Ghosts & Gallows

by Paul Adams

  However, it was the Englishman Robert Thurston Hopkins (1884-1958), a ghost hunter who had a penchant for investigating a number of screaming skulls and similar hauntings, who provided some of the most detailed evidence regarding paranormal associations with the Red Barn case, specifically in connection with the death’s head of William Corder himself.

  Thurston Hopkins was well qualified where the Red Barn mystery was concerned: when Bury Gaol was sold off by the Prisons Commission, his father bought the property and Robert lived at Gyves House as a boy. Thurston Hopkins senior, a man who ‘spoke of ghosts as though their existence had always been accepted by all sensible people’, was a close friend of Dr Kilner, whose family, many years before, had been bequeathed the Corder relics, including the murderer’s articulated skeleton and pickled scalp. This skeleton was used for many years as a teaching aid at the old West Suffolk General Hospital2 and around the 1870s, Dr Kilner made a display of William Corder’s skull by swapping it with a replacement and repairing the original with parts of a third anatomical skull. From this moment on, Kilner seemed to be haunted by some terrible presence and a number of curious and unnerving incidents, reminiscent of events in Robert Bloch’s screenplay and later novel The Skull of the Marquis de Sade (1976), were related by him to Thurston Hopkins’ father. These included being followed by a shadowy figure dressed in an old-fashioned greatcoat and beaver hat, footsteps walking the house, psychic attacks and the materialisation of a disembodied hand on the handle of a bedroom door.

  Tiring of these encounters with the unseen, Dr Kilner ultimately presented the death’s head to Robert Thurston Hopkins’ father, who claimed to have experienced the sinister power of the skull himself: the day he took possession of the relic he slipped and badly twisted his ankle, while the next day his horse was killed when it fell over the edge of a quarry. According to the account that Thurston Hopkins senior often related to his family – by way of a supper-time Christmas ghost story it must be said – he later suffered ‘illness, sorrow and financial disaster such as he had never dreamed possible’ and finally broke the curse of the haunted skull by bribing a gravedigger to give it a Christian burial (enclosed in a japanned cashbox) in an unnamed churchyard near Bury St Edmunds. An account of the haunting has been given by Peter Underwood in his 1985 book The Ghost Hunters.

  The Red Barn murder is the first in this volume where strange paranormal forces seemingly sent a murderer to the gallows. It is not, however, the last …

  NOTES

  1. Borley Rectory, a rambling Victorian building in rural Essex, built in 1863 and badly damaged by fire in 1939; demolished in 1944 and long known as the ‘most haunted house in England’. It was the subject of a lengthy investigation by Harry Price (see Chapter 7), a well-known and controversial researcher during the inter-war years who wrote two full-length books on the case. For a modern reassessment by the present author in collaboration with Eddie Brazil and Peter Underwood see The Borley Rectory Companion (2009). Number 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London, was one of the most notorious murder houses in post-war England, known for the crimes of necrophile serial killer John Reginald Christie and the controversial execution of Timothy John Evans, hanged in March 1950 for the murder of his daughter. Following publication of the book Ten Rillington Place (1961) by journalist and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy and subsequent campaigning, Evans was granted a posthumous free pardon in October 1966, his crime attributed to Christie. For an alternative viewpoint see John Eddowes’ The Two Killers of Rillington Place (1994).

  2. In August 2004, at the request of a descendant, Linda Nessworthy, Corder’s skeleton was released by the Royal College of Surgeons and subsequently cremated at the South London Crematorium at Streatham; the ashes were later interred in St Mary’s churchyard at Polstead.

  CHAPTER 3

  AUTUMN OF TERROR

  ROBERT LEES AND JACK THE RIPPER, 1888

  When the Leicester Mercury published an obituary for one of the city’s noteworthy sons on 12 January 1931, it contained among a number of statements one particular item that would have caught and held the attention of all but the most casual of readers. According to the unnamed writer, as well as being a former Fleet Street reporter, author and a social worker who conducted King Edward and the Prince of Wales incognito on a tour of a London mission for the poor, Mr Robert James Lees, father of fifteen children and associate of former Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, also ‘claimed to be the only surviving person who knew the identity of Jack the Ripper, the notorious murderer’. The responsibility of this knowledge was something that had weighed heavily on Mr Lees in his later years, so the newspaper was told by one of his daughters, Miss Eva, who also informed the Mercury that she hoped ‘to receive a message from my father in the dream-state’, a comment that Robert Lees’ standing as a ‘noted spiritualist’ puts into context.

