Epworth Poltergeist

In December 1716 the Wesley household at Epworth Rectory in Lincolnshire began to be troubled by inexplicable sounds: knockings, groanings, the crash of unseen crockery, footsteps on the stairs. Samuel Wesley, the rector, initially suspected his daughters of pranking him. When it became clear they were as frightened as everyone else, the family resigned themselves to sharing the house with what the children called 'Old Jeffrey' — a figure who appeared to several of them in a white robe.

The disturbances lasted two months, were witnessed by numerous servants and visitors, and were carefully documented by Samuel Wesley in letters. His son John, who was away at school during the haunting, later compiled the family accounts and published them, giving the Epworth Poltergeist its place as one of the most thoroughly recorded hauntings in British history.

Sceptics have offered various explanations — rats, subsidence, teenage psychosomatic phenomena — but none has fully satisfied. The Wesley family's own interpretation was theological: Samuel Wesley had made an enemy of a neighbouring family and suspected human malice as well as supernatural agency. Old Jeffrey, whatever it was, vanished in January 1717 and never returned.