Grosse: “I’ve just examined the girls again.”

Janet Hodgson: [yelling] “Margaret!”

Maurice Grosse: “No doubt whatsoever that they’re asleep. No doubt.”

Janet Hodgson: [yelling] “[unintelligible] Look at it! It’s worse than [unintelligible].”

Margaret Hodgson: “What’s going on in the [unintelligible, perhaps ‘barn’]? It’s all coming out.”

Janet Hodgson: [yelling] “No, I don’t mean that. I’m not worried about that. It’s jumping all over the roof.”

Margaret Hodgson: [screams before talking] “Look [unintelligible]!”

Janet Hodgson: “Look at Gloria’s nose! [Margaret making gasping noises as Janet talks] It’s gone red. Look at Gloria! She’s [unintelligible]! Look at her!”

It is strange material precisely because it is not what we might expect from a carefully constructed paranormal performance. Much of it is repetitive, childish, confused and seemingly meaningless. That can be used sceptically: perhaps the girls were simply acting out fantasies. But the opposite question also deserves consideration. If they were deliberately manufacturing evidence intended to convince adult investigators, why produce hours of incoherent material that frequently made them appear ridiculous? Why continue for prolonged periods, sometimes sweating, screaming or physically exhausting themselves, when a much shorter performance would have achieved the same goal?

None of those questions rules out deception. The source material itself identifies moments that deserve sceptical scrutiny. Margaret sometimes seems suspiciously aware of events around her. At points she changes tone, jokes with people present or becomes quiet when somebody comes to the door. Her adoption of childish personas could sound artificial. Janet sometimes provides unusually detailed running descriptions of what she claims to be seeing within a dream, which can sound more like narration for an audience than ordinary dreaming. One apparent trance ended soon after Grosse threatened to wake or slap her. These details should not be hidden, because they are part of the evidence too.

Yet suspicious behaviour does not automatically establish that every altered state was fabricated. Nor would partial awareness disprove an altered state. The more responsible position is to acknowledge that the episodes probably did not all have identical causes or characteristics. Some could include joking, performance, subconscious behaviour or deliberate deception; others appear much harder to account for in those terms. That messy mixture is actually typical of complex human cases and is one reason why binary categories such as “genuine” and “fake” often prove inadequate.

The reported changes in Janet’s physical strength are one such complication. During some trance episodes, Grosse repeatedly expressed astonishment at her strength. He described her grip as that of a “very, very strong man”, called her strength “absolutely incredible”, “fantastic” and “phenomenal”, and at one point said she seemed to have “the strength of two men”. An older cousin was reportedly thrown to the floor, and Playfair later recalled an occasion when five adults, including a judo expert, struggled to restrain her. These are subjective descriptions rather than controlled measurements, and heightened strength during agitation is not unknown. Nonetheless, the consistency with which several witnesses remembered it makes the phenomenon relevant to any analysis of Janet’s altered states.

Outside witnesses also encountered these episodes. A woman referred to on the tapes as Mrs Edwards, apparently connected to Janet’s school and described as having a background in police work, spent a particularly disturbed night with the family. Grosse recorded the following conversation:

Maurice Grosse: “Well, Mrs. Edwards, I mean, it’s a dreadful thing to watch, but I’m very pleased to see perhaps there will be a few less skeptics in your place now.”

Edwards: “Well, as I said to Mrs. Hodgson, I’ve never disbelieved it.”

Maurice Grosse: “I know you haven’t, but now you’ve seen it yourself. I’m really pleased you have….”

Later that night:

Maurice Grosse: “Well, I’m sorry you’ve had a very disturbed night…You’re now a witness to the fact we’re not all mad…”

Edwards: “I’ll tell you what, my shoulder’s a witness to the fact that we’re not all mad.”

Maurice Grosse: “Perhaps you can tell one or two people in the council who seem to think that we are…When you’ve had the proof, that you’ve seen those children thrown out of bed quite a number of times…”

Again, this is testimony, not laboratory proof. But testimony is not meaningless simply because it is testimonial. The challenge for psychical research is precisely to determine how such observations should be weighed, especially when multiple witnesses encounter unusual behaviour independently.

Medical involvement adds another layer. Playfair noted that Janet received “three different diagnoses in three days”, yet no clear explanation or effective treatment emerged. During an emergency visit on 26 November 1977, an attending doctor examined Janet before administering Valium. On Playfair’s recording, he is heard saying that her “pupils were dilated and not reacting to light”. Grosse described the situation as “very strange” and compared it with what might once have been called “possession”; the doctor responded, “Yeah.” The doctor apparently indicated that Janet had received a “full dose” of Valium and that its effects should last “six to eight hours”.

According to Playfair’s chronology, the injection was administered at approximately 11.10 p.m. Janet became noticeably quieter within minutes, suggesting that the drug was having an effect. Yet at around 11.55 p.m.—roughly forty-five minutes later—she was reportedly thrown across the room. The argument made by supporters of the case is not that Valium somehow proves paranormality, but that if Janet was significantly sedated, an elaborate physical deception becomes more difficult to explain. The point deserves caution because dosage, individual response and the precise mechanics of the later incident would all matter medically. Still, it is precisely the sort of detail that makes the altered-state material worthy of more serious study.

The investigators even attempted instrumental monitoring. On 5 December 1977, David Robertson brought a strain gauge into the house while Hugh Pincott, then secretary of the Society for Psychical Research, and Maurice Grosse were present. During one of Janet’s dream episodes, something reportedly activated the instrument, leading to a discussion captured on tape. The surviving account interprets this as possible evidence that something physical accompanied the dream state, although without the full experimental set-up and data it would be unwise to draw a stronger conclusion.

There were stranger coincidences too. During one shared dream Margaret repeatedly said, “I want to speak to Peggy next door.” Playfair then went downstairs and asked Peggy Hodgson to attempt automatic writing. According to his account, the first words she produced were the same phrase:

“I want to speak to Peggy next door.”

Playfair emphasised that Peggy could not hear Margaret from the kitchen. It is a remarkable anecdote, though one that inevitably raises questions about experimental controls, unconscious cueing and retrospective interpretation. Yet that is precisely why cases like Enfield need careful documentation rather than either credulous acceptance or reflexive dismissal.

TyLean’s current work gives these historical observations a wider context. During our conversation she explained that the Society for Psychical Research’s Spontaneous Case Committee is seeing sleep-related experiences appearing alongside a surprisingly broad range of reports. She noted that in one reporting period, around 80 per cent of cases included sleep paralysis as an associated feature even when the primary report concerned something else, such as a ghost sighting, poltergeist activity or a premonition. She cautiously suggested that there may be “some sort of a link”, whether because individuals susceptible to such sleep states are also more sensitive to extraordinary experiences or for some other reason not yet understood.

This is where the comparison with Enfield becomes particularly valuable. The argument is not that TyLean’s research retroactively proves that Janet Hodgson was paranormal. Nor should Enfield be used to validate every sleep paralysis account as supernatural. Rather, the repeated convergence suggests a research question: why are altered states of consciousness so frequently present when people report extraordinary phenomena?

TyLean also draws attention to something that is easily lost when researchers become preoccupied with classification. An experience does not become irrelevant simply because it happens during sleep.

“Someone else doesn’t have to validate it for it to have been an experience that you went through.”

She adds that even if somebody ultimately concludes that an experience occurred entirely within sleep, “it was a profound experience. It’s something that they have to deal with and they have to process.”

That human dimension is impossible to ignore in the Enfield tapes. During one of the worst periods, Peggy Hodgson had reportedly “collapsed in total exhaustion”. The girls were moving in and out of these states, screaming, crying and groaning; Janet sometimes became violent; other reported phenomena were occurring simultaneously; and Grosse moved from room to room trying to document everything while helping those present. He described it simply as “a dreadful thing to watch”.

For Peggy, however, it was not an investigation. These were her children.

During one episode she expressed the emotional cost in a few words:

“It cuts you in pieces inside.”

That line perhaps matters as much as any alleged levitation or mysterious voice. Whatever explanation one eventually favours for Enfield, the family were experiencing something they found frightening, exhausting and profoundly disruptive. A psychologically generated experience is not therefore insignificant. Neither is a sleep-related experience. Nor does acknowledging the psychological dimension oblige us to assume that every anomaly has been explained.

This is perhaps one of the most important points TyLean made during our discussion. Sleep is not an insignificant interruption between meaningful periods of waking life. As she put it:

“We spend a third of our lives asleep… Of course it’s going to be important… if you want to ignore or diminish that, you’re just siloing off a huge part of the experience of being human.”

That is the broader lesson I take from returning to the Enfield tapes alongside contemporary research into sleep, possession and altered states of consciousness. The correct question may not simply be whether Janet and Margaret were “really asleep”, “really possessed” or “really faking”. Those categories may be too crude for the experiences being described.

Instead, we might ask what states of consciousness they were entering, how those states changed perception, memory, physical behaviour and responsiveness, why apparently related experiences sometimes occurred simultaneously, and why unusual physical events were so frequently reported around them. We should ask what neurological, psychological and social factors were present—and also be willing to document whatever remains after those factors have been considered.

