February 14, 2025 • 30 mins
In 1657 Shepton Mallet, England, a young boy claims to suffer from a mysterious affliction after a strange encounter with an elderly stranger.
Join us as we delve into this dark, unsettling tale of apparent supernatural terror and unexplained happenings that continue to haunt history...
Written by Neil McRobert and produced by Richard MacLean Smith
Find us at youtube.com/@unexplainedpod, tiktok.com/@unexplainedpodcast, twitter @unexplainedpod, facebook.com/unexplainedpodcast or www.unexplainedpodcast.com for more info. Thank you for listening.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, it's Richard mclin smith here, not the impostor you've
been listening to on the podcasts, the real one. Join
me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com forward Slash
Unexplained pod. The Somerset town of Shepton Mallet is one
(00:30):
of the oldest in the southwest of England. Today it
remains a quaint, attractive market town with a well preserved
heritage and architecture, but the listed buildings and cobbled streets
are only a fraction of its story. The town's history,
like the soil it's built upon, is rich, deep and
(00:52):
lay it. It's a living museum embedded in the landscape.
Pottery and flint shards dono to one time Neolithic population.
A pair of barrows prehistoric burial mounds to the north
of the town contained the cremated remains of Bronze Age peoples,
whilst cave dwellings and ancient roundhouses point to the presence
(01:16):
of what was once an Iron Age farming community. There
is also evidence of a Roman settlement lasting into the
fifth century CE. The Foss Way, an old Roman road,
still cuts through the town, as mentioned in the Domesday Book.
By the eleventh century, a small hamlet known as Shepton
(01:38):
had developed on the site. The town's current name, honoring
the local Mallet family, has been in use since at
least the late fourteen hundreds. Pull up a shovel full
of earth anywhere in the town and there's a good
chance something historically significant might come up with it, just
(01:59):
like it did in nineteen ninety when a small Roman
cemetery was excavated on the outskirts of the town to
clear ground for a new warehouse development. It was late
one Sunday in July, as the excavations were nearing an end,
that workers turned their attention to the last of the
sixteen graves. They had to unearth. The grave, that angled
(02:23):
east to west and had been carved out of the
earth by rock, contained a single wooden coffin. Inside lay
the well preserved remains of an adult male from the
fourth century CE, thought to have been somewhere between thirty
to fifty years old at the time of their death. Then,
(02:43):
as they cleared the dirt away from the bones, they
discovered something else, a strange amulet. It appeared to be
made of silver and had been fashioned into the shape
of a cross with a disk at the center of it.
It would have been notable for its aid and beauty alone,
but what really excited the archaeologists who found it was
(03:05):
the marking that had been crudely pressed into the metal.
It was a symbol known as a cairo, derived from
the first two letters of Christ's name in the Greek
alphabet Chai and Roe. An artifact from a time when
Christianity had only just been adopted as the official religion
(03:27):
of the Roman Empire, was quite simply one of the
most important Christian artifacts ever found in Britain. The Shepton
Mallet Amulet was swiftly despatched to the British Museum in
London for safe keeping. The ensuing excitement was so much
(03:51):
that George Carey, soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, the
highest ranking cleric in the Church of England, had a
copy of it for him to wear proudly around his neck. Meanwhile,
in Shepton Mallet itself, the object quickly became something of
a local emblem. The town's theatre renamed itself the Amulet,
(04:13):
while roads on a new housing estate were christened Amulet
Way and Chiro Close. An image of the silver disc
was even added to the town's welcome site, and local
businesses rushed to incorporate it into their branding. The people
of Shepton Mallet were proud of their new symbol. Experts, however,
(04:35):
were soon expressing their suspicions. Academics pointed to its similarity
to the existing Sussex Broach on display in the British Museum.
Peter Leech, an expert on the foss Way, pointed out
that the amulet was discovered on an easily accessible, low
security site, in a grave that, it turned out, had
(04:58):
already been opened once before, and whose disturbance could have
easily been disguised. It would be a whole eighteen years
before another round of tests were taken to determine the
artifact's true composition. In two thousand and eight, analysis proved
that the silver was not of Roman origin after all,
(05:21):
but was most likely smithed in the late nineteenth century.
For almost two decades, the people of Shepton Mallet had
been celebrating a hoax. The real mystery then, was how
and why it was placed in the grave. To this day,
the perpetrator has never been revealed. On discovering the truth,
(05:45):
Like many of the townspeople, Jeannette Marsh the deputy leader
of the local parish council, felt, as she put it,
that the magic had been removed from Shepton Mallet. In truth,
magic is too deep embedded in this corner of Somerset
to be stripped away by a single hoax. In fact,
(06:07):
with its many layers of history, Shepton Mallet has always
been a place blessed or plagued by legend. The local
prison boasts a reputation as supposedly the most haunted building
of its type in Britain. It's also said that the
Market Cross, a hexagonal stone monument that stands fifty feet
(06:31):
tall in the town centre, acts as a nucleus for
the town's apparent supernatural eccentricities. Passes by claim to have
experienced cold spots, heard inexplicable sounds, more seen flitting shadowy
figures in its vicinity. The legend of the Dinderworm tells
(06:51):
of a terrifying dragon that once haunted the banks of
the river Shepey, which cuts through the town, and there
is also the tail of Owen Parfitt, an elderly man
who was said to have disappeared from his front porch
one day in seventeen sixty eight. In the few moments
that his sister was elsewhere in the house. This frail,
(07:14):
partially paralyzed man somehow left the property without being witnessed
by any of his neighbors, and was never seen again.
