A fourteen-year-old girl stood up in Lancaster court and swore her own grandmother had eaten a baby. The same week, the same judge had sent the Pendle witches to hang on the word of a nine-year-old.
Adam, Oz and Frank take on the Samlesbury Witches of 1612: three women accused by Grace Sowerbutts of shape-shifting, grave-robbing and cannibalism, who survived by asking the judge one question, who taught her to say it? Then the White Lady of Samlesbury Hall, and the Southworth family that runs through both stories.
Ask who wrote the script. It's always worth asking.
The Grave Shift is a Ghost Haunt UK production. Hosted by Adam, Oz and Frank.
Full transcript
AdamA fourteen-year-old girl stood up in Lancaster court and swore her own grandmother ate a baby.
AdamAnd the judge who'd just sent ten people to hang for witchcraft... said no.
AdamThis is The Grave Shift.
AdamLong one tonight, so get the kettle on. We're on Apple, Spotify and everywhere else, links below.
OzHe says kettle like we're allowed tea breaks.
FrankI brought biscuits. Custard creams. Don't touch them, Oz.
OzI haven't gone near your custard creams.
FrankThere were twelve in that packet when I sat down.
AdamWe're not even two minutes in. Right.
AdamIf you heard episode one, you know Pendle. August sixteen-twelve, Lancaster Castle, the biggest witch trial England had ever seen.
FrankOld Demdike, Chattox, the Device family. Nine-year-old Jennet Device pointing at her own mother across the courtroom.
AdamThat's the one. Well, here's what almost nobody knows. Same week. Same court. Same judge.
AdamThere was a second trial. Three women from a village called Samlesbury.
OzSamlesbury. That's just off the M6, isn't it. Between Preston and Blackburn.
AdamIt is. You've driven past it a hundred times on the way to the Trough of Bowland.
OzI've driven past it a hundred times on the way to a meeting, Adam. Some of us have jobs.
FrankHe runs a meter at midnight, that's the job.
AdamSo to get this one, you need to know what Lancashire was like in sixteen-twelve. Because this isn't really a witch story. Not underneath.
OzGo on.
AdamIt's seven years after the Gunpowder Plot. The whole country is terrified of Catholics. Priests are being hunted. Being one is treason.
AdamAnd Lancashire is the most stubbornly Catholic county in England. Big old families hiding priests in secret rooms, paying fines rather than go to the Protestant church.
FrankPriest holes. Some of the halls round there still have them. Little cavities behind the fireplace, under the stairs.
OzSo your haunted hall is basically an old-fashioned escape room.
FrankWith the death penalty if you lose.
AdamAnd one of those families is the Southworths. They owned Samlesbury Hall. Old Lancashire gentry, Catholic to the bone.
AdamHold on to that name. Southworth. It turns up twice tonight.
AdamSo. Spring sixteen-twelve. A girl called Grace Sowerbutts, fourteen years old, starts telling people she's being tormented by witches.
AdamAnd she names three women. Jennet Bierley. Ellen Bierley. And Jane Southworth.
FrankAnd Jennet Bierley is...
AdamHer grandmother.
OzOh, that's a family Christmas ruined.
AdamEllen is Jennet's daughter-in-law, so family again. And Jane Southworth married into the Southworths of the Hall.
OzSo a Catholic gentry name, sat in the dock next to two local women. Interesting mix.
AdamRemember you said that.
AdamNow, Grace's story. And I'm going to tell it how it's written down, because it gets properly grim.
AdamShe says the women could turn themselves into a black dog. The dog would come to her, and follow her, and try to lure her away.
FrankBlack dog. That's everywhere in English folklore. Black Shuck in Norfolk, the Barguest up in Yorkshire.
OzEvery county's got a big dark dog. Nobody ever reports a haunted Labrador.
FrankA haunted Labrador would just eat your sandwiches.
AdamThat's Frank's custard creams sorted then.
AdamShe says they carried her off. She says she was found lying in a hay loft, as if she was dead, and couldn't speak for days.
AdamAnd then it gets worse.
AdamShe says the women went to a neighbour's house, a man called Thomas Walshman, and killed his baby by witchcraft.
AdamAnd that after the child was buried, they dug it back up. Cooked it. Ate it. And boiled the bones down to make an ointment, so they could change their shape.
FrankRight. That's... yeah.
OzThat's not a fourteen-year-old's imagination, that. That's somebody else's.