  Local readers with a reasonable memory may well have found the information somewhat familiar as just over a year before, another newspaper, the Illustrated Leicester Chronicle, had published an interview with Robert Lees himself, in which his singular knowledge about the killer of Whitechapel was given a brief and somewhat throwaway mention. This curious provincial story proved to be surprisingly persistent and three months later it was to be given national prominence. Expanding on the original material, the Daily Express, in its editions for 7-9 March 1931, published the contents of ‘an astonishing document … one of the most remarkable narratives that has ever reached a newspaper office’ which went on to describe in three instalments how Robert Lees, a gifted clairvoyant, had used his abilities to assist Scotland Yard in tracking down the East End murderer, who, contrary to popular belief, had been caught and on the findings of a medical committee locked up as an anonymous inmate in an asylum for the criminally insane. The document was described as a testimony dictated by Lees himself, who had placed an embargo on its publication until after his own death.

  Not surprisingly, the paranormal aspect of this information proved to be of particular interest to at least two of the many personalities involved in organised psychical research during the inter-war years. Three years after the Express articles, Dr Nandor Fodor (1895-1964), a practising New York psychoanalyst and one of the great unsung heroes of twentieth-century supernormal investigation, included Lees in his monumental Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science (1934) in which he described the clairvoyant as having ‘rendered the greatest service to the English police’ in his tracking down and closure of the Ripper case. Fodor was not the only psychical researcher who gave credence to this version of events which had been played out in the dark forbidding streets and alleyways of East End Victorian London. Writing in the fledgling Fate Magazine in May 1949, British-born American Hereward Carrington, a veteran of over half a century of paranormal research which included ground-breaking séance room investigations with physical mediums such as Eusapia Palladino and ‘Margery’ Crandon1, was confident that ‘Dr’ Robert Lees, ‘at the height of his powers as a “seer”’, had led the police to a solution of the Ripper’s crimes.

  The end of the 1950s and through into the following decade saw the beginning of a modern resurgence of interest in and intensive study of the Whitechapel murders, a phenomenon which continues with great persistence to this day, over 120 years after the brutal events of the autumn of 1888. The catalyst was the simultaneous but unconnected activities of a number of interested writers: in 1959, at the same time as broadcaster Daniel Farson, nephew of Dracula author Bram Stoker, was researching the case for a BBC television programme, crime journalist Donald McCormick (who would later carry out a personal investigation of the Red Barn mystery) issued his book The Identity of Jack the Ripper, while the following year fellow writer and criminologist Colin Wilson also published a series of articles entitled ‘My Search for Jack the Ripper’ in the London Evening Standard. In 1965, two major Ripper books appeared within a few weeks of one another – Autumn of Terror by Tom Cullen and Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction by Robi
n Odell – both of which quickly became the benchmark texts for a new generation eager to pull back the veil of many decades in the hope of finally putting a name to not only one of England’s most merciless and sadistic killers but, as Colin Wilson has described him, ‘the most notorious killer of all time’.

  All of the authors writing in the 1960s presented what has become a reasonably official and generally accepted version of these events. Between 31 August and 8 November 1888, at least five women, all working as prostitutes, were murdered by an assailant armed with a knife within close proximity of each other in the Whitechapel district of East London; with the exception of one victim, the killer mutilated the bodies and removed internal organs after initially strangling them into unconsciousness and cutting their throats.