Some in Shepton Mallet suggested that he had been taken
by the devil. They certainly had good reason to think so.
At the time, you're listening to Unexplained and I'm Richard
(07:37):
McLean Smith. On the fifteenth of November sixteen fifty seven,
a farmer named Henry Jones returned to his Shepton Mallet
home alarmed to find his twelve year old son, Richard,
(08:01):
lying on the floor in paroxysms of pain. Unable to speak,
the boy simply writhed in agony, his hand clenched to
the right side of his body as he gasped for air.
In panic. Henry rushed to his son's aid, demanding to
know what had happened, but as he stared into his
(08:22):
son's terrified eyes, he realized he was unable to speak.
Utterly helpless, Henry could do little but stay by his
son's side and pray for an end to the strange affliction.
It would be a good few hours later when the
boy's condition finally began to improve. The spasms of pain withdrew,
(08:44):
and his breathing returned to normal. As a greatly relieved
Henry lovingly stroked his son's hair, the boy began to
speak again. It had all started earlier that day, he said,
while his father was out working the fields. Richard claimed
he was playing alone in the house when he looked
(09:05):
up at one point, startled to see a figure watching
him through the window. The swift movement of the figure
away from the glass was followed soon after by a short,
sharp knock at the door. Nervous Richard opened it to
reveal an elderly woman standing on the doorstep who he
(09:26):
didn't recognize. The woman smiled warmly and gently asked the
boy for a morsel of bread if he could spare it.
Richard happily obliged, surprised when the old lady handed him
an apple in return. When Richard took it, the woman
stroked a single finger down the right side of his body,
(09:48):
and then left. There are two versions of what happened next.
In most accounts retold through his street, Richard bit into
the apple immediately and chewed it down to its core.
No sooner had he finished, he felt a pain building
in his right side, precisely where the woman had touched him.
(10:10):
Barely able to drag himself into the house, he fell
into the state of agony that his father, Henry, discovered
him in an hour later. According to this common version
of the story, after hearing the boy's tale, Henry quickly
searched the house for the apple. He soon found it
in the garden, where it was said to have given
(10:31):
off an unusually sour and pungent scent. In another more
contemporaneous telling of the tale, recorded in Joseph Glanville's Seminole
sixteen eighty one, Survey of Full and Plain Evidence concerning
Witches and Apparitions, Henry found the apple whole and uneaten,
(10:52):
and brought it back in side, at which point richard
suffering resumed immediately. In Joseph Clanville's version, when Richard's suffering
continued or night and throughout the next day, in an
(11:13):
act of desperation, Henry is then said to have roasted
the apple, then fed it to his son. Why he
thought this would help, no one can say. Either way.
It seemed to do the trick, though the boy became
convulsively sick at first, he rapidly began to recover and
was soon speaking again. The following day, Henry approached the
(11:36):
local constabulary to report what had happened. It was agreed
that whoever the mysterious woman was, she was most likely
guilty of poisoning his son, but since Richard had never
seen her before, it was arranged for all the older
women of Shepton Mallet to attend the Joneses farmhouse the
(11:57):
following afternoon for an identity parade. Eight. One by one,
the women of the town were brought to the Joneses
house and presented to the still stricken and bed ridden
boy before forming a line along the wall. Things seemed
to be going smoothly until late in the proceedings when
(12:17):
a trio of women stepped into the bedroom together. First
to enter was Jane Brooks, who neither Henry or Richard recognized,
and behind her were her two sisters, Alice Coward and
another whose name has since been lost to history. As
they step into the room, an expression of abject terror
(12:41):
cloud's young Richard's face, his muscles appeared at tents, and
his throat clams up. In a strangled voice, he cries
out that he has been struck blind. Others present in
the room can only look on with concern as he
struggles to get his words out, but the inference is clear. Eventually,
(13:05):
when Richard has calmed down, Henry lifts him from the
bed and leads him by the hand around the room,
pausing for a moment in front of each of the women. Finally,
they come to the three sisters, who has stood in
a row with Jane behind the others. For a moment,
the sightless Richard just stands regarding the air around him,
(13:29):
when suddenly he reaches out a hand and grabs Jane
by the arm, like a snake grabbing its prey in
a violent blur of motion. Richard's father, Henry, is then
said to have grabbed the hapless Jane, pulling her into
the center of the room, whereupon he immediately began to
(13:49):
beat her. Blows rained down on her head from his fists.
He scratched at her face with his fingers, drawing blood.
