The shop premises referred to in the article, as later run by Walter Tricker. Known for many years as “The Top Shop”, being at the top of The Street, it burnt down in the 1960’s and Walnut Tree Place was built on the site.
From the Star of the East, Friday Evening, November 11th 1887
During the past six weeks the village of Bramford, near Ipswich, has been under the spell of a supernatural manifestation. Women and children have been afraid to venture into the dimly-lighted street; frequenters of that cheerful hostelry – the Angel – have made haste to get there, and been more than usually disinclined to leave; and at every fireside the ghost has been the one topic of conversation. On the principle that one story of this kind “remembereth yet another” all the old bogies of childhood and ignorance have been raked up afresh, with the result that it might said of Bramford lately – as Tom Hood once wrote respecting a dwelling of ghostly repute – that:
“A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as a whisper in the ear.
The place is haunted.”
The actual tenement which the ghost in this instance selected is a cottage standing in rear of the shop occupied by Mr. Francis, nearly opposite the Angel Inn. It is the property of Mr. William Squirrel, now living at Manchester (a relative by the way of the famous fasting woman of Shottesham), and is occupied by Mrs. Parker, a widow, with her three children, and an old woman named Felgate. One of the children, Thomas Fennican [Farrington] by name – Mrs. Parker having been married twice – is grown up; the other two are Ellen Parker, aged 13. and Cornelius, aged 11. This family have lived in this cottage for some time, and it was not until recently they “heard anything”. Nobody was ever murdered there and although and old lady did hang herself in a cottage not far away, she had never been suspected of having revisited the glimpses of the moon, and in any case would not be so benighted as to hover about the wrong cottage. But, some weeks ago, as has been said, a rumour was bruited abroad in the village that mysterious rappings had been heard in various parts of Mrs Parker’s cottage. The noise was exactly like that in which spiritualists profess to believe as the language of another world. It usually took the form of three distinct knocks, sometimes in the rooms below, at others very frequently in a shed outside, which for present purposes may be described as an outhouse. On several occasions the door leading to the upper story was opened by some invisible agency. Mud and stones were hurled at the windows and the front door, the most remarkable thing in this connection being that the windows were never broken and the door never dinted, although the ghost showed a decided preference for such missiles as big flints and brick-bats. As time passed on, the village became greatly excited. People who went to the cottage to investigate the mystery confessed themselves puzzled. One man heard the knocks on a couch in the room where he was sitting, whilst the couch itself was pushed up against him by some inscrutable agency. Another enquirer, who came all the way from Blakenham, and said he would stay in the house till Whitsuntide unless the spirit “manifested” itself before him, distinctly heard a most astounding noise proceeding from the outhouse aforesaid. And the most extraordinary of all was that of a Bramford coachman, for he heard the sound of handbells ringing in the copper! Under these circumstances it is hardly to be wondered that the more superstitious among the villagers were considerably frightened. Some thought the house was under a spell. The deliberate opinion of others was that witchcraft was at work. One man said that if he only went to an old woman whom he knew in Ipswich and crossed her hand with silver, she would soon explain the whole matter. A good many people were more impressed than they cared to acknowledge, and several residents who were spoken to on Wednesday, declared a belief that there was something in it quite incapable of explanation on any material grounds.
The scare reached crisis during the past few days. Last Saturday night a crowd of people assembled in the yard outside the cottage and the manifestations were continued until a late hour. On Tuesday night there was a still larger gathering of the villagers, and the whole place was in uproar. In the meantime, Police Sergeant Leeks, who is stationed at Bramford and had all along expressed the profoundest contempt for the Ghost, had made some singular discoveries. He found that, whenever Mrs Parker’s two younger children happened to be away from home, no noises were heard and the cottage was a peaceful as any other house in the village. The spirit never rapped when he was about, as though he or she were quite aware that a summons might be issued for disturbing the good order of the village, against the peace of her Majesty the Queen, her Crown and dignity. The Sergeant flatly refused to believe in ghostly flints and brick-bats and the upshot of it was that on Wednesday morning he waited upon the younger Parker’s, and invited them to make a full confession. Master Cornelius thereupon spoke up and admitted that his sister and himself had been playing the ghost at the instigation of Mrs Felgate. There can be no doubt that this is the real explanation, although it is thought that the poor old lodger was not in any way concerned. The popular belief in the supernatural has not, however, altogether subsided. One of the neighbours declared that, “if they children had kept that game up for six weeks, they must be bedevilled.” The good woman was evidently determined to believe in a spirit of some kind, but it is hoped that the ghost has been now effectually laid, not by the aid of the parson, as in old times, but by the sturdy common sense of the village policeman.
