Ghostly encounter on the Auckland churchyard wall

It was March 23, 1873, the day before Mary Ann Cotton was due to hang in Durham. The sensational case of a mother who had been found guilty of poisoning her stepson in their home in Front Street, West Auckland, was the talk of the district as the swirling gossip said she had killed up to 25 of her husbands, lovers, stepsons, sons, even her own mother, from Sunderland to Seaham to Plymouth and Cornwall and back to West Auckland.

READ MORE: THE EXECUTION OF MARY ANN COTTON AND THE FULL STORY OF HER KILLINGS

As Thomas passed the churchyard that midnight, he would have remembered the events of the previous October when the bodies of three of Mrs Cotton’s reputed victims – her 14-month-old baby, her 10-year-old stepson, and her 36-year-old lover – had all been exhumed from there, and their bodies dissected in the neighbouring old rectory as the authorities searched for traces of arsenic to prove her murderous tendencies.

With such thoughts racing in his mind, by the light of that dark night, Thomas saw a strange-looking child looking strangely at him from the churchyard wall. He greeted the child – “Ho!” – but it didn’t respond. It just carried on staring silently at him.

He carried on walking, and the child walked along beside him. He picked up his pace. The child picked up its. He broke into a run, with his hair standing on. The child ran, too, all the time alongside him.

He burst into his house and awoke his wife. She calmly him slightly, but he was still too scared to sleep upstairs and so he laid down in what the Darlington & Stockton Times called a “cheffionier” bed in the front room.

The Oxford English Dictionary does not think “cheffionier” exists in English, but a chiffonier is a small sideboard, so perhaps he crammed himself in there.

Wherever he was, he didn’t sleep for long.

“He heard the source of his terror walking about the chamber floor, make a similar noise to a cat with cockle shells on its feet,” said the D&S Times, “and at length he heard a whiz resembling a flight of pigeons go through the roof and that was immediately followed by three awful crashes of thunder.

“Barker and his wife simultaneously leaped out of bed, leaving their young child, and ran out, nearly naked, to the house of neighbour named Hodgson.”

Hodgson clothed his scared neighbours and sent his son into the house to rescue the poor child, but the son was forced to beat a retreat when he encountered the ghost coming down the stairs.

By daylight the next day, the Barkers were able to reach their child, who seemed unaffected by the spooky shenanigans it had slept through, but the D&S said that Mr Barker refused “has since been so terrified that he had no less than 11 comrades at his house the following night to sit up with him”.

This, said the Echo’s sister paper, was one of several “extraordinary tales of spectres in the vicinity of the churchyard” that it had heard.

This chilling tale, apparently a D&S Times exclusive, so captured the public imagination that it appeared on the front of the Illustrated Police News magazine the following week (below).