Jane's sisters did their best to hold Henriette bay to
no avail. Finally, the local constable stepped in and pulled
the enraged man away. It was said that as soon
(14:18):
as Jane and her sisters were removed from the bedroom,
Richard made an immediate and sharp recovery. Reports from the
time state that he cried out he was well and
continued to be so after for seven or eight days.
A week later, the young Richard Jones was walking around
(14:39):
the town when he came face to face with Alice Coward,
Jane's sister. A short time later, he returned home shrieking
in agony, his illness having seemingly returned in full. As
he would later claim, it was the exact same pain
down his right side and the same inability to speak,
(15:02):
and as before, the symptoms seemed to wash over him
in waves followed by bouts of incoherence. He claimed Alice
had stopped him in the street, then looked him up
and down before saying softly, how are you, my honey.
Within seconds of their interaction, he said he was in
(15:22):
pain once more. Richard was apparently so distressed that friends
and family often sat with him during his rest. These
included the local constable, who'd taken a personal interest in
the case under mister Gibson, a cousin of the family.
It was soon after this, according to Richard, that the
(15:44):
visions began, he said. The women came to him at
night in the guise of vengeful spirits, all staring eyes,
pale cheeks and lips. Sometimes they grabbed at him, he said,
with their cold hands. One day, Henry and mister Gibson
entered the bedroom to find Richard lying completely still on
(16:07):
the floor. Fearing his son had died, Henry was relieved
to find he was still breathing, though seemingly unconscious. When
he came round moments later, he described a vision he'd
just had. Jane and Alice had come to him again,
he said, telling him that what they had begun could
(16:28):
not easily be rectified, but if he were to say
no more of it, they would give him money. Then,
according to the boy, they lifted him from his bed
and laid him out on the floor, just as he
had been found. Henry and Gibson looked on with astonishment
as the young boy then reached into his pocket and
(16:50):
pulled a shiny twopence piece from it. The mysterious coin
appeared to exhibit strange properties. As an experiment, it was
placed in the fire. As the flames licked greedily at
the metal, the boy began to scream and writhe in pain.
Then as soon as the coin was extracted, the pain
(17:12):
seemed to stop immediately. One morning, Richard apparently woke up
in an agitated state. He'd had another unsettling visitation from
the sisters. After describing precisely what they'd supposedly been wearing
when they confronted him, the Constable dashed immediately across town
(17:32):
to the sisters home. There he is said to have found,
much to his horror, the sisters dressed exactly as the
boy depict it. The strange unrest of Richard Jones continued
(17:56):
into the cold month of December with seemingly no real improvement.
Late at night on the first Sunday of December, cousin
Gibson was sitting at Richard's bedside, watching over him as
he tried to sleep. All of a sudden, Richard stiffened
and pointed in horror to the corner of his room.
(18:17):
She's on the wall, he cried out, Jane Brooks. Gibson
leapt up in terror, straining to see anything in the
dim shadow at the edge of the room. Without hesitation,
he snatched up a knife from Richard's bedside table and
rushed to where the boy was pointing. Gibson slashed furiously
(18:39):
at the empty air. Woken by the commotion, Henry then
rushed into the room. Cousin Gibson has cut Jane Brooks's hand,
shouted and excited Richard. When matters finally calmed down, Henry
and mister Gibson paid yet another visit to the Constable.
The Constable Julie paid his own visit to Jane Brooks
(19:02):
and Alice Coward. According to writer Joseph Glanville, when the
constable arrived at the sister's home, he was invited to
take a seat in the sitting room. There, he found
Jane sitting on a stool with one hand clasped inside
the other. He asked her how she was. Though she
(19:23):
replied that she was well, the constable couldn't help noticing
that she looked pained. When he asked her why she
was covering her hand, Jane responded coolly that it was
simply her wont to do. Unconvinced, the constable is said
to have then stood up and gently drawn the woman's
(19:43):
hidden hand out. It was swathed in bloodied cloth. When
he inquired how she'd come to hurt herself, in such
a way. Jane apparently responded nervously that she'd scratched herself
with a large pin. Jane and her sister Alice were
arrested there and then on charges of witchcraft and sorcery
(20:07):
against a child. After Jane Brooks and Alice Coward's arrest,
things moved quickly. Their trial began just days later on
December eighth, in the nearby town of Castle Carey, presided
(20:27):
over by two magistrates, a mister Hunt and mister Carey. First,
Richard Jones was asked for his testimony, as the court
register recorded, as Richard began to speak, the two accused
women entered the room, at which point he was supposedly
rendered completely speechless. Only when Jane and Alice were then
(20:51):
removed from the courtroom did he seemingly regain his voice.
After Richard gave his testimony, among with a few other
witnesses accounts, the case seems to have become clocked up
in the court system. Then, on January the eleventh, sixteen
fifty eight, Richard was brought back to court After once
(21:13):
again sharing his version of events, he suddenly lost the
power of speech as soon as Jane brook entered the room. However,
this time Alice Coward seemed to no longer have the
same effect on him. The trial continued on into February,
by which point it was drawing large crowds of distinguished
(21:34):
local people, attracted by the growing notoriety of the case.