East Anglian Daily Times, Thursday December 8, 1887
When the story of the “Bramford Ghost” was first laid before the readers of the East Anglian Daily Times the conclusion arrived at upon the facts then ascertained was that the whole thing was a conspiracy on the part of two artful children. It will be remembered that mysterious knocks and manifestations were heard in the cottage occupied by a Mrs. Parker at Bramford, that the rumour of a ghostly visitation spread throughout the village – creating intense excitement – and the two children of the house eventually confessed, in the presence of the village policeman, that they had caused all the commotion. Freaks of this kind have from time to time been detected, and with the plausible explanation given by the local representative of law and order there was apparently an end of the whole matter. Since that time, however, the mystery has entered upon a new phase. In the first place. the alleged confession was discredited. The little boy frankly owned that he told a lie in order to save himself from a “hidin’ ”. His sister declared that she could not account for the strange doings, and in any case the manifestations were continued with even greater vigour and variety than before. From the comparatively harmless “knocking” stage, the spirit, or the psychic force, or whatever It was (and is, for that matter) went on to what is technically called levitation – that is to say chairs and other solid bodies moved about the house of their own accord, and on one memorable washing day the house was turned inside out by some invisible agency. Some of these extraordinary phenomena have, it is said, been witnessed by scores of residents in Bramford and the neighbourhood.
Then came the rumour that the ghost had manifested itself at Stowmarket, and whatever may be the outcome of this singular business, the story of what took place there is most remarkable. Let it be understood, in the first place, that Mrs Parker has a sister at Stowmarket who is married to a respectable working man named Jeffrey. He is in the employ of Messrs. Hewitt and Co., who give him the very highest character for sobriety and truthfulness. Hearing of his sister-in-law’s troubles, he invited the little girl Ellen to stay at his house, thinking that a change would do the child good. She came on Monday week, and what happened during her visit is best told in the words, as nearly as they can be remembered, of Mr. Jeffrey himself:-
The girl came to my home (he said) on the Monday. My wife and two boys, and my wife’s mother live with me, and the little Parker slept with the last named, who is of course her grandmother. During Monday and Tuesday nothing unusual happened. On Wednesday evening, however, my wife went to chapel, and when I was at the back of the house, the girl came to me and said that some boys were knocking at the door. I had left her seated at a table in the inner room writing a letter. I went back with her feeling certain that nobody had been at the door, and then I heard a peculiar knocking—on the table, in the walls (as it were) and all around. The inner door, which nobody could have reached from the outside, was apparently struck with great violence—just one blow only. At that moment the girl was seated at some distance from the door, with her back to it. When my wife came home that night, she heard the knocks—in fact we all heard them, the sounds going on around the girl as she went upstairs to bed. On that day, however, the knocking was all we heard. But when Thursday night came things began to look serious. The girl went to bed in good time with her grandmother, and directly she got upstairs different articles in the room began to move about. I heard the noise and went upstairs. As I entered the room, the washstand, which stood near the door, fell over against me, and would have pitched on to the floor had I not pushed it back. A chest containing linen—the whole being so heavy that the girl could not have moved it by herself —had been shifted about the floor, the hot water bottle was taken out of the bed and thrown against the wall, and the brush and comb had also been shifted from one place to another. I told the girl to get into bed. When she had done so, I went into the room again, and then I saw the things moving myself. By the side of the wall then was an iron bedstead which I had not put up. Well, that was dancing up and down on the floor; then the washstand was thrown over, and the heavy chest moved again. All this time the girl was in bed. There was more or less disturbance during the night; it was more than we could stand, and the next morning my wife took the girl home.