AdamHold that thought too. You're two for two.
AdamAnd there's more. She says she was taken to meetings at night. The women dancing with, and I'm quoting the record here, black things.
FrankBlack things. Not people. Not devils. Just black things.
OzVery specific. Very unspecific.
FrankSee, I actually find that creepier. If you're making it up, you'd give it horns.
OzUnless whoever wrote your script wanted it vague so nobody could check it.
FrankYou keep saying script.
OzI keep saying script.
AdamSo the women are arrested. Taken to Lancaster Castle, into the same cells as the Pendle lot. And in August, they go in front of the judge.
AdamSir Edward Bromley. The same judge who, in the same sitting, sends the Pendle accused to the gallows.
FrankOn the word of a nine-year-old.
AdamOn the word of a nine-year-old. So, stay with me. Same judge. Same kind of evidence. A child, testifying against her own family.
OzSo it's over. They're dead. Every precedent in that building says they're dead.
AdamThat's what everybody in the room thought.
AdamAnd then the three women do something clever. Something the Pendle families never did.
AdamThey ask the judge a question. They ask him to find out who put the girl up to it.
FrankOh, that's bold.
OzThat's not bold, that's a defence. That's the only defence you've got when the evidence is a story.
AdamSo Bromley has Grace examined. Properly. Questions. Details. Times, places, who saw what.
AdamAnd it falls apart.
AdamThe details don't hold. And Grace admits she'd been taught what to say.
FrankBy who?
AdamBy a priest. A man she knew as Master Thompson.
OzThompson.
AdamWho, according to the account of the trial, was really Christopher Southworth. A Catholic priest. From that family.
OzHang on. The Southworths are accusing a Southworth?
AdamTold you the name turns up twice.
FrankSo a priest from the Hall coaches a kid to accuse his own relative of eating a baby?
AdamThat's what the court record says happened. Why he'd do it is where it gets messy, and we'll get there.
AdamBut the result is simple. The judge throws it out. Jennet Bierley, Ellen Bierley and Jane Southworth walk out of Lancaster Castle alive.
FrankThe same week the others hang.
AdamThe same week the others hang.
OzThat's the bit that gets me. Not the dog. Not the black things. That the only difference between walking out and swinging was asking one good question.
FrankAnd having someone in the room willing to listen to it.
AdamNow. Everything we know comes from one man. Thomas Potts. The clerk of the court. He wrote up both trials in a book the next year.
AdamIt's called, and I promise I'm not making this up, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster.
OzWonderful. For who, exactly?
FrankNot for the Devices.
AdamAnd Potts is not neutral. The book was written with the judges looking over his shoulder, and for Samlesbury he tells it one way. It's a Catholic plot. A popish priest tried to corrupt a child to murder innocent women.
OzWhich, in sixteen-twelve, is the most useful story you could possibly tell. The court looks fair. The Catholics look evil. Everyone in charge goes home happy.
FrankOr it's just true. Priests did hide round there. The family was Catholic. It's not a stretch.
OzIt's not a stretch. I'm saying the man writing it had a reason to like that version.
AdamAnd that's the honest position. We've got one account, from one side, and it happens to be the side that won.
FrankSo why? Why would anybody do it?
AdamNobody knows for certain. But there's a theory historians keep coming back to.
AdamThe suggestion is that some of these women may have turned their backs on the old faith. Started going to the Protestant church. Which, to a hardline priest, was betrayal.
OzSo you punish the ones who left, and you use a kid to do it.
FrankThat's darker than any ghost.
AdamIt's a theory, not a fact. The record doesn't tell us what was in his head. But it's the one that fits the pieces we've got.
OzAnd the ointment, the dug-up baby, the dancing... that's straight out of the witch books of the time. That's what educated men thought witches did. A priest would know that stuff. A farm girl wouldn't.
FrankYeah. I'll give you that. That detail's too bookish for a fourteen-year-old.
OzDid Frank just agree with me?
FrankOnce. Mark the date. Doesn't cover the biscuits.
AdamHe's still on the biscuits.
AdamAnd what happened to Grace? We don't really know. And nothing much seems to have happened to the priest either, as far as the record goes. That's the bit that sits wrong with me.
FrankThe kid disappears from history, and the grown-up who wrote her lines just walks away.
OzYou know what this does, though? It makes Pendle worse.
AdamGo on.