Enfield itself contains reasons for both caution and curiosity. Some episodes appear suspicious. Some behaviour looks theatrical. The children admitted playing tricks on occasions. Yet there are also prolonged states witnessed by multiple people, unusual physical responses, medical observations, apparent changes in strength, reports of simultaneous dreaming, recordings made while events unfolded and incidents that remain difficult to reduce to a single simple explanation. The responsible response is not to select whichever half of that evidence best suits a preferred worldview. It is to hold both together.

This is what makes altered states such an important direction for future psychical research. They occupy precisely the territory where psychology, neuroscience, folklore, religious experience and anomalous phenomena overlap. Historically, cultures have called these states dreams, visions, trances, spirit possession, night visitations and countless other names. Modern medicine gives us different terminology, but the underlying human experiences have not disappeared.

Nearly fifty years after Enfield, the Society for Psychical Research is still collecting accounts in which sleep disturbance, sleep paralysis and unusual states of consciousness accompany reports of apparitions, poltergeists, premonitions and possession-like experiences. That does not give us an answer. It gives us something potentially more valuable: a pattern worth investigating.

Perhaps TyLean’s most useful contribution to this discussion is therefore not a theory about what lies on the other side of sleep, but an insistence that the question itself deserves to remain open. As she said:

“There’s something about the sleep state that allows people to be able to see in a way that we do not normally have access to, or at least most of us do not normally have access to.”

We can disagree about what “see” ultimately means. It might refer to internally generated imagery, altered perception, dissociative processes, culturally shaped experiences, psi phenomena, or something we have not yet adequately described. What matters is that we investigate rather than assume.

Why do so many extraordinary experiences appear at the borders of consciousness? Why do dreams, trances and sleep paralysis recur alongside reports that otherwise seem unrelated? Why did altered states feature so persistently at Enfield, and what might modern research reveal if we examine such states with methods unavailable to Grosse and Playfair in 1977?

Those questions remain open.

And perhaps, when studying the unexplained, that is exactly where the most interesting research begins.

The following episodes may be of interest in light of this blog:

https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/dreams-sleep-paralysis-and-the-paranormal-with-tylean-tuijl/

https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/possession-psychology-demons-or-altered-states-with-tylean-tuijl/

https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/the-enfield-poltergeist-revisited-with-tony-hayes/

Why Do So Many Extraordinary Experiences Happen at Night?

Last week, TyLean Tuijl challenged many of the assumptions surrounding possession, encouraging us to move beyond Hollywood stereotypes and consider a far more complex psychological, cultural and experiential picture.

In this follow-up conversation, we explore another question that naturally emerged from that discussion:

Why do so many reports of hauntings, apparitions, possession experiences and other extraordinary encounters seem to occur while we’re asleep—or in that strange space between sleeping and waking?

Together, we explore why sleep may be one of the most important gateways to extraordinary experiences. From sleep paralysis and shadow figures to vivid dreams and altered states of consciousness, we examine why these experiences have been interpreted so differently across cultures and throughout history. We discuss what the Society for Psychical Research is discovering through Project Sleep, why sleep disturbances so often appear alongside reports of hauntings, possession and other spontaneous paranormal phenomena, and why listening without judgement is essential when people come forward with these deeply personal experiences.

My Special Guest Is TyLean Tuijl:

TyLean Tuijl is a PhD researcher in psychology investigating possession and altered states of consciousness. She has a background as a solo, avant-garde composer and recording artist with many songs inspired by the paranormal, altered states of consciousness, and human psychology. She has performed on dozens of albums and on tour for various bands, most notably Attrition. She is a method-trained actress who has worked in film, television and on stage as well as voice over. Her experience with The Method became the foundation from which she would later study altered states of consciousness and possession.

TyLean is a council member and office holder for the Society for Psychical Research and a case investigator for the Spontaneous Case Committee, where she also serves as the Safeguarding Advisor.

Link to the episode:

Dreams, Sleep Paralysis and the Paranormal With TyLean Tuijl

What does it really mean to be possessed?

For centuries, stories of possession have been shaped by religion, folklore and popular culture. Films have taught us to expect dramatic exorcisms, distorted voices and supernatural battles between good and evil. But what if the reality is far more complex?

Can possession be explained by psychology alone, or is there something more? In this episode, PhD researcher and Society for Psychical Research investigator TyLean Tuijl explores possession, altered states of consciousness, dissociation, exorcism, mental illness and the paranormal, challenging many of the myths created by popular culture.

My Special Guest Is TyLean Tuijl:

TyLean Tuijl is a PhD researcher in psychology investigating possession and altered states of consciousness. She has a background as a solo, avant-garde composer and recording artist with many songs inspired by the paranormal, altered states of consciousness, and human psychology. She has performed on dozens of albums and on tour for various bands, most notably Attrition. She is a method-trained actress who has worked in film, television and on stage as well as voice over. Her experience with The Method became the foundation from which she would later study altered states of consciousness and possession.

TyLean is a council member and office holder for the Society for Psychical Research and a case investigator for the Spontaneous Case Committee, where she also serves as the Safeguarding Advisor.

You can listen to the full episode here: Possession: https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/possession-psychology-demons-or-altered-states-with-tylean-tuijl/

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What happens when two of the world’s most famous paranormal investigators arrive at the centre of an alleged haunting?

Over the previous three episodes, Ciaran Farrell has described a series of extraordinary experiences that, according to his account, began in childhood before following him into boarding school. There, alleged paranormal phenomena became intertwined with psychiatric theories, harsh discipline and increasingly controversial attempts to explain what was happening.

The Poltergeist Boy: Between Ghosts and Demons Part 4 (link to the full episode)

In this concluding chapter, the focus shifts to the arrival of Ed and Lorraine Warren.

Ciaran reflects on their investigation, the stark differences between their interpretation of events and those of the school, and why they believed the activity was demonic rather than the work of spirits such as Susan, the apparition he says repeatedly protected him. He also recounts disturbing allegations of ritual activity, violent confrontations, physical evidence that he believes challenged official explanations, and the growing divide between theology, psychology and psychical research.

As the series reaches its conclusion, broader questions emerge. How should extraordinary experiences be investigated? What happens when belief shapes interpretation? And can two people witness the same event yet arrive at completely different conclusions? This final episode invites you to decide where the evidence leads.

My Special Guest Is Ciaran Farrell:

Ciaran has served as a Council member of the Society for Psychical Research, SPR and the SPR’s Spontaneous Cases committee, SCC for many years.

He has had many psychical experiences and adventures when he was a boy. This led him to formulate his own early theories about ghosts, poltergeists and telepathic veridical dreams of the dead gained through direct encounters with ghosts, spirits and poltergeists.

He went on to build and design some of his own ghost-hunting equipment and to improve upon his previous theories about Cold Spots building on his own experience of them and his own ghost adventures.

He formulated the concept of ‘my body as an instrument’ to monitor and evaluate his perception of the atmospheres of rooms and outdoor places and preternatural Cold Spots within them as well as the perception and detection of poltergeists and ghost encounters.

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Hello, and welcome to this month’s newsletter.

Some stories stay with you long after you’ve finished researching them. Others challenge your assumptions about the paranormal, belief, and even memory itself. Over the past few weeks I’ve been sharing one such story on the podcast—The Poltergeist Boy—and the response has been incredible.

The series explores the extraordinary experiences of Ciaran Farrell, whose childhood became the focus of one of Britain’s most controversial paranormal cases. What began as strange disturbances during a family holiday soon escalated into years of terrifying encounters, shared experiences, unexplained phenomena and investigations that drew the attention of psychical researchers, psychiatrists, clergy and eventually Ed and Lorraine Warren. Along the way the story raises fascinating questions about poltergeists, dreams, spirit communication, religious belief and whether different investigators were witnessing the same events through entirely different lenses.

Episodes One, Two and Three are now available to listen to, with the concluding chapter arriving this Friday. In the final episode we explore what happened after the Warrens became involved, the lasting impact these experiences had on Ciaran and his family, and how he reflects on one of Britain’s most extraordinary haunting cases decades later.

If you haven’t started the series yet, now is the perfect opportunity to catch up before the final instalment is released.

Listen here:

Website:
https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/

Episode One:
https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/the-poltergeist-boy/

Episode Two:
https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/the-poltergeist-boy-the-school-under-siege-part-2/

Episode Three:
https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/the-poltergeist-boy-a-battle-for-control-part-3/

Elsewhere This Month

I’m also delighted to have another article featured in the latest issue of Unknowing Australia, the independently published magazine dedicated to exploring Australia’s hidden mythology, haunted history and the paranormal through original research, essays, photography and artwork.

My contribution is The Housekeeping Ghost, an investigation into one of Australia’s mysterious cases of a spectral housekeeper whose quiet acts of service have become part of the history and folklore surrounding a well known property. As with many of the cases I research, it raises fascinating questions about memory, place and why certain stories continue to endure long after those at their centre have gone.

The latest issue also features an excellent collection of articles exploring Australia’s stranger side. If you enjoy well-researched accounts of haunted locations, folklore and unexplained history, Unknowing Australia continues to be one of the most engaging independent publications in the field.

Find out more and order a copy here:

https://www.unknowingau.com/product-page/unknowing-australia-paranormal-magazine-issue-14

Continue the Journey on Patreon

If you find yourself wishing each podcast episode lasted just a little longer, there’s plenty more to discover over on the Haunted History Chronicles Patreon.

