by Aaron Mahnke
There were more and more new experiences each day. John noticed that an odd odor would fill the house from time to time. They heard the sound of heavy chains being rattled and dragged on the floor. Loud voices came from empty parts of the house. There was even heavy breathing, as if someone large and invisible were standing in the room with them.
All the while, the drumming continued, sometimes so loud that the neighbors could hear it. And all that noise drew public attention. People traveled from far across the area just to hear the drumming and to experience the hauntings for themselves. But with fresh eyes and ears also came fresh news.
You see, up until this point, John Mompesson had assumed the drummer had died or had been killed, and that his spirit was the cause of all their troubles. But word reached him in the summer of 1663 that this wasn’t true at all. William Drury was alive and well. After a short stint in a Gloucester jail for stealing some pigs, the man had escaped. Then he’d purchased himself a new drum and gone back to wandering the area again.
But there were other rumors. It was said by some that Drury had bragged to more than a few people about bewitching John’s house. And according to the beggar’s old military friends, Drury had a reputation for being a sorcerer.
Of course, rumors didn’t mean that Drury really was a sorcerer. It could very well have just been a lot of unchecked superstition. But for a man as desperate as John, these notions represented hope. He was looking for a logical explanation for his situation, and these tales of witchcraft did the trick.
So Drury was brought to Salisbury, where he was put on trial for the spiritual equivalent of aiding and abetting a criminal. They accused him of sorcery and presented the evidence against him: the drumming, the invisible forces in the house, the rumors, all of it. In an age when witchcraft was considered real, possible, and punishable, Drury’s freedom was suddenly on the line.
Judge Isaac Burgess listened to it all. He weighed the evidence. And, it seems, he brought common sense to the table. Because on August 3, 1663, Drury was acquitted. Not easily, they say. It was a tough choice, but in the end, he wasn’t charged with witchcraft. That didn’t mean he was off the hook, though. There was still the theft charge, so the very next day he was taken back to a Gloucester jail.
The results of that trial are important to our story, because when he was finally convicted of that crime, Drury was placed on a prison ship and sent to live in a penal colony. And then, as if a switch had been flipped, the drummer’s hold over the Mompesson household—the drumming, the noises, the invisible hands, all of it—just stopped.
Their nightmare was finally over.
SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
On the surface, this is just one more in a long line of haunted house stories. I get that, trust me. But the drummer of Tedworth is much more than just a spooky poltergeist tale.
It’s the story of one family’s struggle to understand their unusual experiences in a world that was quick to reach for supernatural explanations. It’s a story that had what many other tales always seem to lack—eyes on the ground, contemporary documents that still exist today, and multiple testimonies by outsiders about what they experienced at the house.
Still, it is a haunted house story. It’s a tale that plays with our ability to suspend disbelief. It presents us with something that, at first blush, seems trivial, almost laughable: a household of normal, rational people held hostage by a drum.
It’s easy to wonder: was it a haunting or was it witchcraft? Because those are different things in folklore. It resembles so many different types of supernatural activity that it’s a hard story to pin down. But perhaps, in the end, it was something much more mundane.
There’s a good chance this story was actually grounded in something less superstitious but no less dark and evil: politics. As I said earlier, William Drury had been a drummer in the English Civil War. And he had served with the Parliamentarians.
John Mompesson, on the other hand, had served as an officer on the side of the Royalists. Which means that he and the drummer were political enemies. It would be like watching a Union officer and a Confederate soldier meeting each other just a year after the end of the American Civil War. You can end a war, sure, but bad blood is a lot more difficult to put a stop to.
After nine weeks of silence and peace in the Mompesson household, it all started happening again: the noises, the breathing, the moving objects…and the drumming.
We don’t have to take John’s word for it, either. There were witnesses to it. One pair, an attorney named Anthony Ettrick and his friend Sir Ralph Bankes, actually spent the night and reported knocking sounds. They claimed to be able to request that the spirit knock in specific numbers, and that it complied willingly.
Naturally, this perplexed John Mompesson. It frustrated him, too. And maybe even frightened him. So he began to ask around. He had connections, after all. And soon enough, he received the news he’d already feared.
William Drury had escaped and was already back on English soil. Back, and in the area again. If the explanation for the mysterious sounds involves the drummer needing to be in close proximity to the house, his return and the resumption of the sounds certainly seem to support it.
Is this proof that a political argument rarely finds a peaceful solution? Or one more clue that hints at a supernatural explanation? Either way, it’s proof of the magical nature of music.
If you can hear it, it has power.
PLANES AREN’T SUPPOSED to collide with each other. Just taking statistics into account, you’re a lot more likely to hear about automobile collisions than those involving airplanes, because of the simple fact that there are a lot more cars on the road today than planes in the air. Still, as unusual as it sounds, it happens.
In the late 1950s, two military planes were flying off the coast of Georgia, above Tybee Roads, the spot where the Savannah River’s estuary meets the waters of the Atlantic. Those waters are a busy shipping lane, but on February 5, 1958, the sky above was busy as well.