OzBecause it proves the judge could see a coached child when somebody made him look. He did it on the Wednesday. So why didn't he look at Jennet Device?
FrankBecause nobody asked him to.
OzBecause nobody asked him to. The Pendle families didn't have anyone to ask the question. So ten people hanged.
AdamThat's the one line I'd want people to take away from this whole episode.
AdamJustice in that building depended on who could ask the right question at the right time.
AdamRight. Deep breath. Because I promised a ghost story, and Samlesbury has a good one.
FrankFinally. I've been patient.
OzYou've eaten nine biscuits.
FrankPatiently.
AdamSamlesbury Hall. Black and white, timber framed, parts of it going back to the thirteen hundreds. Home of the Southworths for centuries. It's still there. You can go to a wedding in it.
OzNothing says happily ever after like a family with a priest-hole.
AdamAnd the Hall has its own legend. The White Lady.
AdamThe story goes, in the fifteen hundreds, one of the daughters of the house, Dorothy Southworth, fell in love with a young man from the de Hoghton family, over at Hoghton Tower.
FrankAnd they're Protestant.
AdamAnd they're Protestant. So, as far as her family are concerned, completely out of the question.
AdamThey plan to run away together. Meet one night, near the Hall, and go.
AdamBut one of her brothers finds out. And on the night, he's waiting. The young man is killed, and so are the friends who came with him.
FrankAnd Dorothy?
AdamSent abroad to a convent, the story says. Kept away from all of it. And she never recovers. She dies young, heartbroken, and never sees Samlesbury again.
OzBrutal family, the Southworths.
FrankProper Romeo and Juliet, that, only with Lancashire weather.
AdamAnd ever since, people say a woman in white walks the grounds of the Hall. Crying. Looking for him.
AdamAnd not just in the grounds. There are stories about the road outside, too. Drivers at night, a pale figure by the side of the road, and then nothing.
OzThe road outside. Which is a fast main road, in the dark, with headlights hitting mist off the fields.
FrankHere we go.
OzI'm not saying nobody saw anything. I'm saying if you want to see a white shape at night on a country road, Lancashire will happily provide one.
FrankLoads of people, over loads of years, all describing the same woman, in the same place.
OzAll of whom already knew the story. That's the problem with a famous ghost. You can never find a witness who hadn't heard of her.
FrankYeah. That's actually fair.
OzTwice in one night. I'm writing this down.
AdamAnd to be straight with everyone, the Dorothy story is a legend. There's no court record for it like there is for the trial. It's the kind of story families and villages pass down.
FrankBut here's what I like about it. The legend and the trial are the same fight. Catholic against Protestant. A family willing to destroy its own to stay on the right side.
AdamThat's a really good point, Frank.
FrankI have them. Occasionally. Between biscuits.
OzSo whether or not there's a lady in white, that house really did have a story about a girl who got used by her own family. It's just that the true one's got the court record.
AdamGrace Sowerbutts. Not Dorothy Southworth.
FrankMaybe the wrong girl got the ghost story.
AdamRight, verdicts. Oz, you first. The witches.
OzNo witches. A coached child, a frightened county, and a religious grudge. The only thing supernatural is that the judge actually listened.
AdamFrank?
FrankSame on the witches, if I'm honest. But the White Lady? I'd still stand in those grounds at midnight. And I'd want Oz with me.
OzYou'd want my torch.
FrankI'd want your torch.
AdamFor me, it's that the scariest thing in this whole story is an adult teaching a child exactly what to say, and a court that nearly believed it.
AdamAnd three women who were only alive at the end of that week because they asked one question.
AdamIf you're anywhere near Preston, Samlesbury Hall is a real place you can visit. Go and stand in it. Make your own mind up about the lady in white.
AdamWe've put the full case notes on the Ghost Haunt UK website, ghosthauntuk dot co dot uk, including the Pendle episode this one ties into.
FrankAnd follow us. Honestly. It keeps Oz off my biscuits.
OzNothing keeps me off the biscuits.
AdamThis has been The Grave Shift. I'm Adam.
FrankFrank. Twelve biscuits down to two.
OzOz. Innocent. Like the Samlesbury three.
AdamA girl told a story that should have hanged three women. A judge finally asked where it came from.
AdamAsk who wrote the script. It's always worth asking.
AdamYou can listen to this episode and every other episode of The Grave Shift on all major podcast providers -- link's in the description below.
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