I haven’t done a spooky post for a while and so I will rectify that now. The following tale is supposedly true and hails from the North Yorkshire village of Little Smeaton. I am not sure exactly how long ago this all happened, but it is a sad and spooky story. You probably won’t have heard it before and it centres on the Hewgill family of Smeaton Hall. I found this version of the story in the book More Tales of Ghosts And Terror Around The North of England. It is an old book, the third of a series written by Rebecca Dane and Craig MacNeale. Unfortunately the books are now out of print. I also found a slightly different version of the same tale on the web. Anyway, here is the story as I first encountered it:
Squire Hewgill and his wife had only one daughter, Bella, and at the time all this happened she was just 20 years old and in love. The only problem was that Bella was in love with a man called Tom Bristow and he was a farmhand. There is nothing wrong with being a farmhand, of course, but things were a little different in those days, and when Bella came home one evening, announced to her parents that she was in love, and declared her intentions to get married the proverbial brown stuff hit the fan. The Squire was livid and said that he would rather see Bella dead than married to a lowly farmhand. He also informed his distraught daughter that he had already selected a husband for her, a wealthy middle-aged widower from Northallerton.
Emotions ran high at Smeaton Hall that evening; Bella was beside herself with grief and told her father that she would not be happy married to anyone but the man she loved. The Squire was unmoved and unmoving, though, and refused to see reason. As for Bella’s mother, she was totally dominated by the squire and, when Bella turned to her for help, she ran from the room without a word.
All Bella’s tears and protests were useless, her father dragged her upstairs, locked her in her bedroom, and told her that she would have to stay there until she saw sense. Bella didn’t ’see sense’ though. She remained true to her love and remained locked in her room. She stayed there for days and a servant, who was under strict instructions not to talk to the girl, brought up her meals for her. Each day the servant also took the meals away again, uneaten.
The Squire was a man that was used to getting his own way and Bella’s disobedience angered him greatly. In the end he took the rather unusual and drastic action and went to see the local witch, Old Mother Webster, who lived in a cottage on the outskirts of the village. The old woman told the Squire that she might be able to help him, by preparing a potion, but that she could not guarantee its success and that for it to work certain things would have to be avoided. Stoat’s blood and Owl’s blood were two of the ingredients in her potion and if the Squire saw either animal on his return home then it would mean disaster for him.
On his way home Squire Hewgill kept his eyes closed and trusted his horse to get him safely home. When he reached the woods, though, that surrounded his estate; a nearby owl let out such a piercing shriek that he opened his eyes with the shock and saw a huge white owl looking down at him from the trees. Fearing the worst, he galloped all the way home, but when he arrived there Bella was already dead.
Being the truly loving and devoted father that he was the Squire could not face the thought of a verdict of suicide being passed and so he made his own funeral arrangements-he dumped her body in a disused well and covered it up with stones.
None of this did anything to improve the Squires temper and things got so bad at the Hall that the servants all left in search of pastures new, while their moody ex-master took to taking long walks in his grounds. It was on one of his walks that he first heard the wailing coming from the well and when he went to investigate he saw a cloud of mist rise out of the well and come drifting towards him, and within the mist he could see the form of his daughter pointing an accusatory finger at him. Needles to say, the Squire decided not to take any more walks. More than that, he decided not to even leave the Hall and neither he nor his wife ever left it again. Most nights, though, they could still hear the wailing drifting from the well and shortly after that their daughter would drift out of it too and often drifted into Hall to torment and terrify her parents.
With no servants to care for them, and fearing to leave their home, the couple had to live off the food that was stored in the house, which ran out in the end.
The bodies of the Squire and his wife were found by some workmen. They were lying side by side in their four poster bed. The strangest thing of all was that they were locked in and the key was on the outside of the door. They were locked in, and they must have been locked in for a while because the key was rusted into the lock.
I’m not saying I believe this tale just that it is supposed to be true. I think that, in less enlightened times, the landed gentry might very well have displayed an attitude similar to that of the squire, and the title ‘Old Mother’ is real enough (explained in my post about Old Mother Shipton ). Could a father be so uncaring of his daughters feeling, though, that he would be so cold-hearted or dispose of her body so unceremoniously? I’ll let you make up your own mind on that one.