Patreon has become a place where I can explore subjects in greater depth than is possible on the main podcast. Alongside exclusive podcast episodes, you’ll find regular articles, historical investigations, behind-the-scenes research, archive discoveries and discussions that delve further into the strange intersections of history, folklore and the paranormal.

One series I’ve recently begun—and will continue over the coming weeks—is a chapter-by-chapter exploration of Guy Lyon Playfair’s classic investigation, This House is Haunted. Widely regarded as one of the most important first-hand accounts of the Enfield Poltergeist, the book deserves to be read slowly and carefully. Each Patreon episode features recordings from individual chapters followed by discussion and analysis, examining the evidence, the witnesses, the investigators and how the case has been interpreted over the decades. Whether you’re discovering the Enfield case for the first time or returning to it with fresh eyes, I hope these episodes offer a thoughtful companion to one of the most influential books ever written on the paranormal.

Alongside this new series, Patreon supporters can also enjoy exclusive podcasts, regular articles, early access to selected projects, historical case studies, folklore, ghost stories, book discussions and plenty of material that never makes it onto the main podcast. New content is added throughout the month, making it a wonderful place to continue exploring the stranger corners of history.

Join the Patreon community here:

https://www.patreon.com/c/Haunted_History_Chronicles

Other Ways to Support the Podcast

If you enjoy the podcast and would like to help it continue to grow, there are a number of ways you can support Haunted History Chronicles.

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You can also browse the Haunted History Chronicles shop, where you’ll find a growing collection of designs inspired by ghosts, folklore, history and the supernatural. From mugs and notebooks to clothing, stickers and prints, every purchase helps support the continued production of the podcast.

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Whether you support the podcast through Patreon, Ko-fi, the shop, by leaving a review, sharing an episode with a friend or simply listening each week, every contribution helps make future episodes, interviews and research possible. Thank you for being part of the Haunted History Chronicles community.

Exciting News from Friends of the Podcast

I’m always delighted to celebrate the achievements of past guests, and I’m thrilled to share that Karin Beasant and Lisa Jane Holman have announced the publication of their brand-new book, Jamaica Inn: The History, Hauntings and Folklore, due for release on 22nd August 2026.

Many of you will remember Karin from her appearance on Haunted History Chronicles, where we explored the rich history, ghost stories and smuggling legends surrounding the famous Cornish inn. Since then, Karin and Lisa have spent more than a decade researching one of Britain’s most iconic and enigmatic locations, bringing together historical records, first-hand accounts and paranormal investigations into what promises to be a fascinating new volume.

Moving beyond the legends popularised by fiction, the book explores the true history of Jamaica Inn, tracing its origins through the story of Captain John Broad and the people who shaped its remarkable past. Alongside its historical research, the book examines the unexplained phenomena that continue to be reported today—from mysterious footsteps and shadow figures to the many chilling encounters that have cemented Jamaica Inn’s reputation as one of Britain’s most intriguing haunted locations. By weaving together documented history, folklore and eyewitness testimony, Karin and Lisa invite readers to explore one of Cornwall’s greatest mysteries from every angle.

I’ve already ordered my copy and genuinely can’t wait to read it. Knowing the care, enthusiasm and dedication that Karin and Lisa have invested in this project, I’m sure it’s going to be an outstanding account. If you have an interest in haunted history, folklore, Cornwall or the paranormal, I’d certainly encourage you to take a look.

You can find out more about the book here:

Jamaica Inn: The History, Hauntings and Folklore
https://lisaholman.co.uk/https-lisaholman-co-uk-jamaica-inn/

If you’d like to revisit my conversation with Karin before the book is released, you can listen to our episode:

Ghostly Tales and Smuggling Legends: Jamaica Inn Explored with Karin Beasant
https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/ghostly-tales-and-smuggling-legends-jamaica-inn-explored-with-karin-beasant/

I know I’ll be counting down the days until publication, and I have a feeling this is going to become an essential addition to the bookshelf of anyone fascinated by Britain’s haunted heritage.

As always, thank you for reading and for continuing to support Haunted History Chronicles. Whether you’ve been listening since the very beginning or have only recently discovered the podcast, your curiosity, encouragement and enthusiasm make this community what it is.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s collection of stories and updates. There is plenty more to come over the next few weeks, with new podcast interviews, historical investigations and, of course, many more journeys into the stranger corners of history, folklore and the paranormal.

Until next time... stay curious, keep questioning, and never stop exploring the stories that refuse to be forgotten.

Take care,

Michelle
Haunted History Chronicles

How far would an institution go to explain the unexplained?

In Part One, Ciaran Farrell recounted the childhood experiences that began in a haunted holiday home before, according to his account, following him into his boarding school.

In Part Two, we explored how the alleged paranormal activity escalated, affecting pupils and staff alike as the school struggled to maintain order.

Now, in Part Three, the story takes its darkest turn.

As the disturbances intensified, school authorities sought increasingly extreme ways to understand—and suppress—what they believed was happening. Ciaran reflects on the highly disciplined culture of the residential school, the psychiatric theories used to explain the alleged hauntings, and the controversial medical treatments he says were employed in an attempt to stop the phenomena.

This episode examines the complex intersection of psychiatry, discipline and paranormal belief during a very different era, raising important questions about how children were treated and how unusual experiences were interpreted.

My Special Guest Is Ciaran Farrell:

Ciaran has served as a Council member of the Society for Psychical Research, SPR and the SPR’s Spontaneous Cases committee, SCC for many years.

He has had many psychical experiences and adventures when he was a boy. This led him to formulate his own early theories about ghosts, poltergeists and telepathic veridical dreams of the dead gained through direct encounters with ghosts, spirits and poltergeists.

He went on to build and design some of his own ghost-hunting equipment and to improve upon his previous theories about Cold Spots building on his own experience of them and his own ghost adventures.

He formulated the concept of ‘my body as an instrument’ to monitor and evaluate his perception of the atmospheres of rooms and outdoor places and preternatural Cold Spots within them as well as the perception and detection of poltergeists and ghost encounters.

The Poltergeist Boy: A Battle for Control Part 3

The story continues...

In the first episode, Ciaran Farrell shared the extraordinary experiences that began with a family holiday to a reportedly haunted house in Broadstairs. What should have ended when the holiday was over instead followed him home and into his boarding school, where increasingly disturbing events drew the attention of psychical researchers, clergy and even Ed and Lorraine Warren.

In Part Two, the mystery deepens.

Ciaran describes the different entities he believes surrounded him, the extraordinary incidents that disrupted life throughout the school, and the experiments carried out to determine whether the phenomena originated from him—or from something entirely separate. From shared dreams and automatic writing to violent poltergeist activity witnessed by staff and pupils, he reflects on the experiences that shaped his lifelong search for answers.

Whether viewed as genuine paranormal events, misunderstood psychological experiences or something in between, this episode explores one of the most unusual personal accounts you’ll hear.

My Special Guest Is Ciaran Farrell:

Ciaran has served as a Council member of the Society for Psychical Research, SPR and the SPR’s Spontaneous Cases committee, SCC for many years.

He has had many psychical experiences and adventures when he was a boy. This led him to formulate his own early theories about ghosts, poltergeists and telepathic veridical dreams of the dead gained through direct encounters with ghosts, spirits and poltergeists.

He went on to build and design some of his own ghost-hunting equipment and to improve upon his previous theories about Cold Spots building on his own experience of them and his own ghost adventures.

He formulated the concept of ‘my body as an instrument’ to monitor and evaluate his perception of the atmospheres of rooms and outdoor places and preternatural Cold Spots within them as well as the perception and detection of poltergeists and ghost encounters.

You can listen to the episode here : The Poltergeist Boy: The School Under Siege Part 2

What happens when a haunted holiday doesn’t end when you leave?

In this extraordinary first part of a series of conversations, Ciaran Farrell shares the deeply personal story that shaped the rest of his life. What began as a family holiday in a supposedly haunted house in Kent soon became something far stranger, with terrifying experiences that, he says, followed him home—and even into his boarding school.

Years before becoming a respected member of the Society for Psychical Research, Ciaran found himself at the centre of a case involving apparitions, poltergeist phenomena, exorcisms, and later, the controversial involvement of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Whether you approach the story as a believer or a sceptic, this is a remarkable account of one man’s lifelong search to understand the experiences that defined his childhood.

You can listen to the first episode here:

https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/the-poltergeist-boy/

My Special Guest Is Ciaran Farrell:

Ciaran has served as a Council member of the Society for Psychical Research, SPR and the SPR’s Spontaneous Cases committee, SCC for many years.

He has had many psychical experiences and adventures when he was a boy. This led him to formulate his own early theories about ghosts, poltergeists and telepathic veridical dreams of the dead gained through direct encounters with ghosts, spirits and poltergeists.

He went on to build and design some of his own ghost-hunting equipment and to improve upon his previous theories about Cold Spots building on his own experience of them and his own ghost adventures.

He formulated the concept of ‘my body as an instrument’ to monitor and evaluate his perception of the atmospheres of rooms and outdoor places and preternatural Cold Spots within them as well as the perception and detection of poltergeists and ghost encounters.