On the seventeenth, Richard Jones was once more on the
stand when Jane was led into the room. Richard began
again to suddenly convulse and wail in agony, before falling
into the arms of his cousin and hung slack as
(21:56):
though he were dead. At this one of the judges
ordered Jane to place her hand on the boy. Reluctantly,
she did as she was asked. No sooner had she
touched him, he immediately began to convulse once more, casting
his arms and legs around violently. However, Justice Hunt was
(22:18):
not entirely convinced by the display. Having waved Gibson and
the rest of the Jones family away, he took the
seemingly insensible boy in his own arms. Once Richard had calmed,
Hunt instructed a court employee to tie a blindfold tightly
around his eyes. The Justice then winked at the crowd
(22:40):
and called out loudly for Jane to be brought forward,
while simultaneously he gestured to a random stranger to place
her hands upon Richard instead. The crowd collectively held its
breath as she reached out and touched the young boy,
and the boy didn't re act. This experiment was repeated
(23:03):
several more times, each with different members of the crowd,
and each time the result was the same. When Richard
seemingly passed Justice Hunt's first test, the judge ordered him
to keep his blindfold on, but this time asked his father,
(23:26):
Henry Jones, to come forward and touch him. Apparently unknown
to the boy, however, the judge then signored to a
clerk of the court to bring Jane forward instead of Henry.
At the slightest touch of Jane's hand, Richard was suddenly
struck mute, and his apparent convulsions returned. No matter how
(23:49):
many times the justice tried to deceive him, each time
Jane's hand made contact, the result was the same. Having
seemingly been left completely rigid. After the ordeal, Richard had
to be carried home and laid to rest back on
his bed for the next few days. Crowds of onlookers
(24:10):
gathered outside the house hoping to get a glimpse of
the strangely afflicted boy while in sight, his family tried
repeatedly to bend his arms and legs into a resting position,
to no avail. On the twenty fifth of February, a
Missus Isles, a neighbor of the Joneses, walked out into
(24:32):
her garden where she apparently found young Richard standing with
an odd look on his face. It soon became clear
to her that he was in some kind of trance.
As she later described it, his body then lifted upwards
off the ground. It rose higher and higher until he'd
(24:53):
gained enough height to clear the garden wall. The woman
claimed that Richard eventually he levitated so high that he
floated over the wall to appoint thirty yards beyond the property.
The boy was said to have just hung in the
air for a moment until, as if he were a
(25:13):
puppet having his strings cut, he plummeted to the ground.
Missus Isles is said to have rushed immediately to the boy,
fully expecting to find him dead, only for him to
wake groggly and explain that it was Jane Brooks who'd
taken him by the arm and carried him into the air.
(25:35):
A villager spotted Richard in a barn, appearing to be
hanging from the ceiling four feet above the ground. The
neighbor rushed in to save him, but there was no
rope around the boy's neck. Instead, he is said to
have simply been hanging in the air, with the palms
of his hands pushed up against a beam and nothing
(25:58):
to support him underneath. It is said that somewhere between
nine to twenty seven people witnessed this bizarre event. It
was also said that he remained in that position, seemingly
in another of his trances, for a good fifteen minutes
before he woke up again and again he said it
(26:21):
was Jane Brooks that did it. This alleged event would
prove the final nail in the coffin for Jane. With
the local magistrate concerned that Richard's life was now in danger,
there was only one thing left to be done. At
the end of her trial, Jane Brooks was found guilty
(26:42):
of witchcraft and sentenced to death. She was hanged in
the town of Chart, Somerset on March twenty sixth, sixteen
fifty eight. Though Alice Cowart was believed to be less
culpable than her sister. She was still kept under arrest
with the intention of also charging her with witchcraft. However,
(27:05):
she died in custody before she could take the stand.
Following Jane Brooks and Alice Coward's deaths, Richard Jones reportedly
made of full and fast recovery. As writer Joseph Glanville wrote,
(27:27):
the boy, having no longer any inducement to act possessed,
consented to remain with his feet on the ground and
his head in the air. According to the laws of nature.
He passes out of the history books and into insignificance,
as does most everyone else involved in the case. Today,
(27:48):
only Jane Brooks retains a legacy. Her trial is held
up as an example of the misogyny and patriarchal terror
that drove so much of the English wind. However, unlike
with other more famous cases such as the so called
Pendle Witches or the burning of Mary Lakeland in sixteen
(28:10):
forty five for supposedly using witchcraft to murder her husband,
there has never been any rationale or reason given for
what Jane and her sister were reputed to have done.
At no point did any of the Joneses family ever
admit to any grievance with or even knowledge of Jane
and Alice prior to their first meeting with Richard, and
(28:35):
no link between the two families was ever established. For now,
this strange and unsettling event remains unexplained. This episode was
written by Neil McRobert and produced by me Richard McLain Smith.
(28:57):
Neil is the creator and host of his own brilliant
podcast called Talking Scared, in which she discusses the craft
of horror writing with everyone from Ta Nanaeve Do to
the God of horror himself, Stephen King. I can't recommend
it highly enough. Unexplained is an Avy Club Productions podcast
(29:18):
created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast,
including the music, are also produced by me Richard mclin smith. Unexplained.
