About the end of October 1662, Nathaniel Smith, a thrower (wood turner) from Hyde told a ghostly tale while staying in Henry Mather’s house in Openshaw, outside Manchester. The story soon landed him in hot water with the law for its ‘seditious & scandalous words’. According to Henry’s daughter, Sarah, Nathaniel claimed ‘the King [Charles II] should but reign three years & that he should Turn papist & be in danger to be murdered by one of his own house’. Yet as Nathaniel himself would depose, this prophecy was but part of a much stranger tale – one worthy of Halloween in its spooky subject matter.    

Depositions concerning the case were collected in early December 1662, in the house of esquire Nicholas Mosley of Ancoats. They were recorded in a notebook of judicial business related to Mosley’s duties as a justice of the peace (JP). Nicholas had inherited the book from his father, Oswald Mosley, and Nicholas’ grandson (another Oswald) would make use of it again in the 18^th century.¹ If the names of these JPs sound a bit familiar, it’s because they were the ancestors of notorious 20^th-century fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. While the notebook doesn’t contain anything quite so scary as fascism, the supernatural does make several appearances.

Nathaniel Smith’s deposition provides the most vivid example, worth repeating in full. According to him, Sarah Mather’s testimony was missing a few essential details:

…he told the said Henry Mather that there was an house where an innkeeper had lately lived, taken by another to live in and a maid of the house went to sweep the room. There came up loose moulds & as she was sweeping a knife fell out of her bosom into the place where the said loose moulds appeared. She stooped to take up the knife and felt a stave. She thereupon pulled up the stave and stooped down again to see what was in the place, supposing their might be some money hid there. She found dead man’s bones at which she was afraid.

Thereupon there appeared unto her a spirit in green colour & said it had been killed about 13 years & said there was three persons that did murder him, whereupon 2 was dead & one woman was alive. The spirit bade the said maid go to a Justice of peace & to make it known. She said she was but a woman & the Justice would take no notice of it because she wanted evidence. But the said spirit bade her go & she should not want for evidence. So she went & informed the Justice who sent for the said woman & she confessed all that the spirit had told.

The said spirit further told her that the King had two of his own servants that should turn papist & betray him. But denies that he said the King should reign but 3 years & that he should turn papist & be in danger to be murdered by one of his own house.²   

There’s so much striking and entertaining about this little ghost story, it’s hard to know where to begin: the spirit’s verdant shade, the bones under the boards, maid and ghost working together to crack a 13-year-old cold case. But what I find especially funny is how the spirit, after giving detailed instructions on how to ‘aveeenge meee!’, dropped a seemingly unrelated and last second prophecy of national importance, just for good measure: ‘Thanks for your help. Oh and btw, the king shall be betrayed. OK bye!’.

The prophecy’s incongruity with the rest of the ghost story might make sense in the context of Smith’s indictment for seditious words, which forecasted the king’s conversion to Catholicism and death. Perhaps Smith fabricated the ghost story to put as much distance between himself and the seditious speech as possible. Not only was Sarah Mather mistaken about what Smith had said, it wasn’t even really him who’d said it. No, no, no. He’d heard it from a maid, who said she’d heard it from the spirit of a man dead 13 years.  Why should Smith be blamed?

Yet this interpretation seems a bit too cynical, and cannot really account for (what seems to me) the most interesting thing about Smith’s story: it’s more concerned with the validity and accuracy of the green spirit than anything else. Indeed, only the last two lines of the deposition address the very serious crime with which Smith was accused.

The interactions between the maid and the spirit centre on matters of proof and believability. She fears that no justice of the peace will listen to her – because she ‘wanted evidence’ and because gender and low status weaken her credit. But the ghost’s words are proven accurate twice over: first when the maid’s testimony successfully sparks an investigation, and second when the accused murderess confesses ‘all that the spirit had told’.

In many respects, Smith’s tale reflects tropes common to the early modern ghost stories circulating in popular printed media of the time. Apparitions often came back from the dead to right wrongs, exact vengeance and offer prophesy; women were often key mediators and contacts. But the fixation on evidence was more typically a feature of learned writing on ghosts. During the 1600s, intellectuals (clergymen in particular) compiled examples of supernatural phenomena and ‘adopted experimental methods to prove the existence of spirits’. They did so to counteract a perceived erosion in supernatural belief and religiosity as ideas of natural and mechanical philosophy gained traction.³  

This is partly what makes Smith’s account so fascinating: Smith was a craftsman of rural and presumably humble origins. Yet in many ways his story reads like a ‘sensible proof of spirits’ found in the collections of contemporary intelligentsia.⁴

Nor is this the only example in Mosely’s justicing book of ordinary folk taking critical, empirical approaches to the supernatural.  