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There are few stories more unsettling than that of Karl Tanzler. Even among the countless tales of obsession, grave robbing and the macabre that fill the darker corners of history, his remains uniquely disturbing. In the 1930s, the German-born radiographer working in Key West became captivated by one of his patients, a young woman named Elena Hoyos. When tuberculosis claimed her life, grief slowly gave way to obsession. Night after night he visited her mausoleum, convinced that death had not severed the bond between them. Two years later he secretly removed her body, taking it home where, over the course of seven years, he painstakingly attempted to preserve it using wire, wax, plaster and fabric. He lived beside her remains as though the life they had imagined together had merely been postponed.

It is a story that seems to exist outside ordinary history. It belongs somewhere between Gothic fiction and psychological horror. Yet while Tanzler’s actions were extraordinary, the questions they raise are surprisingly ancient. What becomes of love when death arrives before marriage? Can a life cut short ever truly be considered complete? And should death have the final word over promises made by the living?

Across the world, and stretching back centuries, different cultures answered those questions in ways that continue to astonish us today.

Long before Tanzler wandered the cemeteries of Florida beneath the cover of darkness, families throughout Asia, Africa and Europe were arranging weddings for those who had already died. Some united a deceased bride with a deceased groom. Others allowed the living to marry the dead. There were ceremonies, wedding feasts, matchmakers, vows and even dowries. These were not secret rites performed by eccentrics on society’s fringes, but recognised customs embedded within communities, each intended to repair the disruption caused by an untimely death.

To modern readers, the phrase ghost marriage immediately conjures images of haunted churches, spectral brides and restless spirits wandering through moonlit graveyards. The historical reality is both less theatrical and far more revealing. These ceremonies were rarely about romance in the modern sense. Instead, they reflected how deeply marriage once shaped every aspect of society.

Today we tend to think of marriage as a personal choice between two individuals. Historically, it was something much larger. Marriage determined inheritance, family identity, property rights, social standing and the continuation of an ancestral line. To die unmarried was not simply to miss out on companionship. In many societies it represented an unfinished existence, leaving obligations unresolved and families uncertain about how the deceased should be remembered.

Nowhere is this more evident than in China, where ghost marriage has been practised in various forms for many centuries. Although customs differed from region to region, the underlying belief remained remarkably consistent. A young man or woman who died before marriage could become spiritually restless, lingering uneasily between the worlds of the living and the dead. Such spirits were believed capable of disturbing surviving relatives, bringing illness, financial hardship or persistent misfortune until their unmet desires had been addressed.

Whether these experiences arose through dreams, séances or unexplained family troubles, the solution was often the same. Find a suitable spouse.

Families would seek another household whose unmarried son or daughter had also died. Negotiations were carried out much like ordinary matchmaking, with compatibility, family reputation and tradition all playing their part. Once an agreement had been reached, a wedding ceremony followed. Offerings were made to the ancestors, rituals observed and, in many cases, the remains of the newly married couple were buried together so that, symbolically at least, they could continue into the next world side by side.

Seen through modern eyes, the practice can appear profoundly unsettling. Yet within its original context it was considered an act of kindness rather than superstition. The ceremony offered comfort not only to the dead but also to those left behind, reassuring grieving families that an interrupted life had, in some measure, been completed.

There were practical considerations too. Traditional Chinese society was strongly patrilineal. Sons remained within the family line, while daughters usually became part of their husband’s household after marriage. A daughter who died unmarried occupied an uncomfortable position. She no longer had a clear place within the family structure, even after death. Through ghost marriage, her spirit could be formally welcomed into another family, ensuring that she would continue to be remembered, honoured and included in ancestral rites rather than fading into obscurity.

As with so many customs rooted in sincere belief, however, darker consequences eventually followed.

The demand for suitable ghost brides became so significant in some parts of northern China that it created an illicit trade in human remains. Grave robbers began targeting the recently buried, stealing the bodies of young women before selling them to families seeking wives for deceased sons. In recent decades Chinese police have uncovered criminal gangs involved in exhumations, body trafficking and, in the most disturbing cases, murders allegedly committed to satisfy the continuing demand for ghost brides.

It is a sobering reminder that even traditions born from compassion can become vulnerable to exploitation.

Japan developed a very different answer to the same problem.

Rather than pairing two deceased individuals together, some communities instead symbolically married the dead to beautifully crafted dolls. The idea sounds almost whimsical until one understands the belief behind it. Those who died young were thought to harbour resentment because they had been denied the ordinary milestones of adult life. Marriage represented one of those essential passages. Without it, the spirit might remain dissatisfied, turning its frustration towards surviving relatives through illness or misfortune.

The bride doll therefore became a symbolic companion.

A photograph of the deceased would be displayed beside the carefully dressed doll inside a glass case, representing the marriage that death had prevented during life. Families sometimes kept these displays for decades, believing that over time the spirit would finally find peace before moving into the next realm.

What strikes me most about these customs is not their apparent strangeness, but their extraordinary tenderness. It is easy to dismiss them as curious relics of a superstitious past, yet doing so misses their deeper purpose. Every society develops rituals to soften the harshness of death. Victorian families posed for photographs with their deceased children as though they were merely sleeping. Locks of hair became treasured keepsakes. Ancient Egyptians filled tombs with possessions intended for the afterlife. Medieval Europeans commissioned prayers and masses for souls they believed continued to exist beyond the grave.

Ghost marriage belongs within that same long history of mourning.

It is less about ghosts than about grief.

Perhaps the most surprising example, however, lies not in folklore but in modern law.

France remains one of the few countries where posthumous marriage is legally recognised. Following the catastrophic collapse of the Malpasset Dam in 1959, which claimed more than four hundred lives, one grieving fiancée appealed directly to President Charles de Gaulle for permission to marry the man she had been preparing to wed before disaster intervened. Public sympathy was overwhelming. By the end of that year, legislation had been passed allowing, under exceptional circumstances, a living person to marry a deceased fiancé, provided sufficient evidence existed that the marriage had genuinely been intended.

There are no wandering spirits in these ceremonies. No supernatural beliefs or haunted traditions. Yet emotionally they arise from exactly the same place as ghost marriages elsewhere in the world. They acknowledge something profoundly human: that death often interrupts lives before important promises have been fulfilled.

If China and Japan reveal how ghost marriage could provide comfort for grieving families, another tradition from Africa demonstrates that such ceremonies were not always driven by spiritual concerns alone. Among the Nuer people of what is now South Sudan, posthumous marriage developed as a practical solution to an altogether different problem: preserving family lineage.

Traditionally, if a man died before fathering a male heir, his family risked losing not only property but also the continuation of his ancestral line. To prevent this, a close male relative might marry a woman in the deceased man’s name. Although any children born from the union were biologically fathered by the living husband, they were legally regarded as the descendants of the dead man. To modern sensibilities the arrangement seems bewildering, but within Nuer society it ensured inheritance remained intact, property stayed within the family and the deceased’s lineage continued despite his untimely death.

It is another reminder that marriage, throughout much of history, was rarely viewed solely as a romantic union. It was a social institution capable of restoring order after catastrophe. Death created disruption; marriage was one means of repairing it.

A similar principle, although expressed through theology rather than tradition, can be found within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Members believe that family relationships continue beyond earthly life, leading to the practice of proxy sealing ceremonies. Living individuals may undergo marriage rituals on behalf of deceased ancestors, symbolically uniting families for eternity. Again, the emphasis is not upon ghosts haunting the living, but upon ensuring that death does not permanently sever familial bonds.

Taken together, these customs reveal something profoundly human. Across continents, languages and religions, people repeatedly arrived at remarkably similar conclusions. Death might interrupt a wedding, but perhaps it need not erase the relationship altogether. Through ritual, symbolism or law, communities sought to finish stories that fate had left unfinished.

That is why these traditions deserve to be understood on their own terms. Modern audiences are often drawn towards their most sensational elements, imagining haunted brides, wandering spirits and supernatural encounters. Yet the historical evidence paints a quieter picture. These ceremonies were acts of remembrance. They allowed grieving parents to believe their child had entered the next world with dignity. They enabled fiancés to fulfil promises that illness or disaster had prevented. Above all, they offered reassurance that those who died young had not been denied life’s most important milestones forever.

Only when viewed against this wider historical backdrop does Karl Tanzler’s story acquire its full significance.

At first glance, his actions seem to belong alongside these traditions. They all involve death, love and an unwillingness to let go. Look more closely, however, and an important distinction emerges. Ghost marriages accepted death as an unavoidable reality. Their purpose was never to reverse mortality but to acknowledge it, while easing the emotional and social consequences it created.

Tanzler’s actions did precisely the opposite.

Rather than helping Elena Hoyos pass peacefully into memory, he attempted to keep her physically present within his own life. There was no community supporting his actions, no recognised ritual and no shared belief system guiding what he did. He acted entirely alone, convinced that the woman he loved continued to communicate with him beyond the grave.

His efforts to preserve Elena’s body have become infamous. Wires were used to reinforce her skeleton. Glass eyes replaced those that time had destroyed. Perfumes attempted to disguise the inevitable odour of decomposition, while wax, silk and plaster recreated the appearance of living flesh. The result was neither a memorial nor a funeral rite. It was an attempt to deny the finality of death itself.