At two o’clock that morning, a B-47 bomber was running a simulated mission along the coast, heading up from Florida. At the same time, an F-86 fighter plane was patrolling from the north. When they collided, it wasn’t disastrous, like you might see in a movie—neither plane exploded—but both were badly damaged. The pilot of the fighter plane had to eject and let the plane drop into the sea. The bomber, though, managed to stay in the air. The aircraft lost a lot of altitude, and it was clear that the crew was going to need to make an emergency landing, and fast. To help with this, they requested and received permission to jettison some extra weight.
They dropped only one thing, though. On board was a bomb that weighed nearly eight thousand pounds. A nuclear bomb. And they released it off the coast of Tybee Island, where it plummeted into the sea below. The military tried to recover it later that year, but the mission was a failure. The bomb is still there to this day.
That’s the trouble with a world as big as ours. Things—even large things—are easy to hide. It adds a layer of mystery to our experience, an element of unknown risk. But the hidden things of our world aren’t limited to objects. Even people—the ones who live and breathe and move around us all the time—can act a lot like the cold, dark waters of the sea. At the end of the day, you never know what lies hidden just beneath the surface.
MARY…
Mary was born in 1847, and she was just six months old when she had her first seizure. Her muscles twitched uncontrollably, and the pupils of her eyes dilated. Her parents, Asa and Ann Roff, were of course sick with worry. The seizure, which seemed to be epileptic, left Mary unconscious for several days, and for a while they assumed the worst. Still, she recovered, and life moved on, though she continued to suffer seizures.
In an effort to find some relief for their daughter, the family moved from Indiana to Texas when she was about ten. A year later, they followed the newly built Peoria Railroad back north and settled in the brand-new town of South Middleport, Illinois. They b
uilt one of the first houses there, started a new life, and hoped for the best. But Mary’s seizures didn’t cease.
By the time they moved to Illinois, she was having them at least once a day. This was before even the earliest anti-epileptic drugs, such as potassium bromide, and the lack of options left Mary and her parents feeling depressed and hopeless. Add to this the intense drain that regular seizures had on her physical health, and it’s easy to see how dark those days must have been for her.
One of the methods they tried for a while was bloodletting. It’s a practice that dates back thousands of years, and it’s been done with many sorts of implements, from knives and needles to spring-loaded cutting devices. One of the professions that historically delivered bloodletting services was, of all people, the barber. Even today, you can find barber shops that still use the red-and-white striped pole outside. It’s a carryover from another era, designed to represent blood and bandages.
Mary’s preferred method, though, was actually leeches. And because she complained constantly of headaches, she would place them on her temples, believing they would help. She used them so often that she even began to view them as pets. Like a child with a kitten, time spent with her leeches would often put a smile on Mary’s face.
(As an aside: if your kid asks for a dog for Christmas, I can’t help but feel like they’re missing out on a fun pet option here. Leeches are really cheap to feed, and you don’t have to walk them. Just putting it out there.)
Mary went on like this for about three years, with the use of the leeches escalating slowly. All the while, she was a sad young woman, and rightly so. But she was also bright, excelling in her studies and even becoming an accomplished pianist. Her music choices reflected her mood, though, leaning more toward the dark and melancholy.
In 1864, at the age of eighteen, she took the bloodletting to a new level, cutting herself on the arm with a knife. The loss of blood was so heavy that it caused her to pass out. When she did regain consciousness, something seemed off. She spent days screaming and thrashing around on her bed. There were periods of several hours at a time when multiple adults had to hold her down to prevent her from hurting herself.
And then, like a tropical storm that’s passed through a city, everything went calm. Instead of uprooted trees and leveled buildings, though, Mary was left awake but unresponsive. It was as if something inside of her had broken. People would walk into the room and speak to her, but she didn’t seem to notice them. No eye contact. No reply. If she could see and hear them, she certainly wasn’t acknowledging them.
Mary was still able to carry out many routine daily activities, such as dressing herself or putting her hair up with pins. But her parents started to notice something odd about it all. When Mary did those things, her eyes were open, but she didn’t seem to be using them. She was completing tasks that required sight, but her eyes never moved, never shifted or focused on the task at hand. It was as if she wasn’t really seeing anything at all.
So they decided to test it out. They put a blindfold on her and then asked her to repeat the same tasks. Mary complied, and successfully, too. Even with a dark blindfold on, she could dress herself completely, even picking up pins off the dressing table and using them to do her hair. Of course, all of that could have been muscle memory, but there were other, less explainable things she could do. For example, still blindfolded, she had an encyclopedia placed in front of her. Even though she couldn’t see the pages, she opened the book up to the word “blood”—and then proceeded to read the entry word for word.
This made a lot of people in town curious. She was doing something that no one should be able to do, and they wanted answers. So they began to come to the house to test her. One person suggested that she might have memorized the encyclopedia entry—she’d been obsessed with blood for years, of course—so they asked for a more difficult test. They took a few of Mary’s personal letters, written in her own hand, and then shuffled them into a larger stack of papers. Still blindfolded, Mary was able to pull out her own and then read them aloud to the people in the room.