This was, in brief, the account heard from the lips of Mr Jeffrey himself. The narrative is not, as in most cases of a similar character, removed in the third or fourth degree from the actual observer. “People may believe me or not,” Mr. Jeffrey said in conclusion, “I can only bear witness to what I actually saw; I am quite certain there is something on the girl.” Under the circumstances, therefore, the sceptical inquirer is in this dilemma —that be must either disbelieve Mr. Jeffrey or admit that there may be something in the phenomena called spiritualism. Upon the first point, it can only be said that Mr. Jeffrey’s absolute veracity is avouched by his frank and open manner no less than by his high character. It has been said that the village ghosts have fallen off a good deal now that people are becoming more sober, but no suspicion attaches to Mr. Jeffery in this respect for he is a teetotaller. Of course, there is the alternative opinion that he was mistaken; but if that view hinted to him, his reply would probably suggest the conclusion arrived at by Macbeth, that on the occasion in question, his eyes were either “made the fools o’ the other senses, or else worth all the rest.”
The Society for Psychical Research includes amongst its members one or two residents of Stowmarket, and we understand that the Bramford “manifestations.” have been communicated to the Secretary and that the case will most probably be subjected to the strictest investigation. People who are inclined to believe in the psychical element, to use that phrase for want of better, are much impressed with the extraordinary resemblance which the Bramford story bears to other well. authenticated phenomena roughly classified under the head of spiritualism. These poor people of Bramford, it is argued, could not possibly have heard of or read the communications collected by the Psychical Society, and yet the manifestations they have witnessed are exactly similar to those which have occurred in other parts of the country; therefore it is highly improbable that this Is a case of trickery and deception. The contention is not unreasonable. We have been favoured with some reports of the “Proceedings” of the Society in question, and we propose to reprint one of these cases which is too long for Insertion in this connection, to-morrow’s East Anglian Daily Times.
Having seen Mr Jeffrey, it was thought that any inquiry would be incomplete without an interview with the ” medium ” herself. In the evening, therefore, on the way back from Stowmarket, a visit was paid to Mrs Parker’s house – small tenement situate in a yard nearly opposite the Angel Inn, and not by any means easy to discover on a dark winter’s night, for Bramford Street must be the worst lighted thoroughfare in all Suffolk. The door was opened by Thomas Farrington – Mrs Parker’s grown-up son by a former husband – and the good lady herself was engaged in washing up the tea-things. Ellen (the ” medium “) sat by the fireside with her brother, their ages being eleven and nine years respectively. The girl may be called rather good-looking. but she seemed nervous and frightened, and an old-fashioned arrangement of the hair, combed low down on the forehead, gave a somewhat sullen expression, to face otherwise intelligent enough. She has, in fact, passed the 4th Standards at school. Asked whether she had anything to do with the knockings and so forth, she burst into tears, and was rather severely reprimanded by her mother. To all the questions put, she would only reply “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir ” – as the case might be – and even then, she was prompted by Mrs Parker. The latter, however, and the grown-up son were very communicative. They told a most astounding story – of having had all the furniture in the house upset until they were afraid to stop indoors, of extraordinary noises outside the windows and doors, of loose bricks actually following the girl about the house. “As God Is my witness,” said the woman. ” I have seen things rise from the earth of their own accord and follow my little girl to the door. That kettle have often been shifted from one hob to the other, and the other evening this basin” -pointing to the big washing-up basin on the table – “was lifted off here and placed on the ground. We have seen nights in this house which we would give anything to found out. On the washing-day before referred to, the furniture would not stand upright, a table in one of the bedrooms was thrown down so many times that it was broken; and on several occasion the knives flew out of the cupboard and stuck in the little girl’s hair.
These are only a few among the many Instances alleged of the work of some malevolent influence. Mrs. Parker and the little girl were both asked whether anything could be done to set the spirit moving there and then—would the table turn if she touched it, for example? The woman shook her head and said that these things might happen at any moment, but that they could not control them in any way. Pressed as to what their explanation was, both the son and Mrs Parker expressed a profound conviction that the child and their furniture were bewitched by somebody who had a spite against them. They had tried burning the furniture—a table, chair, and even a kettle having been committed to the flame. —” but it’s of no use,” the woman added, ” for that new kettle goes about just the same.” Then Mrs. Parker complained about the conduct of the Guardians in having taken away her allowance, declaring most solemnly that she had made no money out of the business, but that, on the contrary, it was rendering her life intolerable. She certainly refused to take anything on this occasion. We stayed for some time, but no manifestation occurred, and there for the present the story must be left.