Perhaps that explains why historians and psychologists continue to return to Tanzler’s case. It sits at the uncomfortable crossroads between love, grief and obsession. Every culture develops ways of remembering those it has lost. We visit graves, keep treasured photographs, preserve letters, wear wedding rings long after a spouse has died and sometimes find ourselves speaking aloud to someone who can no longer answer. These rituals are neither unusual nor unhealthy. They are part of the slow process of learning to live alongside loss.

Tanzler crossed a boundary that most grieving people never approach.

His story illustrates how remembrance can, in the rarest circumstances, become possession. Instead of accepting absence, he attempted to erase it. Instead of allowing memory to replace physical presence, he tried to preserve both. In doing so, he transformed what began as bereavement into something profoundly disturbing.

That distinction matters because ghost marriages are so often misunderstood.

The phrase itself encourages sensationalism. It conjures images of candlelit graveyards, haunted churches and supernatural romance. Popular culture has eagerly embraced these themes, filling novels and films with spectral brides and phantom grooms waiting centuries for their lost loves. Such stories possess undeniable emotional power, but they are a poor reflection of the historical record.

The real participants were not Gothic heroes wandering through mist-shrouded cemeteries. They were grieving mothers and fathers. Fiancées robbed of their future. Families trying to navigate unimaginable loss using the beliefs and traditions available to them. Whether in a Chinese village, a French town or a Sudanese community, posthumous marriage was rarely intended to frighten. It existed to comfort.

That comfort often rested upon a simple but deeply moving idea: that love should not be rendered meaningless by an accident of timing.

A young couple engaged to marry could still fulfil their promise.

An unmarried daughter could still find her place within a family.

A son whose life ended too soon could continue his ancestral line.

These customs may seem strange today, yet they emerged from concerns that remain entirely familiar. Every generation fears unfinished conversations, broken promises and futures stolen by unexpected death. Ghost marriage merely provided one cultural response to those universal anxieties.

It is also worth remembering that history is full of mourning customs that appear equally peculiar when separated from their original context. Victorian families commissioned post-mortem photographs of loved ones posed as though asleep. Hair from the deceased was woven into jewellery and displayed with pride. Medieval Christians paid for prayers to be offered on behalf of souls believed to be passing through Purgatory. Ancient Egyptians stocked tombs with food, clothing, furniture and even servants intended to accompany the dead into eternity.

Each practice reflected the same underlying impulse.

Human beings have always struggled to accept that relationships can end abruptly.

Perhaps that is why stories of corpse brides and ghost grooms continue to capture the imagination. They are not really tales about the supernatural at all. They are stories about the extraordinary resilience of love when confronted by mortality. They reveal how different cultures have wrestled with the same impossible question: how do we honour those whose lives ended before they were ready?

Some answered with ritual.

Others answered with law.

Others with theology.

Karl Tanzler answered with obsession.

His story endures because it exposes the point at which devotion ceases to be an act of love and becomes something altogether darker. Unlike the ghost marriages that sought peace for both the living and the dead, Tanzler’s actions offered neither. Elena Hoyos was transformed from a cherished memory into the centrepiece of an impossible fantasy, denied even the dignity of resting undisturbed.

That, ultimately, is what separates his case from the centuries of history that came before it.

Ghost marriages sought acceptance.

Karl Tanzler sought possession.

One attempted to make peace with death. The other attempted to defeat it.

History suggests that every culture searches for ways to soften death’s cruellest edges. Some build monuments. Some create rituals. Some preserve photographs, letters or treasured possessions. Others hold symbolic weddings for those who never reached the altar. However different these traditions appear, they all acknowledge one unavoidable truth: grief is the price we pay for love.

Karl Tanzler refused to pay that price.

And perhaps that is why, nearly a century later, his story still horrifies us in ways that ghost brides and spectral grooms never quite do. The customs of the past may seem strange, but they were born from compassion. Tanzler’s obsession, by contrast, reminds us that there is a profound difference between remembering someone and refusing to let them go. That distinction may be subtle, but it is the line that separates one of history’s oldest expressions of love from one of its most disturbing obsessions.

Link to podcast episode: https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/karl-tanzler-and-his-corpse-bride-a-love-that-would-not-die-with-ben-harrison/

History isn’t always found in castles, battlefields or museums. Sometimes it is waiting quietly on a bookshelf.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with historian and author Sarah Blake about her fascinating new book, Hushed Up History: Volume I. It is a collection of remarkable true stories that have quietly slipped through the cracks of history—stories that are shocking, extraordinary and often entirely forgotten. Rather than focusing upon the familiar events that dominate history books, Sarah turns her attention towards those obscure moments and overlooked individuals that deserve another chance to be remembered.

As we spoke, one story in particular lingered in my mind long after our conversation had ended. Not because it involved an ancient curse, a haunted house or a famous monarch, but because it centred upon one of the most ordinary objects imaginable.

A dictionary.

It’s hardly the sort of object that invites excitement. For generations they have sat quietly on classroom shelves, gathered dust in libraries, occupied forgotten corners of family bookcases and accompanied students through countless homework assignments. Today, many of us rarely reach for a physical dictionary at all, choosing instead to ask our phones or search online whenever we need the meaning of an unfamiliar word.

Yet have you ever stopped to wonder where those words came from? Not the words themselves, but the book that gathered them together. Who decided which words belonged? Who discovered their earliest meanings? Who painstakingly searched thousands upon thousands of books to trace how the English language had changed over centuries?

Like so many ordinary objects, we tend to take dictionaries completely for granted. They simply exist. We use them. We close them. We move on. The remarkable truth is that one of the greatest dictionaries ever produced owes an extraordinary debt to a man who spent nearly four decades confined within one of Britain’s most infamous institutions. It is a story involving obsession, murder, mental illness, remarkable friendship and an impossible publishing project that many believed would never succeed. Most surprisingly of all, it reminds us that history often hides in plain sight.

One of the joys of studying history is learning to ask different questions. When visiting an old castle, we naturally ask who built it. Standing before an ancient monument, we wonder what happened there. Walking through an abandoned churchyard, we read names on weathered gravestones and imagine the lives they once represented. But we rarely ask the same questions about ordinary objects. The old chair bought from a charity shop. The brass candlestick inherited from a grandparent. The battered camera found at a car boot sale. The faded photograph tucked inside a second-hand book.

Every one of these objects has travelled through countless hands before reaching ours. Each carries stories that have largely disappeared, leaving behind only the object itself. Historians often speak of the importance of buildings and landscapes, yet objects deserve equal attention. They survive wars, fires, changing fashions and the passing of generations. They quietly witness history without ever speaking. A dictionary is no different. Millions have owned one. Very few have ever considered the extraordinary story hidden behind its pages.

An Impossible Dream

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the English language had become one of the richest and fastest-growing languages in the world. New scientific discoveries, colonial expansion, literature, industry and international trade continually introduced fresh vocabulary. Existing dictionaries struggled to keep pace. Definitions were inconsistent. Many words lacked historical context. Others had never been included at all.

There was growing recognition that something far more ambitious was needed—not merely a dictionary explaining what words meant, but one that traced every word back through history, documenting precisely when it first appeared, how its meaning evolved and how writers had used it over time. It was an astonishingly ambitious undertaking. Imagine attempting to collect every significant word ever written in English. Not simply modern words. Every word. Every spelling variation. Every historical meaning. Every quotation illustrating its use.

Today such a project would require enormous databases, powerful search engines and sophisticated computer software. In the 1870s there were only books. Millions of pages had to be searched by human eyes. Every quotation had to be copied by hand. Every source checked manually. Many doubted the task could ever be completed.

The man eventually entrusted with this monumental responsibility was James Augustus Henry Murray, a Scottish schoolmaster and gifted linguist whose passion for language bordered upon obsession.

Murray possessed an extraordinary memory and an insatiable curiosity. By adulthood he had taught himself numerous languages, mastered dialects and developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of words and their origins. Yet even someone of Murray’s formidable intellect recognised an uncomfortable truth. He could never complete the project alone. No individual could. The Oxford English Dictionary would require an army.

Rather than recruiting academics exclusively, Murray made what proved to be one of the most important decisions in publishing history. He invited the public to help. Newspaper advertisements appeared across Britain and beyond asking volunteers to become readers. The task sounded deceptively simple. Choose a book. Read carefully. Whenever an interesting word appeared, write it on a slip of paper together with the quotation and publication details before sending it to Oxford. These became known as quotation slips. Each tiny piece of paper represented another fragment of the English language waiting to be assembled.

Gradually they began arriving. Dozens each week. Then hundreds. Soon thousands. Teachers contributed. Librarians. Clergymen. Doctors. Retired civil servants. Housewives. Students. Anyone with patience, books and curiosity could play a small part in constructing what many hoped would become the greatest dictionary ever produced.

Inside Murray’s famous Scriptorium—a corrugated iron building erected beside his Oxford home—these slips accumulated in staggering numbers. They were sorted into pigeonholes, arranged alphabetically and constantly reorganised as new evidence emerged.

Visitors often described the building as resembling a paper cathedral. Every wall was lined with shelves. Bundles of handwritten quotations filled boxes from floor to ceiling. The English language itself appeared to exist there physically, broken apart into hundreds of thousands of individual fragments waiting to be pieced together.