The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide.
You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and
other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever
(29:40):
you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in
touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've
heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of
your own you'd like to share. You can find out
more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reaches online through
Twitter at Unexplained pod and Facebook, Facebook dot com, Forward
(30:01):
Slash Unexplained Podcast
Hello, it's Richard mclin smith here, not the impostor you've
been listening to on the podcasts, the real one. Join
me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com forward Slash
Unexplained pod. The Somerset town of Shepton Mallet is one
(00:30):
of the oldest in the southwest of England. Today it
remains a quaint, attractive market town with a well preserved
heritage and architecture, but the listed buildings and cobbled streets
are only a fraction of its story. The town's history,
like the soil it's built upon, is rich, deep and
(00:52):
lay it. It's a living museum embedded in the landscape.
Pottery and flint shards dono to one time Neolithic population.
A pair of barrows prehistoric burial mounds to the north
of the town contained the cremated remains of Bronze Age peoples,
whilst cave dwellings and ancient roundhouses point to the presence
(01:16):
of what was once an Iron Age farming community. There
is also evidence of a Roman settlement lasting into the
fifth century CE. The Foss Way, an old Roman road,
still cuts through the town, as mentioned in the Domesday Book.
By the eleventh century, a small hamlet known as Shepton
(01:38):
had developed on the site. The town's current name, honoring
the local Mallet family, has been in use since at
least the late fourteen hundreds. Pull up a shovel full
of earth anywhere in the town and there's a good
chance something historically significant might come up with it, just
(01:59):
like it did in nineteen ninety when a small Roman
cemetery was excavated on the outskirts of the town to
clear ground for a new warehouse development. It was late
one Sunday in July, as the excavations were nearing an end,
that workers turned their attention to the last of the
sixteen graves. They had to unearth. The grave, that angled
(02:23):
east to west and had been carved out of the
earth by rock, contained a single wooden coffin. Inside lay
the well preserved remains of an adult male from the
fourth century CE, thought to have been somewhere between thirty
to fifty years old at the time of their death. Then,
(02:43):
as they cleared the dirt away from the bones, they
discovered something else, a strange amulet. It appeared to be
made of silver and had been fashioned into the shape
of a cross with a disk at the center of it.
It would have been notable for its aid and beauty alone,
but what really excited the archaeologists who found it was
(03:05):
the marking that had been crudely pressed into the metal.
It was a symbol known as a cairo, derived from
the first two letters of Christ's name in the Greek
alphabet Chai and Roe. An artifact from a time when
Christianity had only just been adopted as the official religion
(03:27):
of the Roman Empire, was quite simply one of the
most important Christian artifacts ever found in Britain. The Shepton
Mallet Amulet was swiftly despatched to the British Museum in
London for safe keeping. The ensuing excitement was so much
(03:51):
that George Carey, soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, the
highest ranking cleric in the Church of England, had a
copy of it for him to wear proudly around his neck. Meanwhile,
in Shepton Mallet itself, the object quickly became something of
a local emblem. The town's theatre renamed itself the Amulet,
(04:13):
while roads on a new housing estate were christened Amulet
Way and Chiro Close. An image of the silver disc
was even added to the town's welcome site, and local
businesses rushed to incorporate it into their branding. The people
of Shepton Mallet were proud of their new symbol. Experts, however,
(04:35):
were soon expressing their suspicions. Academics pointed to its similarity
to the existing Sussex Broach on display in the British Museum.
Peter Leech, an expert on the foss Way, pointed out
that the amulet was discovered on an easily accessible, low
security site, in a grave that, it turned out, had
(04:58):
already been opened once before, and whose disturbance could have
easily been disguised. It would be a whole eighteen years
before another round of tests were taken to determine the
artifact's true composition. In two thousand and eight, analysis proved
that the silver was not of Roman origin after all,
(05:21):
but was most likely smithed in the late nineteenth century.
For almost two decades, the people of Shepton Mallet had
been celebrating a hoax. The real mystery then, was how
and why it was placed in the grave. To this day,
the perpetrator has never been revealed. On discovering the truth,
(05:45):
Like many of the townspeople, Jeannette Marsh the deputy leader
of the local parish council, felt, as she put it,
that the magic had been removed from Shepton Mallet. In truth,
magic is too deep embedded in this corner of Somerset
to be stripped away by a single hoax. In fact,
(06:07):
with its many layers of history, Shepton Mallet has always
been a place blessed or plagued by legend. The local
prison boasts a reputation as supposedly the most haunted building
of its type in Britain. It's also said that the
Market Cross, a hexagonal stone monument that stands fifty feet
(06:31):
tall in the town centre, acts as a nucleus for
the town's apparent supernatural eccentricities. Passes by claim to have
experienced cold spots, heard inexplicable sounds, more seen flitting shadowy
figures in its vicinity. The legend of the Dinderworm tells
(06:51):
of a terrifying dragon that once haunted the banks of
the river Shepey, which cuts through the town, and there
is also the tail of Owen Parfitt, an elderly man
who was said to have disappeared from his front porch
one day in seventeen sixty eight. In the few moments
that his sister was elsewhere in the house. This frail,
(07:14):
partially paralyzed man somehow left the property without being witnessed
by any of his neighbors, and was never seen again.