Sir Edward Mosley (a cousin of Nicholas) died at Hough End in late October 1665. Soon after, Mary Fletcher of Didsbury reportedly claimed that the knight ‘being then dead was come again & had ridden his old horse Jordy to the death’. Several depositions investigated the truth of this spectral rider, all of which hinged on the condition of Jordy the horse. Rebecca Chorlton, the wife of a husbandman from Withington, doubted Fletcher’s tale specifically because Jordy was not dead at the time of its telling. But another witness from the town, John Holt, claimed that Jordy was indeed dead by that time. Furthermore, he added that Lady Mosley (Edward’s widow) was ‘frighted with going into a chamber in Hough End Hall’, presumably because of the whole uncanny ordeal.⁵

Apart from the undead knight’s appalling disdain for animal welfare, this episode further underscores a couple of things about early modern belief in ghosts. It was not limited to ‘the folk’, nor was verification of supernatural experiences through logic and observation limited to elites. Reading thousands of quarter sessions depositions from collections throughout England has left me with similar impressions. Witches, cunning folk, spectres and devils haunt the pages of these testimonies, especially in northern counties like Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire.

Certainly, such records warrant further study, especially since much supernatural history has relied on elite perspectives.⁶ Although mediated by the judicial process, these depositions give unrivalled insight into deeply held folk beliefs.  Moreover, they can illuminate ordinary people’s attempts to interrogate those beliefs and vet their uncanny experiences. Layfolk’s aims and purposes in doing so were not the same as clergymen’s – they were not interested in supporting ‘the whole edifice of religion’ with their proofs.  Nonetheless, early modern men and women were invested in discerning the truth of spectral experiences, the reliability of prophecies, or the efficacy of cunning folks’ cures.

Will all this in mind, Smith’s story appears much more than an attempt to distance himself from seditious speech. Maybe he wished to show his words were not mere scandalous rumour. Nay, they were a fair and dutiful warning to the crown from a credible source – a supernatural source but one proven to be real and trustworthy.

And in the end, who are we to question the green spirit’s credentials? True, he was not right about Charles II’s fate. But maybe he was just a bit confused about what year and reign it was. Being dead for 13 years might do that to a person. Perhaps he meant Charles II’s brother and successor instead? After all, James VII and II did ‘reign but three years’; he did ‘turn papist’; and he was put in danger (and deposed) by ‘one of his own house’.

Spooky stuff indeed. 

1. Manchester Central Library, GB127.MS f 347 96 M2. Part of the justicing notebook (covering the first seven years) has been published in Manchester Sessions. Notes of Proceedings before Oswald Mosley (1616-1630), Nicholas Mosley (1661-1672), and Sir Oswald Mosely (1731-1739) and Other Magistrates. Vol. I 1616-1622/3, ed. Ernest Axon, (The Record Society for the Publication of Original Documents relating to Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. XLII, 1901). The rest of the book has never been published. MCL holds the transcripts, which I have been working from here.      ↩︎
2. MCL, GB127.MS f 347 96 M2, pp. 178-9.  I’ve modernised the spelling and added some punctuation for ease of reading. ↩︎
3. Quote is from Laura Sangha, ‘The Social, Personal, and Spiritual Dynamics of Ghost Stories in Early Modern England’, The Historical Journal, 63, 2 (2020), pp. 339-359, at p. 343. On ghost belief more broadly see also Owen Davies, The haunted: a social history of ghosts (Basingstoke, 2007). ↩︎
4. For more on early modern elite interests in ‘proving’ supernatural phenomena, see Jo Bath and John Newton, ‘”Sensible proof of spirits”: ghost belief during the later seventeenth-century’, Folklore, 117 (2006), pp. 1-14; Michael Hunter, ‘The decline of magic: challenge and response in early Enlightenment England’, The Historical Journal, 55 (2012), pp. 399-425. ↩︎
5. MCL, GB127.MS f 347 96 M2, pp. 199-200. ↩︎
6. Bath and Newton (2006), for example, ‘concentrate on elite attitudes to the phenomena…since it is largely through such sources that accounts of ghosts have filtered through to us’ (p. 2). They point to the potential of legal records as evidence of folk belief, but opine that ‘very little information on spectres has been found in the legal records so far’ (p.9). ↩︎