Yet amongst the thousands of contributors, one correspondent gradually distinguished himself from all the others. His contributions arrived with astonishing regularity. The quotations were meticulously chosen. His handwriting was elegant. His scholarship exceptional. Time after time he supplied precisely the historical evidence Murray needed. Whenever particularly obscure words proved difficult to trace, this mysterious volunteer somehow seemed able to locate exactly the right quotation. It almost appeared impossible. Naturally, Murray became curious. Every letter carried the same address. Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire.

To Murray, the explanation seemed obvious enough. Broadmoor must surely be the doctor’s place of employment. After all, the contributor signed himself Dr William Chester Minor. He was courteous. Highly educated. Clearly well read. Perhaps he worked as a physician there while pursuing scholarly interests during his spare time.

Over the years, Murray developed enormous respect for this unseen colleague. Although they had never met, their correspondence revealed a shared love of books, language and meticulous research. Minor seemed capable of producing exactly the quotations the dictionary required, often within remarkably short periods of time. His personal library, Murray assumed, must be extraordinary.

In many respects, he was right. Minor did possess one of the finest private libraries imaginable. He spent countless hours surrounded by books. He devoted much of his life to reading, annotating and searching for obscure words. But Murray had misunderstood one crucial detail. Broadmoor was not William Chester Minor’s workplace. It was his prison. Or, more accurately, it was the place where Victorian society confined those deemed criminally insane. The brilliant scholar helping to build the Oxford English Dictionary was not one of Broadmoor’s doctors. He was one of its patients.

The revelation would astonish Murray, reshape their friendship and uncover one of the most remarkable human stories hidden behind one of the most ordinary books ever printed. But to understand how an educated American surgeon came to spend his days contributing to the greatest dictionary in the English language from within the walls of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, we must first travel back across the Atlantic—to the jungles of Ceylon, the lecture halls of Yale University, and ultimately to the blood-soaked battlefields of the American Civil War, where William Chester Minor’s life would begin its tragic and irreversible transformation.

William Chester Minor entered the world in June 1834 in Ceylon—modern-day Sri Lanka—where his parents served as American Congregational missionaries. Although American by nationality, his earliest memories belonged not to New England but to the tropical landscapes of the Indian Ocean.

Growing up in a missionary household meant education was central to daily life. Reading, languages and scripture formed the backbone of his childhood, whilst visitors from across Asia introduced him to cultures and customs unfamiliar to most American children of the period. Yet Minor’s upbringing also left him caught between two worlds. His parents remained deeply committed to their missionary calling, whilst their son developed interests that extended beyond religious life. Like many missionary children, he would eventually be sent back to the United States to continue his education, separated from the only home he had really known.

Such experiences were not unusual during the nineteenth century, but historians have often noted the emotional upheaval these separations created. Children left families, climates and cultures behind to begin entirely new lives in unfamiliar surroundings.

Whether this contributed to Minor’s later psychological difficulties cannot be known. It would be simplistic—and irresponsible—to draw such a direct connection. Nevertheless, his early life was characterised by upheaval long before mental illness entered the picture.

Returning to America, Minor proved himself an exceptionally able student. He enrolled at Yale, where he studied medicine and graduated in 1863. Everything suggested a distinguished career lay ahead.

Medicine was rapidly advancing during the nineteenth century. Anaesthesia had transformed surgery, scientific understanding was improving and ambitious young doctors found themselves entering a profession full of opportunity.

Minor was intelligent, meticulous and artistically gifted. Outside medicine he enjoyed painting and played the flute to a high standard. Friends described him as cultured and thoughtful—a man who appreciated literature as much as anatomy.

Nothing in his early career hinted at the tragedy that would later define his life.

Unfortunately, history had other plans.

When Minor graduated, America was already engulfed in civil war. The conflict between Union and Confederate forces would become one of the bloodiest in modern history, claiming more than 600,000 lives and leaving countless others physically and psychologically scarred.

Minor accepted a commission as a surgeon in the Union Army. For a doctor, war demanded a very different form of medicine. There was little time for careful diagnosis. Battlefield hospitals overflowed with shattered bodies. Gunshot wounds, amputations, gangrene, infection and unimaginable suffering became daily realities. Although surgeons did not usually carry rifles into battle, they witnessed horrors that soldiers themselves sometimes escaped. Their work began after the fighting stopped. Rows of wounded men. Limbs piled outside operating tents. The smell of blood mixing with mud, sweat and disinfectant. Hours spent attempting to save lives that often could not be saved.

Modern psychology recognises such prolonged exposure as capable of producing profound psychological trauma. Today we speak of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), yet Victorian medicine possessed no comparable understanding. Those who broke down mentally were frequently dismissed as weak, unstable or morally deficient.

Minor appears to have carried the war home with him. Historians remain cautious when retrospectively diagnosing historical figures. It is impossible to know precisely what condition William Chester Minor suffered. What is clear is that his mental health deteriorated dramatically after the war. He became increasingly withdrawn. Paranoid. Unable to trust those around him. Most disturbingly, he developed an overwhelming belief that strangers entered his room at night while he slept. These were not vague anxieties. To Minor they were terrifying realities. He believed intruders climbed through windows and ceilings. He became convinced they intended to torture him. Sometimes they were poisoning him. At other times they threatened his life. No evidence supported these fears. Yet for Minor they felt entirely genuine.

One of the great tragedies of severe mental illness is precisely this inability to distinguish internal experience from external reality. To an outside observer the fears appear irrational. To the sufferer they are completely real. It is easy, from the comfort of historical hindsight, to dismiss such beliefs. Far more difficult is imagining the terror of living with them every single day.

Minor attempted to rebuild his life following the war. He moved to New York. He continued practising medicine. Yet his paranoia only deepened. Doctors eventually diagnosed him with what nineteenth-century medicine termed monomania—a now obsolete diagnosis referring to insanity focused upon one dominant delusion.

Today the symptoms described in historical accounts might prompt investigation for several different psychiatric conditions. Whatever the diagnosis, it was evident that Minor required substantial medical support and he was admitted to an institution.

Eventually his condition appeared sufficiently stable for discharge. His family hoped a complete change of surroundings might aid his recovery. England seemed the perfect destination. London offered culture, libraries, galleries and relative anonymity. Perhaps distance from America—and from memories of the Civil War—would provide the peace he desperately needed. It was an understandable hope. Sadly, it proved to be a fatal mistake.

Minor arrived in England during 1871 with considerable financial security. His army pension ensured he lacked for nothing. Unlike many visitors to Victorian London, he could easily have rented comfortable accommodation in affluent districts. Instead, he chose Lambeth. Nineteenth-century Lambeth bore little resemblance to the area familiar today. Its overcrowded streets were notorious for poverty, crime and overcrowded housing. Factories operated day and night. Labourers left for work before dawn. The narrow streets echoed with carts, horses and industry. Why Minor chose to live there remains uncertain. Perhaps he sought solitude. Perhaps he preferred inexpensive lodgings despite his wealth. Whatever his reasoning, the district became the setting for one of Victorian London’s most tragic misunderstandings.

During the early hours of 17th February 1872, factory worker George Merrett left home before dawn. Like thousands of working-class Londoners, he was simply walking to work. It was a journey he had undoubtedly made many times before. He never reached his destination. At approximately two o’clock in the morning, William Chester Minor emerged carrying a revolver. He fired. The bullet struck George Merrett in the neck. He collapsed and died in the street.

Police arrived quickly. What they encountered must have seemed bewildering. Minor offered no attempt to flee. He remained calmly at the scene. Weapon in hand. He admitted firing the fatal shot almost immediately. Yet his explanation seemed utterly detached from reality. He insisted George Merrett was not the intended victim. According to Minor, another man had repeatedly broken into his room during the night and fled into the darkness. He believed he had finally confronted his persecutor. In truth, no such intruder existed. George Merrett had simply been walking to work. An ordinary man, undertaking an ordinary journey, happened to cross paths with someone whose grip on reality had collapsed.

Minor’s trial attracted considerable attention. The facts themselves were not disputed. He had fired the weapon. George Merrett was dead. The central question became one of responsibility. Witnesses described Minor’s profound delusions. Medical experts examined his mental condition. The court concluded that although he had committed the act, he had done so whilst legally insane. He was therefore found not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered to be detained indefinitely, remaining confined “until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known.”

For George Merrett’s family, such a verdict could offer little comfort. A husband and father had been killed. His widow was left to raise their children alone. Minor himself reportedly recognised this tragedy. Throughout his years in Broadmoor he quietly sent financial assistance to Mrs Merrett, an act suggesting that beneath the delusions remained a man deeply conscious of the suffering he had caused. It is one of the many contradictions that define William Chester Minor. He was both killer and benefactor.Patient and scholar. A man capable of extraordinary kindness whilst simultaneously imprisoned by extraordinary illness.

On 17th April 1872, William Chester Minor entered Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum as Patient 742. For most people, that would have marked the end of their story. History would remember them, if at all, only as another name entered into institutional records. Few could have imagined that behind those imposing walls, surrounded by books rather than bars, Minor would begin work that would eventually shape the English language itself.

Whilst the outside world knew Broadmoor as a place of confinement, inside its walls an extraordinary library was beginning to take shape. It would become one of the most unlikely centres of literary scholarship Victorian Britain had ever seen—and from that library, William Chester Minor would embark upon the work that transformed him from a forgotten patient into one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s greatest and most unexpected contributors.