  Earlier in the year two other murders, both unsolved, took place in the same area which some commentators have attributed to the Ripper: in the early hours of the morning of 3 April 1888 (Easter Monday), forty-five-year-old Emma Elizabeth Smith died of peritonitis in the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road after being viciously assaulted (according to her own account) by four men in Osborn Street who pushed a metal rod into her vagina; while just over four months later, on 7 August, thirty-nine-year-old Martha Tabram (or Turner) was found dead, the victim of a frenzied knife attack, on the first-floor landing of a communal stairwell in the George Yard Buildings, a tenement block to the north of Whitechapel High Street. However, what is considered to be the first Ripper murder, the first of the ‘canonical five’, took place a few streets away at the end of the same month.

  Just before 3.40 a.m. on the morning of Friday 31 August, a carter named Charles Cross walked into Buck’s Row, a street behind the main thoroughfare of Whitechapel Road, and noticed what he initially took to be a tarpaulin bundle lying in the entrance to Brown’s stable yard. It proved to be the body of London-born Mary Anne ‘Polly’ Nicholls, a prostitute in her early forties; her throat had been cut and the lower part of her abdomen slashed, exposing the intestines. A week later, on 8 September, forty-seven-year-old Annie Chapman was refused a bed at a lodging house in Dorset Street for not having sufficient doss money. Her body was discovered a few hours later just after six in the morning by a resident in the back yard of a house at 29 Hanbury Street off of Brick Lane. The yard, accessed by a narrow passageway from the street, was often frequented by prostitutes and their clients. Annie Chapman had been brutally murdered – the head, practically severed from the neck, was tied in place with a handkerchief and as well as disembowelling his victim, the killer had removed and taken away the uterus. Seventeen people asleep on the premises only yards away heard nothing.

  At the end of the same month, on 30 September, two more women were murdered within an hour of each other on what has become known as the night of the ‘double event’. Around 1 a.m., Louis Diemschutz, a jewellery hawker, drove his horse and cart into Dutfield’s Yard behind a working men’s club in Berner Street, Whitechapel, and came across the body of a woman lying in a pool of blood, her throat cut. This was Elisabeth Stride (‘Long Liz’), a forty-five-year-old Swedish-born prostitute originally from Torslanda near Gothenburg. The lack of mutilation has given some commentators reason to doubt whether this was actually a Ripper murder but it is highly likely that the sound of Diemschutz’s approach interrupted the killer before he could begin his butchery and, hiding in the shadows, he made his escape as the peddler ran into the club to raise the alarm. Forty-five minutes later and half a mile to the west, Police Constable Edward Watkins was passing on his regular beat through Mitre Square when, in a secluded corner opposite Church Passage, the light from his lantern revealed the horrific sight of another dead East End woman, forty-three-year-old Catherine Eddowes who had been, in Watkins’ own words, ‘cut to pieces’. The Ripper had worked quickly and in only a few minutes (the policeman had passed the same spot a quarter of an hour earlier and seen nothing) had laid open Eddowes’ abdomen – this time both the left kidney and the uterus were missing and, as well as gashing open the throat, the killer had viciously slashed and disfigured the face2.

  In between the killing of Annie Chapman and the double slayings of Elisabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, a letter sent to the Central News Agency on 17 September and signed ‘Catch me if you Can, Jack the Ripper’ was the first of several communications (all of which may or may not have been written by the murderer) to give the killer a chillingly anonymous identity and, subsequently, set the benchmark for sadistic slaughter which, in the words of crime writers Joe Gaute and Robin Odell, has become ‘a kind of universal standard against which other murders are measured’. For the whole of October, Victorian London held its breath; several weeks passed with no new killings, but in reality it proved to be the eye of the storm. Forty days after the grim events of Dutfield’s Yard and Mitre Square, ‘Jacky’ seemingly concluded his reign of terror with a final killing of almost mind-numbing savagery.

