Paranormal
One day in March 1661, a magistrate named John Mompesson, who lived in Tedworth in Wiltshire, was visiting the small town of Ludgershall when he was startled by loud drumming noises that came from the street. He was told that the racket was being made by a vagrant named William Drury, who had been in town for a few days. Drury had been trying to persuade the local constables to give him public assistance, on the strength of a 'pass' signed by two eminent magistrates. The constable suspected that the pass was forged.
Mompesson ordered the drummer to be brought before him, and examined his papers; just as the bailiff had suspected, they were forged. Mompesson seems to have been an officious sort of man who enjoyed exercising his authority; he ordered the drummer - a middle aged man - to be held until the next sitting of the local Bench, and meanwhile confiscated his drum. The man seems to have tried hard to persuade Mompesson to return the drum, but without success. As soon as Mompesson's back was turned, the constable seems to have allowed Drury to escape. But the drum stayed behind.
A few weeks later, the bailiff of Ludgershall sent the drum to Mompesson's house in Tedworth. Mompesson was just on his way to London. When he came back he found the house in uproar. For three nights, there had been violent knockings and raps all over the house - both inside and out. That night, when the banging started, Mompesson leapt out of bed with a pistol and rushed to the room from which the sound was coming. It moved to another room. He tried to locate it, but it now seemed to be coming from outside. When he got back into bed, he was able to distinguish drumbeats among the rapping noises.
For the next two months, it was impossible to get sleep until the middle of the night; the racket went on for at least two hours every night. It stopped briefly when Mrs. Mompesson was in labor, and was silent for three weeks - an indication that the spirit was mischievous rather than malicious. Then the disturbances started up again, this time centering around Mompesson's children. The drumbeats would sound from around their beds, and the beds were often lifted up into the air. When the children were moved up into a loft, the drummer followed them. The servants even began to get used to it; one manservant saw a board move, and asked it to hand it to him. The board floated up to his hand, and a joking tug-of-war ensued for twenty minutes or so, until the master ordered them to stop. When the minister came to pray by the children, the spirit showed its disrespect by being noisier than usual, and leaving behind a disgusting sulfurous smell - presumably to imply it came from Hell. Scratching noises sounded like huge rats.
Things got worse. Over the course of the next two years, lights were seen, doors slammed, unseen skirts rustled and a Bible was burnt. The creature purred like a cat, panted like a dog, and made the coins in a man's pocket turn black. One day, Mompesson went into the stable and found his horse lying on its back with its hind hoof jammed into its mouth; it had to be pried out with a lever. The 'spirit' attacked the local blacksmith with a pair of pincers, snatched a sword from a guest, and grabbed a stick from a servant woman who was trying to bar its path. The Reverend Joseph Glanvil - who wrote about the case - came to investigate, and heard the strange noises from around the children's beds. When he went down to his horse, he found it sweating with terror, and the horse died soon afterwards.
The phantom drummer seems to have developed a voice; one morning, there was a bright light in the children's room and a voice kept shouting: 'A witch, a witch!' - at least a hundred times, according to Glanvil. Mompesson woke up one night to find himself looking at a vague shape with two great staring eyes, which slowly vanished. It also developed such unpleasant habits as emptying ashes and chamber pots into the children's' beds.
In 1663, William Drury was arrested in Gloucester for stealing a pig. While he was in Gloucester jail, a Wiltshire man came to see him, and Drury asked what was happening in Wiltshire. When the man said "nothing," Drury said, "What, haven't you heard about the drumming in the house at Tedworth?" The man admitted that he had, whereupon Drury declared, "I have plagued him, and he shall never be quiet until he has made me satisfaction for taking away my drum."
This, according to Glanvil, led to his being tried for a witch at Salisbury and sentenced to transportation. As soon as Drury was out of the country, peace descended on the Mompesson household. But the drummer somehow managed to escape and return to England - whereupon the disturbances began all over again. Mompesson seems to have asked it, by means of raps, whether Drury was responsible, and it replied in the affirmative.
How the disturbances ended is not clear, presumably they faded away like most poltergeists. Certainly they had ceased by the time Glanvil published his account twenty years later.
Glanvil wrote his book on strange occurrences, Saducismus Triumphatus, just before the beginning of the 18th century, the start of the Age of Reason. Even in the 1660s, the magistrate Mompesson was suspected of somehow fabricating the story of the phantom drummer, and "he suffered by it in his name, in his estate, in all his affairs...". The family was the target of ridicule by other townsfolk and many believed they were being punished for wicked deeds. A quarter of a century after its publication, Glanvil's book was regarded as an absurd relic of an age of credulity. The main reason was that the civilized world was, after four centuries, finally shaking off the belief in witchcraft. In England, there had been no mass trials of witches since the death of Matthew Hopkins, the 'Witchfinder General' in 1646. In America, the witch hysteria came to an end after the Salem trials in 1692. The age of science had dawned and so there was no room for books like Saducismus Triumphatus in the age of Newton and Leibniz. Despite this, however, it worth questioning as to why Drury would admit to being responsible for one of the manifestations of witchcraft-like activity.