To many outside its imposing walls, Broadmoor represented a place of fear. Newspapers portrayed it as somewhere dangerous criminals were locked away, hidden from respectable society. Yet Broadmoor was unlike an ordinary prison. Established in 1863, it was intended to house those who had committed crimes whilst suffering from mental illness. Patients received varying degrees of treatment, and those considered trustworthy were afforded freedoms unimaginable within a conventional gaol. Minor benefited from this more progressive approach.

As a former military officer and educated gentleman, he was granted two adjoining rooms rather than a single cell. The doors remained unlocked, although escape was impossible. Large windows looked out across the Berkshire countryside, offering views of meadows and woodland rather than prison yards. More importantly, Broadmoor allowed him to rebuild something of the life he had lost. At the request of the American Vice-Consul, many of Minor’s personal possessions were shipped from the United States. His furniture arrived. His paints and easel followed. Boxes of books soon filled the rooms until shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling.

Gradually, one room became less like an asylum cell and more like the study of an Oxford don. Books were everywhere. Classical literature. Poetry. History. Science. Travel. Philosophy. Languages. It was a remarkable private library, assembled over many years and continually expanded through his military pension, which allowed him to order more volumes from booksellers across Britain.

Visitors later remarked that entering Minor’s rooms scarcely felt like entering Broadmoor at all. Instead, they encountered an exceptionally well-read gentleman surrounded by thousands of books, paintings resting against the walls and music waiting upon the stand beside his chair.

Yet appearances could be deceptive. Although his surroundings appeared peaceful, Minor’s illness had not disappeared. Each night he remained convinced that strangers entered through the ceiling to torment him. He believed unknown men carried out bizarre acts of torture whilst he slept before vanishing without leaving evidence. His remarkable intellect had survived. His grasp of reality had not.

History often reveals remarkable examples of individuals discovering purpose under the most unlikely circumstances. For Minor, that purpose arrived quietly in the early 1880s. Somewhere amongst newspapers, magazines or correspondence circulating through Broadmoor, he encountered an appeal from a Scottish lexicographer named James Murray. The Oxford English Dictionary required volunteers. Murray’s request was beautifully simple. Read. Whenever an interesting word appeared, write it onto a slip of paper together with the quotation in which it appeared. Send it to Oxford.

For most volunteers this represented a pleasant intellectual pastime. For Minor it became an obsession. More importantly, it gave structure to a life increasingly consumed by illness.

Minor quickly developed a working system unlike that of any other contributor. Many volunteers simply read continuously, recording quotations whenever they happened across useful examples. Minor approached the challenge differently. His extraordinary memory allowed him to recall approximately where particular words appeared across thousands of volumes. Rather than searching randomly, he organised his books so that they could be consulted almost like a modern database.

When Murray requested historical evidence for a specific word, Minor often knew exactly which shelves contained the answer. He would retrieve the relevant book, locate the quotation and carefully copy the passage onto one of Murray’s famous slips. It was painstaking work. Every quotation required absolute accuracy. Page numbers had to be checked. Spellings verified. Publication details confirmed. There were no photocopiers. No computers. No search engines. Only patience, scholarship and an extraordinary command of language.

The results astonished everyone. Over the years Minor contributed thousands upon thousands of quotations to the dictionary. Some estimates suggest he supplied well over 10,000 individual entries, making him one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s single most valuable volunteers. It is a staggering achievement. A man whom society regarded primarily as dangerously insane became one of the greatest authorities on the English language.

For years James Murray knew almost nothing about his mysterious contributor. Every envelope carried the same address. Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire. Murray naturally assumed Dr Minor worked there. Only in 1891 did the astonishing truth emerge. The American librarian Justin Winsor casually remarked how admirable it was that Murray maintained such a close friendship with Dr Minor given his “painful case.” Confused, Murray asked what he meant. Winsor explained. Minor was not employed at Broadmoor. He was confined there. The revelation must have been extraordinary. One imagines Murray replaying years of correspondence in his mind, suddenly viewing every letter through an entirely different lens. Yet what followed perhaps tells us more about James Murray than it does about William Chester Minor. Rather than distancing himself, Murray travelled to Broadmoor to meet him. The visit changed both their lives.

Accounts suggest the two men immediately found common ground. They talked for hours about books. Language. History. Literature. Minor showed Murray his library. Murray saw not merely a patient but a fellow scholar whose mind, despite profound illness, retained astonishing intellectual gifts. Their friendship deepened over the following years. Whenever possible Murray visited Broadmoor. The pair walked through the grounds together. When the weather turned cold, they sat beside the fire discussing words, reading passages aloud and debating the evolution of the English language.

It remains one of Victorian Britain’s most unlikely friendships. One man editing the greatest dictionary in history. The other contributing from within the walls of a criminal asylum.

Murray’s respect extended beyond academic admiration. As Broadmoor changed management, newer administrators attempted to reduce many of Minor’s privileges. His comforts came under threat. Restrictions increased. Murray protested vigorously. He wrote letters supporting his friend, arguing that Minor’s treatment had become unnecessarily harsh and urging those in authority to show greater compassion. He also lobbied for Minor’s eventual return to America, believing he might receive better care nearer his surviving family. These efforts reveal something often overlooked within historical accounts. Their relationship was never simply transactional. Minor was not merely a useful source of quotations. He had become a genuine friend.

Eventually, after decades inside Broadmoor, permission was granted for Minor to return to the United States. On 16th April 1910, James Murray and his wife travelled to London docks to bid farewell. It must have been an emotional meeting. For nearly twenty years they had worked side by side—sometimes separated by miles, yet united by a shared passion for language. Now they embraced for the last time. Minor returned to America under the care of his family. His health, however, continued to decline. He spent his remaining years in psychiatric institutions before dying peacefully in Connecticut on 26th March 1920 at the age of eighty-five.

James Murray did not live to see the Oxford English Dictionary completed either. He died five years earlier, still immersed in the monumental task that had defined much of his life. The first complete edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was finally published in 1928. It had taken more than seventy years from conception to completion. Thousands of volunteers had contributed. Millions of quotation slips had been examined.One man’s impossible dream had finally become reality.

Whenever I hear this story, I find myself looking differently at the objects around me. History often encourages us to seek out the spectacular. We travel to castles because they are impressive. We visit museums because they preserve remarkable artefacts. We stand upon battlefields because great events unfolded there. Yet extraordinary stories frequently hide within the ordinary.

Objects survive long after memories fade. They pass quietly from owner to owner, carrying stories that are rarely written upon their surfaces. Unless someone asks the right questions, those stories remain hidden.

The Oxford English Dictionary represents far more than definitions arranged alphabetically. Within its pages lie the efforts of thousands of ordinary volunteers who devoted countless hours to preserving the English language. Amongst them was William Chester Minor.

His contribution does not excuse the terrible tragedy that brought him to Broadmoor. George Merrett lost his life, and no historical achievement can diminish that loss. It is important to remember both men together: the innocent victim whose death devastated a family, and the deeply troubled doctor whose untreated mental illness destroyed two lives—Merrett’s through violence, and his own through decades of confinement.

Yet history also reminds us that human beings are rarely defined by a single chapter of their lives. Minor was a gifted surgeon. A talented artist. A voracious reader. A generous correspondent. A man whose mind was simultaneously capable of extraordinary scholarship and profound delusion. Those contradictions make him endlessly fascinating, not because they provide easy answers, but because they resist them.

Perhaps that is the greatest lesson hidden within this remarkable story. History is seldom black and white. It is filled with flawed people who achieve remarkable things, ordinary objects concealing extraordinary journeys, and friendships that emerge in the most unlikely of places.

So, the next time you reach for a dictionary—or scroll through an online definition without giving it a second thought—pause for a moment. Behind those neatly printed words stands an impossible Victorian ambition, millions of handwritten slips of paper, the tireless determination of James Murray, and the extraordinary scholarship of a man who, from the quiet confines of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, helped shape the language that millions of us still speak today.

Sometimes the most remarkable stories in history are not hidden inside castles or buried beneath ancient ruins. Sometimes, they are waiting patiently on the bookshelf, hidden in plain sight.

You can listen or watch via the links below:

https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/the-stories-history-tried-to-forget-with-sarah-blake/

Links to Sarah Blake and Hushed Up History

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https://husheduphistory.com/

Link To Book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hushed-Up-History-Sarah-Blake-ebook/dp/B0F7ZXF6JF

Some stories dominate the history books. Others vanish into the margins, buried beneath time, tragedy, controversy, or simple neglect. In this episode of Haunted History Chronicles, I’m joined by historian, researcher and storyteller Sarah Blake to explore her fascinating new book, Hushed Up History: Volume 1. Together, we uncover the strange, shocking and often unbelievable stories that history has quietly left behind.

From the catastrophic final voyage of the SS Morro Castle and the enduring mystery of the Flannan Isles Lighthouse keepers to bizarre true tales involving baboons, murder, maritime disasters and forgotten corners of local history, Sarah reveals how these overlooked accounts continue to speak to us today. We also discuss why certain stories become famous while others disappear from public memory, the challenges of uncovering hidden histories, and what these extraordinary accounts reveal about human nature itself.