  On 9 November 1888, around a quarter to eleven in the morning, Thomas Bowyer, assistant to Mr John McCarthy, a local landlord and candle maker, knocked on the door of 13 Miller’s Court, effectively the twelve foot square ground-floor back room of 26 Dorset Street, only yards from the main Commercial Street thoroughfare, to collect twenty-nine shillings-worth of back rent from one of the tenants, twenty-four-year-old Mary Jeanette Kelly, who was several weeks in arrears. Receiving no response, Bowyer reached through a broken windowpane and, pulling back the curtain, peered into the room. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he was greeted with a scene from a nightmare. With little chance of interruption, Jack the Ripper had subjected the young Irishwoman to a prolonged and ferocious assault lasting over an hour, inflicting appalling injuries and leaving the tiny room looking like an abattoir. Police constables and later Scotland Yard detectives found what was left of Mary Kelly lying on a bed soaked through with blood. Flesh had been stripped from the legs and arms, the abdomen opened and organs removed (the liver was found placed between her feet), both breasts had been sliced off and the heart cut out and taken away. Ashes found in the grate suggested the killer had worked (possibly naked to avoid saturating his outer clothing with blood) by the light of a pile of burning rags in the fireplace.

  Over the next fifteen months several more murders, all of women, took place in and around the same area which have been described by some researchers as further Ripper crimes. They included parts of a headless body dredged from the Thames in June 1889, which were subsequently identified as that of a prostitute named Elizabeth Jackson from Turks Row, Chelsea; Alice McKenzie (‘Clay Pipe Alice’), found the following month in Castle Alley, Whitechapel with her throat cut and gashes across her abdomen, and twenty-five-year-old Frances Coles, discovered with similar injuries under a railway arch at Swallow Gardens in Whitechapel on 13 February 1891. Most commentators, however, consider the killing of Mary Kelly to be the final Ripper murder, whose brief but unprecedented reign of terror was curtailed either by the killer’s suicide or anonymous incarceration in an unknown lunatic asylum. For those both investigating and rediscovering the mystery of Jack the Ripper during the renaissance of the 1960s, the Whitechapel murderer – despite many imaginative theories as to his real identity – was an unidentified man who was never caught.

  In the sixty years between the execution of William Corder and the chilling ‘autumn of terror’ of Jack the Ripper, a significant landmark in the history of the paranormal took place when the small village of Hydesville, twenty miles from Rochester in New York State, became the birthplace of Modern Spiritualism. Two decades after Ann Marten’s prophetic dreams of the Red Barn, strange things began to happen in the home of the Fox family.

  On 11 December 1847, John D. Fox became the tenant of a small cabin-like house and moved in with his wife and six children. The building itself had in the local area something of a haunted reputation. Nothing of any particular significance happened until March 1848, when curious events started to unfold. The Fox family became disturbed at night by strange rapping noises and
knocks sounding within the house itself. These were accompanied by noises suggesting the movement of furniture and later the sound of footsteps. The rapping noises seemed to be centred around three of John Fox’s daughters, twelve-year-old Kate, fifteen-year-old Margaret and later their sister Leah, who also became a focus for the disturbances3. What today’s modern researchers would recognise as being a spontaneous poltergeist outbreak was to be the catalyst that would unlock a doorway to seemingly dormant psychic faculties inherent in mankind.

  It became apparent to the Fox family that the alarming noises seemed to have some form of intelligence behind them, something that was confirmed when they began putting questions to whatever was making the sounds. Answers were received in the form of raps and knocks and a gruesome picture began to emerge. Apparently, a thirty-one-year-old man had been murdered in the house five years previously and his remains buried in the cellar of the building. The news of the disturbances quickly spread throughout the area and the family soon became inundated with visitors wanting to hear the rappings for themselves. During the course of a few days, over 300 people came to Hydesville and whatever was causing the disturbances did not disappoint them. The sinister knockings continued and volunteered more information to the effect that the murdered man was a peddler who had been killed for money. Digging took place in the cellar of the house in an attempt to ascertain the truth behind the bizarre affair. The work was temporarily suspended until the summer, when the excavators finally unearthed part of a skeleton. This was too much for the Fox family and they finally vacated the house. Kate Fox moved to her brother’s home in Auburn, in New York State, while Margaret went with her sister Leah to Rochester. The remaining parts of the murdered peddler had to wait a further fifty-six years before they were finally unearthed in 1901 when the house itself, then as now considered of immense importance to the Spiritualist movement, was physically moved in its entirety to a new location in Lily Dale, New York.