Some in Shepton Mallet suggested that he had been taken
by the devil. They certainly had good reason to think so.
At the time, you're listening to Unexplained and I'm Richard
(07:37):
McLean Smith. On the fifteenth of November sixteen fifty seven,
a farmer named Henry Jones returned to his Shepton Mallet
home alarmed to find his twelve year old son, Richard,
(08:01):
lying on the floor in paroxysms of pain. Unable to speak,
the boy simply writhed in agony, his hand clenched to
the right side of his body as he gasped for air.
In panic. Henry rushed to his son's aid, demanding to
know what had happened, but as he stared into his
(08:22):
son's terrified eyes, he realized he was unable to speak.
Utterly helpless, Henry could do little but stay by his
son's side and pray for an end to the strange affliction.
It would be a good few hours later when the
boy's condition finally began to improve. The spasms of pain withdrew,
(08:44):
and his breathing returned to normal. As a greatly relieved
Henry lovingly stroked his son's hair, the boy began to
speak again. It had all started earlier that day, he said,
while his father was out working the fields. Richard claimed
he was playing alone in the house when he looked
(09:05):
up at one point, startled to see a figure watching
him through the window. The swift movement of the figure
away from the glass was followed soon after by a short,
sharp knock at the door. Nervous Richard opened it to
reveal an elderly woman standing on the doorstep who he
(09:26):
didn't recognize. The woman smiled warmly and gently asked the
boy for a morsel of bread if he could spare it.
Richard happily obliged, surprised when the old lady handed him
an apple in return. When Richard took it, the woman
stroked a single finger down the right side of his body,
(09:48):
and then left. There are two versions of what happened next.
In most accounts retold through his street, Richard bit into
the apple immediately and chewed it down to its core.
No sooner had he finished, he felt a pain building
in his right side, precisely where the woman had touched him.
(10:10):
Barely able to drag himself into the house, he fell
into the state of agony that his father, Henry, discovered
him in an hour later. According to this common version
of the story, after hearing the boy's tale, Henry quickly
searched the house for the apple. He soon found it
in the garden, where it was said to have given
(10:31):
off an unusually sour and pungent scent. In another more
contemporaneous telling of the tale, recorded in Joseph Glanville's Seminole
sixteen eighty one, Survey of Full and Plain Evidence concerning
Witches and Apparitions, Henry found the apple whole and uneaten,
(10:52):
and brought it back in side, at which point richard
suffering resumed immediately. In Joseph Clanville's version, when Richard's suffering
continued or night and throughout the next day, in an
(11:13):
act of desperation, Henry is then said to have roasted
the apple, then fed it to his son. Why he
thought this would help, no one can say. Either way.
It seemed to do the trick, though the boy became
convulsively sick at first, he rapidly began to recover and
was soon speaking again. The following day, Henry approached the
(11:36):
local constabulary to report what had happened. It was agreed
that whoever the mysterious woman was, she was most likely
guilty of poisoning his son, but since Richard had never
seen her before, it was arranged for all the older
women of Shepton Mallet to attend the Joneses farmhouse the
(11:57):
following afternoon for an identity parade. Eight. One by one,
the women of the town were brought to the Joneses
house and presented to the still stricken and bed ridden
boy before forming a line along the wall. Things seemed
to be going smoothly until late in the proceedings when
(12:17):
a trio of women stepped into the bedroom together. First
to enter was Jane Brooks, who neither Henry or Richard recognized,
and behind her were her two sisters, Alice Coward and
another whose name has since been lost to history. As
they step into the room, an expression of abject terror
(12:41):
cloud's young Richard's face, his muscles appeared at tents, and
his throat clams up. In a strangled voice, he cries
out that he has been struck blind. Others present in
the room can only look on with concern as he
struggles to get his words out, but the inference is clear. Eventually,
(13:05):
when Richard has calmed down, Henry lifts him from the
bed and leads him by the hand around the room,
pausing for a moment in front of each of the women. Finally,
they come to the three sisters, who has stood in
a row with Jane behind the others. For a moment,
the sightless Richard just stands regarding the air around him,
(13:29):
when suddenly he reaches out a hand and grabs Jane
by the arm, like a snake grabbing its prey in
a violent blur of motion. Richard's father, Henry, is then
said to have grabbed the hapless Jane, pulling her into
the center of the room, whereupon he immediately began to
(13:49):
beat her. Blows rained down on her head from his fists.
He scratched at her face with his fingers, drawing blood.
Jane's sisters did their best to hold Henriette bay to
no avail. Finally, the local constable stepped in and pulled
the enraged man away. It was said that as soon
(14:18):
as Jane and her sisters were removed from the bedroom,
Richard made an immediate and sharp recovery. Reports from the
time state that he cried out he was well and
continued to be so after for seven or eight days.