My Special Guest Is Sarah Blake:

Sarah Blake began Hushed Up History in October 2014 as a way to tell the dark, amusing, surprising, and forgotten true tales hidden inside history’s discarded pages. She currently lives in New Jersey and when she is not writing about all things weird she works in cemeteries and museums, studies tarot and mediumship, paints nightmares, and devours everything she can about the history of her ancestor’s home of Salem, Massachusetts. She also drinks way too much tea and has absolutely no regrets about it. If learning about tarot floats your boat she can be found at Twin Crows Tarot on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

You can listen to the full episode below or via all your favourite podcast platforms:

https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/the-stories-history-tried-to-forget-with-sarah-blake/

On this day in 1896, one of Victorian Britain’s most notorious killers met her fate at Newgate Prison.

When a bargeman pulled a suspicious package from the River Thames at Caversham on 30th March 1896, he made a discovery that would expose a horrifying trade hidden in plain sight. Wrapped in brown paper was the body of a baby girl, later identified as Doris Marmon. She had been strangled with tape. As more infant bodies were recovered from the river, police launched a nationwide hunt for a serial killer.

Their investigation would lead them to Amelia Dyer, a seemingly respectable nurse and baby farmer who is believed to have murdered hundreds of infants during the dark era of Victorian baby farming.

In this fascinating and chilling episode, I am joined by crime historian and Victorian detective expert Angela Buckley. Angela’s research into the development of detective work and Victorian crime helps us unravel how investigators pieced together the evidence that finally brought Dyer to justice.

Together, we explore:

• The shocking world of Victorian baby farming.
• The murder of Doris Marmon and the discovery that exposed a killer.
• The nationwide police investigation and sensational trial.
• How Amelia Dyer became one of Britain’s most prolific serial killers.
• The paranormal reports, ghost stories and strange lore that have grown around those connected to the case and the locations linked to these tragic events.

More than 130 years later, the crimes of Amelia Dyer continue to horrify historians and true crime enthusiasts alike. But beyond the headlines lies a story of social stigma, poverty, vulnerable mothers and the desperate need for child welfare reform.

Join us as we revisit one of the darkest chapters in Victorian criminal history and examine the chilling paranormal tales that still linger in its shadow.

Watch now and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Link to podcast episode: https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/dark-cradle-the-chilling-case-of-amelia-dyer-the-victorian-baby-farm-killer/

Ways you can support the podcast:

https://www.patreon.com/c/Haunted_History_Chronicles

https://ko-fi.com/hauntedhistorychronicles

On a quiet residential street in Villisca, an ordinary-looking house hides an extraordinary darkness. Shuttered windows, sealed doors, and a weather-worn warning sign give it away long before the story is told.

Locals call it the “Murder House.”

Inside its walls lies the unanswered horror of the night of 9th into 10th June 1912, when the home of Josiah Moore and his family, along with two overnight guests, became the scene of an unsolved massacre that still unsettles history today. No lights. No answers. Just silence that refuses to fade.

As we revisit the events leading into that night, the question remains the same… how does a place like this still speak so loudly after all this time?

https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/a-haunting-in-villisca-the-axe-murder-house/

What looks at first like a cutting-edge experiment in microbial archaeology is, in a cultural sense, a continuation of a very long fascination with death as both archive and apothecary.

South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology / Eurac Research / Marion Lafogler

Discovered in 1991 in the Tyrolean Alps between Italy and Austria, Ötzi has become one of the most intensively studied human remains in the world. Preserved in ice, his body was effectively time-capsuled by glacier conditions, allowing researchers to reconstruct everything from his last meal—ibex, red deer and einkorn wheat—to evidence of illness, tattoos, and a fatal arrow wound.

More recently, scientists at the Institute for Mummy Studies at Eurac Research have gone further, examining not just the human remains but the broader ecosystem of microorganisms living on and within the mummy.

Their work revealed a complex microbiome: ancient microbes that likely lived in Ötzi while he was alive, modern organisms introduced during excavation and conservation, and a surprising group of cold-adapted yeasts associated with the glacier environment itself. One strain in particular appears to have proliferated under storage conditions, raising the possibility—still debated—that some of these organisms remain metabolically active.

From these yeasts, researchers were able to carry out fermentation experiments, successfully producing sourdough bread. The team has also suggested that beer production could be the next step, arguing that cold-active yeasts may have valuable applications in low-energy fermentation processes.

The implication is provocative: the mummy is not merely a preserved corpse but a living microbial archive capable of yielding functional biological agents.

Scientifically, the experiment sits at the intersection of paleogenetics, microbiology and food science. The key question is whether the yeasts are genuinely active after millennia or simply revived during thawing and laboratory cultivation. Some researchers remain cautious, noting that proof of metabolic activity would require RNA evidence showing gene expression rather than dormant DNA alone.

Südtiroler Archäologiemuseum / Eurac / Marco Samadelli-Gregor Staschitz

Even so, the experiment demonstrates that ancient remains can still yield viable biological materials under the right conditions. This raises a broader question that science alone cannot fully contain: what does it mean when human remains become sources of food production?

That question echoes, in a modern scientific register, an older and far more literal history.

For centuries in Europe, human remains were not only objects of curiosity but ingredients in medicine. This tradition, often grouped under the term “corpse medicine”, treated the dead body as a reservoir of potent substances capable of healing the living.

One of the most famous examples was mummia, a medicinal powder originally derived (or claimed to be derived) from Egyptian mummies. By the medieval and early modern periods, demand in Europe for “mummy medicine” was so strong that genuine Egyptian remains became scarce, leading to the substitution of more recent corpses treated and dried for sale.

Mummia was prescribed for a wide range of ailments, including internal bleeding and poisoning, based on the principle that the preserved vitality of the embalmed dead could transfer restorative properties to the living body.

Alongside mummia, other grim pharmacological practices circulated in early modern medicine:

• Blood preparations, sometimes including fresh human blood or processed forms such as “blood marmalade”, were used in attempts to treat weakness, epilepsy, or consumption.

• “King’s drops”, associated in folklore with royal executioners’ blood or materials taken from executed criminals, were believed in some traditions to carry curative or protective powers.

• Scaffold medicine, in which blood or bodily fragments were collected from recently executed individuals, was based on the idea that violent death concentrated life force or healing energy.

• Skull and bone remedies, including powdered cranium or “cranium humanum”, were widely listed in pharmacopoeias across Europe into the seventeenth century.

While these practices now appear macabre, they were embedded in pre-modern medical frameworks that blended humoral theory, symbolic reasoning and early experimental empiricism. The body—especially the violently or ritually dead body—was seen as chemically and spiritually potent.

At first glance, the sourdough experiment seems far removed from these historical practices. There is no suggestion that Ötzi’s remains are being consumed directly, nor that human tissue is being processed into medicine. Instead, scientists are isolating microorganisms—yeasts living in and around the mummy—and cultivating them under laboratory conditions.

Yet the conceptual continuity is difficult to ignore. Both corpse medicine and modern microbial archaeology rest on a shared premise: that the dead body is not inert, but biologically or chemically productive.

In earlier centuries, that productivity was imagined in terms of “life force”, medicinal essence or spiritual residue. Today, it is understood in terms of microbiomes, DNA, and metabolic pathways. But in both cases, the corpse is treated as a resource.

There is also a subtler parallel in the transformation of death into utility. Mummia became medicine; scaffold blood became remedy; skull powder became pharmacology. In the modern case, ancient yeast becomes fermentation culture, potentially usable for baking and brewing industries.

The difference lies less in the extraction of value than in the framework used to justify it.

Researchers involved in the Ötzi study have emphasised precisely this point. They describe the mummy not as a fixed artefact but as a “dynamic biological system”, continuously shaped by microbial activity, environmental exposure and conservation practices.

Even the museum preservation methods—such as humidification spray used to maintain the body—have altered its microbial profile, introducing modern bacterial signatures. In this sense, the mummy is not only a window into the past but also a living interface between past and present biological processes.

This challenges older ideas of mummies as sealed, silent objects. Instead, they are active sites of biological exchange, even thousands of years after death.

Modern researchers are careful to emphasise that their work is about microorganisms, not the consumption or exploitation of human remains. Nevertheless, the symbolic resonance with earlier corpse-based medicines is unavoidable.

Where medieval apothecaries saw vitality in powdered flesh, modern scientists see fermentative capacity in yeast. Where scaffold medicine imagined healing power in violent death, microbiology identifies adaptive organisms surviving extreme environments.

The trajectory from mummia to microbiome science reflects a broader shift in how humans conceptualise the boundary between life and death. Yet it also shows that this boundary has always been porous in cultural imagination.

The sourdough made from Ötzi’s microbial companions is best understood not as a culinary curiosity, but as part of a long continuum in which human remains have been treated as sources of transformation—medical, symbolic, and now biochemical.

Corpse medicine once extracted meaning and remedy from the dead through the language of humours and essences. Contemporary science extracts enzymes, DNA and metabolic activity through microbiology and genomics.

In both cases, the dead body becomes a site of productivity rather than finality. And in that sense, the ancient mummy in the Alps is not so distant from the jars of mummia, the scaffold remedies, or the powdered skulls of early modern Europe. The tools have changed dramatically; the fascination has not.

You can find out more about corpse medicine here:

https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/mummies-cannibals-and-vampires-a-history-of-corpse-medicine-with-richard-sugg/