A local newspaper editor even stopped by to do his own experiment, and his was the most astounding of them all. He arrived with an envelope in his coat pocket. It was still sealed, and inside it, he told everyone, was a letter from a friend who lived far away.
He handed the envelope to a blindfolded Mary, who turned it over and over but never opened it. And then, without hesitation, she announced the name of the person whose signature was on the letter. The editor opened it up and checked; Mary was correct.
But it wasn’t all magic shows and wonder. No, Mary was continuing to have seizures on a daily basis, and as a result, her depression was deepening. And that led to more cutting. It’s tragic, really—in the middle of the nineteenth century, mental health care still was practically medieval, and that meant that Mary was left to suffer largely without help beyond her own family.
On July 5, 1865, Mary’s parents left her home alone while they took a short trip. Mary got up that day, made herself breakfast, and then went back up to her bedroom. It was there that she had a powerful seizure and died as a result.
She was only nineteen years old.
…MARY…
A year before the tragic death of Mary Roff, Thomas and Lucinda Vennum welcomed a daughter into their family. Mary Vennum was born in Illinois in April 1864, and almost immediately the family took to calling her by her middle name, Lurancy.
In 1871, when Lurancy was just seven, her family moved up from Milford to South Middleport, but in the years between Mary Roff’s death and the Vennums’ move, the town had become the county seat of the newly formed Iroquois County. In honor of a well-known Native American woman who’d been born in the area, the town changed its name to Watseka.
For a while, Lurancy’s childhood was healthy, happy, and unremarkable. But in early July 1877, at the age of thirteen, Lurancy started to complain that she’d been hearing voices in her bedroom. She claimed they were calling out to her, saying her name over and over. Her parents, chalking it up to the overactive imagination of a child, largely ignored her.
Then, on the night of July 5, Lurancy had a small seizure that left her in an odd state. She was still conscious, but she stayed mysteriously rigid for nearly five hours. When she finally snapped out of whatever trance she seemed to have been in, she told her parents that she felt rather strange. Of course she did, they said. She’d had a seizure, after all.
The following day, Lurancy had a second seizure and entered into that awake-yet-stiff state once more. This time, though, she spoke. Her parents sat beside her bed and listened as she told them what she could see. But even though her eyes were open, she didn’t describe the bedroom to them. She described Heaven.
Specifically, she described seeing her two siblings, her sister Laura and brother Bertie, both of whom had passed away young. In fact, Lurancy had been only three when her brother died, and the family rarely talked about those painful memories, which made her description even more unusual.
All through the summer and well into November, Lurancy continued to have these trances. Each time, she would describe another world, the world beyond the veil of reality. Beyond that curtain that separates life and death, there were angels, spirits, Heaven, and all of the details she attached to it. It seemed surreal. And then on November 27, things…well, they took a left turn at Weird and cruised down Crazy Street, if you know what I mean.
The seizure she had that night was extremely violent. She was stretched out on the bed and would violently arch her back with each episode. One report claims that she bent so sharply at the waist that her feet touched her head, though I’m honestly not sure how that’s possible. If it happened, I can’t imagine a more creepy scene than watching a young woman bend in half backward while screaming in pain.
This wasn’t a one-time thing, either. These new seizures went on for weeks, leaving the family distraught and Lurancy exhausted and in pain. This pattern—first seizures, a
nd then visions—repeated itself regularly for nearly three months. Their doctor didn’t know how to help. And while the seizures were something that he could at least put a medical name to, her visions of the afterlife—full of spirits and angels and the like—defied his expertise. Members of her extended family were beginning to think that the young woman had lost her mind. They begged the Vennums to send her to Peoria, where there was an asylum well equipped to help treat her illness, but the Vennums refused.
One person who did offer them answers was Dr. E. Winchester Stevens. He was a friendly man in his mid-fifties from Janesville, Wisconsin, and he worked as a spiritualist doctor, offering a mixture of medicinal cures and otherworldly solutions to people just like the Vennums.
He’d heard of Lurancy’s story through the Vennums’ neighbors, an older couple with an interest in spiritualism and the afterlife. But when Dr. Stevens entered her room for the first time on the thirty-first of January, he didn’t meet Lurancy. Instead, the voice that came out of the young woman claimed to be that of an elderly German woman named Katrina Hogan.
She’d been sixty-three years old when she passed away years before, and now she was in possession of Lurancy’s body. And she wasn’t nice, apparently. This elderly spirit, speaking through the young woman’s mouth, insulted and verbally abused Thomas and Lucinda Vennum. This went on for a few moments before shifting into another spirit entirely.
This one claimed to be that of a young man named Willie Canning, who’d died after running away from his family. But he, too, vanished after just a few minutes. Dr. Stevens, who’d simply been an observer up until this point, stepped in to help. According to the historical account of the events of that day, Stevens used mesmerism—what we would call hypnosis today—in an attempt to help Lurancy calm down.