A week later, the young Richard Jones was walking around
(14:39):
the town when he came face to face with Alice Coward,
Jane's sister. A short time later, he returned home shrieking
in agony, his illness having seemingly returned in full. As
he would later claim, it was the exact same pain
down his right side and the same inability to speak,
(15:02):
and as before, the symptoms seemed to wash over him
in waves followed by bouts of incoherence. He claimed Alice
had stopped him in the street, then looked him up
and down before saying softly, how are you, my honey.
Within seconds of their interaction, he said he was in
(15:22):
pain once more. Richard was apparently so distressed that friends
and family often sat with him during his rest. These
included the local constable, who'd taken a personal interest in
the case under mister Gibson, a cousin of the family.
It was soon after this, according to Richard, that the
(15:44):
visions began, he said. The women came to him at
night in the guise of vengeful spirits, all staring eyes,
pale cheeks and lips. Sometimes they grabbed at him, he said,
with their cold hands. One day, Henry and mister Gibson
entered the bedroom to find Richard lying completely still on
(16:07):
the floor. Fearing his son had died, Henry was relieved
to find he was still breathing, though seemingly unconscious. When
he came round moments later, he described a vision he'd
just had. Jane and Alice had come to him again,
he said, telling him that what they had begun could
(16:28):
not easily be rectified, but if he were to say
no more of it, they would give him money. Then,
according to the boy, they lifted him from his bed
and laid him out on the floor, just as he
had been found. Henry and Gibson looked on with astonishment
as the young boy then reached into his pocket and
(16:50):
pulled a shiny twopence piece from it. The mysterious coin
appeared to exhibit strange properties. As an experiment, it was
placed in the fire. As the flames licked greedily at
the metal, the boy began to scream and writhe in pain.
Then as soon as the coin was extracted, the pain
(17:12):
seemed to stop immediately. One morning, Richard apparently woke up
in an agitated state. He'd had another unsettling visitation from
the sisters. After describing precisely what they'd supposedly been wearing
when they confronted him, the Constable dashed immediately across town
(17:32):
to the sisters home. There he is said to have found,
much to his horror, the sisters dressed exactly as the
boy depict it. The strange unrest of Richard Jones continued
(17:56):
into the cold month of December with seemingly no real improvement.
Late at night on the first Sunday of December, cousin
Gibson was sitting at Richard's bedside, watching over him as
he tried to sleep. All of a sudden, Richard stiffened
and pointed in horror to the corner of his room.
(18:17):
She's on the wall, he cried out, Jane Brooks. Gibson
leapt up in terror, straining to see anything in the
dim shadow at the edge of the room. Without hesitation,
he snatched up a knife from Richard's bedside table and
rushed to where the boy was pointing. Gibson slashed furiously
(18:39):
at the empty air. Woken by the commotion, Henry then
rushed into the room. Cousin Gibson has cut Jane Brooks's hand,
shouted and excited Richard. When matters finally calmed down, Henry
and mister Gibson paid yet another visit to the Constable.
The Constable Julie paid his own visit to Jane Brooks
(19:02):
and Alice Coward. According to writer Joseph Glanville, when the
constable arrived at the sister's home, he was invited to
take a seat in the sitting room. There, he found
Jane sitting on a stool with one hand clasped inside
the other. He asked her how she was. Though she
(19:23):
replied that she was well, the constable couldn't help noticing
that she looked pained. When he asked her why she
was covering her hand, Jane responded coolly that it was
simply her wont to do. Unconvinced, the constable is said
to have then stood up and gently drawn the woman's
(19:43):
hidden hand out. It was swathed in bloodied cloth. When
he inquired how she'd come to hurt herself, in such
a way. Jane apparently responded nervously that she'd scratched herself
with a large pin. Jane and her sister Alice were
arrested there and then on charges of witchcraft and sorcery
(20:07):
against a child. After Jane Brooks and Alice Coward's arrest,
things moved quickly. Their trial began just days later on
December eighth, in the nearby town of Castle Carey, presided
(20:27):
over by two magistrates, a mister Hunt and mister Carey. First,
Richard Jones was asked for his testimony, as the court
register recorded, as Richard began to speak, the two accused
women entered the room, at which point he was supposedly
rendered completely speechless. Only when Jane and Alice were then
(20:51):
removed from the courtroom did he seemingly regain his voice.
After Richard gave his testimony, among with a few other
witnesses accounts, the case seems to have become clocked up
in the court system. Then, on January the eleventh, sixteen
fifty eight, Richard was brought back to court After once
(21:13):
again sharing his version of events, he suddenly lost the
power of speech as soon as Jane brook entered the room. However,
this time Alice Coward seemed to no longer have the
same effect on him. The trial continued on into February,
by which point it was drawing large crowds of distinguished
(21:34):
local people, attracted by the growing notoriety of the case.
On the seventeenth, Richard Jones was once more on the
stand when Jane was led into the room. Richard began
again to suddenly convulse and wail in agony, before falling
into the arms of his cousin and hung slack as
(21:56):
though he were dead. At this one of the judges
ordered Jane to place her hand on the boy. Reluctantly,
she did as she was asked. No sooner had she
touched him, he immediately began to convulse once more, casting
his arms and legs around violently. However, Justice Hunt was
(22:18):
not entirely convinced by the display. Having waved Gibson and
the rest of the Jones family away, he took the
seemingly insensible boy in his own arms. Once Richard had calmed,
Hunt instructed a court employee to tie a blindfold tightly
around his eyes. The Justice then winked at the crowd
(22:40):
and called out loudly for Jane to be brought forward,
while simultaneously he gestured to a random stranger to place
her hands upon Richard instead. The crowd collectively held its
breath as she reached out and touched the young boy,
and the boy didn't re act. This experiment was repeated
(23:03):
several more times, each with different members of the crowd,
and each time the result was the same. When Richard
seemingly passed Justice Hunt's first test, the judge ordered him
to keep his blindfold on, but this time asked his father,
(23:26):
Henry Jones, to come forward and touch him. Apparently unknown
to the boy, however, the judge then signored to a
clerk of the court to bring Jane forward instead of Henry.
At the slightest touch of Jane's hand, Richard was suddenly
struck mute, and his apparent convulsions returned. No matter how
(23:49):
many times the justice tried to deceive him, each time
Jane's hand made contact, the result was the same. Having
seemingly been left completely rigid. After the ordeal, Richard had
to be carried home and laid to rest back on
his bed for the next few days. Crowds of onlookers
(24:10):
gathered outside the house hoping to get a glimpse of
the strangely afflicted boy while in sight, his family tried
repeatedly to bend his arms and legs into a resting position,
to no avail. On the twenty fifth of February, a
Missus Isles, a neighbor of the Joneses, walked out into
(24:32):
her garden where she apparently found young Richard standing with
an odd look on his face. It soon became clear
to her that he was in some kind of trance.
As she later described it, his body then lifted upwards
off the ground. It rose higher and higher until he'd
(24:53):
gained enough height to clear the garden wall. The woman
claimed that Richard eventually he levitated so high that he
floated over the wall to appoint thirty yards beyond the property.
The boy was said to have just hung in the
air for a moment until, as if he were a
(25:13):
puppet having his strings cut, he plummeted to the ground.
Missus Isles is said to have rushed immediately to the boy,
fully expecting to find him dead, only for him to
wake groggly and explain that it was Jane Brooks who'd
taken him by the arm and carried him into the air.
(25:35):
A villager spotted Richard in a barn, appearing to be
hanging from the ceiling four feet above the ground. The
neighbor rushed in to save him, but there was no
rope around the boy's neck. Instead, he is said to
have simply been hanging in the air, with the palms
of his hands pushed up against a beam and nothing
(25:58):
to support him underneath. It is said that somewhere between
nine to twenty seven people witnessed this bizarre event. It
was also said that he remained in that position, seemingly
in another of his trances, for a good fifteen minutes
before he woke up again and again he said it
(26:21):
was Jane Brooks that did it. This alleged event would
prove the final nail in the coffin for Jane. With
the local magistrate concerned that Richard's life was now in danger,
there was only one thing left to be done. At
the end of her trial, Jane Brooks was found guilty
(26:42):
of witchcraft and sentenced to death. She was hanged in
the town of Chart, Somerset on March twenty sixth, sixteen
fifty eight. Though Alice Cowart was believed to be less
culpable than her sister. She was still kept under arrest
with the intention of also charging her with witchcraft. However,
(27:05):
she died in custody before she could take the stand.
Following Jane Brooks and Alice Coward's deaths, Richard Jones reportedly
made of full and fast recovery. As writer Joseph Glanville wrote,
(27:27):
the boy, having no longer any inducement to act possessed,
consented to remain with his feet on the ground and
his head in the air. According to the laws of nature.
He passes out of the history books and into insignificance,
as does most everyone else involved in the case. Today,
(27:48):
only Jane Brooks retains a legacy. Her trial is held
up as an example of the misogyny and patriarchal terror
that drove so much of the English wind. However, unlike
with other more famous cases such as the so called
Pendle Witches or the burning of Mary Lakeland in sixteen
(28:10):
forty five for supposedly using witchcraft to murder her husband,
there has never been any rationale or reason given for
what Jane and her sister were reputed to have done.
At no point did any of the Joneses family ever
admit to any grievance with or even knowledge of Jane
and Alice prior to their first meeting with Richard, and
(28:35):
no link between the two families was ever established. For now,
this strange and unsettling event remains unexplained. This episode was
written by Neil McRobert and produced by me Richard McLain Smith.
(28:57):
Neil is the creator and host of his own brilliant
podcast called Talking Scared, in which she discusses the craft
of horror writing with everyone from Ta Nanaeve Do to
the God of horror himself, Stephen King. I can't recommend
it highly enough. Unexplained is an Avy Club Productions podcast
(29:18):
created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast,
including the music, are also produced by me Richard mclin smith. Unexplained.
The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide.
You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and
other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever
(29:40):
you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in
touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've
heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of
your own you'd like to share. You can find out
more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reaches online through
Twitter at Unexplained pod and Facebook, Facebook dot com, Forward
(30:01):
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