The Witch Who Blighted Leekley

The Witch Who Blighted Leekley

Vengeance from the Boneyard

* * *

This story is inspired by actual events that occurred in the English Countryside, in the ruined churchyard near Clophill, in 1963.

* * *

They say my great, great, great grandmother was a witch. Back in her living days, being a single mother was unheard of, and yet, she lived alone with her baby daughter in a cottage on the edge of Leekley. The fact that this great grandmother of mine was a feisty, red-haired beauty didn't help her reputation any.

They said she was a witch, and looking back at the stories that have come down to me, and considering what I now know, I'd say she definitely was.

Most of the time, being called a "witch" just meant you were unpopular with the local church wives- or that you had landed in bed with one of their husbands. Turns out, my great grandmother had.

But unlike the other women that local farmer William used and ruined, my grandmother knew a thing or two about what really hurt a farmer's business- it is said that she buried a dead toad under one of his birch trees- and after that, his hens began laying stones instead of eggs.

Most people today find this to be an amusing, harmless revenge- but back then, it was actually quite a dangerous thing, because it led to accusations that could lead to a gallows pole. Farmer William, the villainous ladies man, and his very jealous wife, led the mob that came to my grandmother's cottage, to round her up for the local magistrate.

They never managed to find her on their own, though. They kicked her door in, only to find her toddler daughter bundled up in the corner, sleeping fitfully, and no sign of my grandmother. They knew she was in the cottage, because they had seen her go in, before they surrounded the place and beat her door in. They immediately looked in the fireplace and up the chimney, thinking she had hid there, but there was no sign of her. At this point, the clear facts were apparent to the mob: she wasn't IN the chimney because she had flown up it and away.

The wife of Farmer William wasn't going to let something as silly as flying powers ruin her revenge, however. She seized the young daughter of my grandmother and ran outside with her, yelling to the sky and the trees that the little girl would come to harm if the mother didn't turn herself over to god and man- and guess what! It worked! That night, my grandmother walked into the village, and turned herself in.

Yeah, it was pretty horrid to threaten an innocent little girl, just to catch her mother- but it happened. What exactly she threatened to do to her, I never found out; no one ever mentioned it. But it was enough.

From what I've come to understand, reading up on local folklore, one of the ways people used to make evil fairies and spirits return human children they had stolen was by threatening the “changeling” child that the fairies left behind- sometimes even burning what looked to everyone like an innocent human baby. Sometimes, it worked- sinister, mind-twisting beings would creep out of the darkness on the other side of the village hedge to return children, rescuing their offspring, leaving behind a crying human baby and partially insane parents- and sometimes, a child just died.

Either way, threatening a child to coerce the obedience of a supernatural being had a long precedent in those parts. And this time, as I said before, it worked. My grandmother went to trial, and predictably, was sentenced rather quickly to swing.

As an interesting aside, at her trial, my grandmother said a man taught her some things in the graveyard down the lane from her cottage, deep in the spinney, where the older village and church had been, before everyone moved to be closer to the developing roads. The man was never named or found, but he seems to have had a fascination with graves and the dead- she was taught that digging up bones and arranging them in a special way caused a path to open, for dead souls to come back into the world, and enter the womb of a fertile woman who had just been impregnated. Maybe her graveyard man was the Devil himself; the popular opinion at the time said he was.

Well, anyway, folktales aside, they hung her. Her last words to the minister were "silence, you." Her last words to the people gathered to watch her die were "red milk."

The day after that, milk-maids and farmers in Leekley got a nasty surprise in the early morning: blood was all that came from the udders of their cows. No cow in Leekley ever gave milk again, only blood. Farmer William, whose entire stock of cows and chickens was now useless, went broke. He drank himself to death, and his wife, bitter lady till the end, died in a workhouse, very ugly and broken, years later.

As for the daughter of the witch who blighted Leekley, her story ended in tragedy too. She died of a fever a year and a day after her mother was hung. The little girl was buried in the churchyard, but the mother, my grandmother, was buried near a crossroads a mile away, where unbaptised children and suicides got buried. She wasn't fit for holy ground.

About ten years after this all happened, a grave got robbed- the grave of the little daughter of my grandmother. Somebody took her little skull and the bones of her left hand, leaving the other bones exposed. And that was just the start of the trouble- disaster after disaster started happening after that, to every person who was involved with the lynch-mob that came for my grandmother. One by one, the nastiest of things happened- cart accidents, lethal fevers, heart attacks, and the like.

Nor were their families spared- children died too. Investigators got a real tip-off one day, when a young maid from the village up the road was accused of witchcraft, and caved in under questioning herself- the Man in Black, the Graveyard Man, was getting revenge, she said. His lover, the Leekley Witch, was murdered and he wanted revenge.

Yes, she admitted, she helped him to rob the grave of the little girl. Why? Because the Spirit of the Leekley witch could only be summoned by threatening her daughter- in this case, by threatening to smash her daughter's skull and hand to dust. If you carried the skull and hand, and threatened to do that, down at the crossroads, the vengeful spirit of that red-haired woman would do what you asked. A sinister, yet effective charm.

Well for her testimony, and her confession and repentance, this maid was released. She, at least, didn't have to hang. But the investigators furiously hunted the man in Black, the bone-man who was bringing havoc down on the village and the area. They never found him, and the remains of the families who were involved in the Leekley witch incident fled the town. There isn't anymore record of what became of them in other places, but I have an intuitive feeling that they never came to good ends.

I got a visit, about a month ago, from a gentleman who refused to come inside my house. He wanted to talk outside. He always dressed all in black, and he visited me at dusk for about seven days in a row, always leaving before the cock crowed the next dawn. He knew a lot about my grandmother, and told me something that I'd never heard before. He said that before she went to turn herself into the local people, she had told him that she'd come back with the sun in her hand.

I asked him how he knew that- and he told me that he was the Bone Man. I told him that the Bone Man would have to be dead, and he told me that no one who understood the road of the graveyard had to die, for good. He then told me a very interesting tale.

Apparently, our two local graveyards were both built on old pagan temples, one temple to an old thunder god, a god who carried a big mallet and a wheel, and other to the Gods of the underworld, who were always in the company of black snakes and black roosters. The dead, I was told, "went down below" at one cemetary, but "came back" through another. When the cock crowed, the king below called the dead away- they couldn't resist the cock's crow. But when the days were right, the sky parted and the dead could come back, if the graveyard road was made clear.

It was done by opening a grave, taking all the bones out, and making a big circle with them, and placing the skull in the center. Then, a big wheel with four spokes had to be painted in red on a flat piece of stone nearby, a stone that pointed to heaven. Apparently, the ruined stone church wall worked just fine for this, because its steeple pointed to heaven. Then, when the name of the dead person was intoned, a man studded a woman in the circle, and as long as the bones were of a female relative, the spirit could "leap" into the womb of the woman being impregnated, joining with the newly fertilized egg within.

When the person came out as a newborn baby, they didn't really remember their previous life, but a member of the Bone-society had a way of "rekindling" those memories.

The man in black said that he had died and been "back down the bone road" dozens of times around the area of Leekley. He remembered dozens of lives, where he had done this operation for many others like himself- and so it went.

I was a little shocked and mystified by his story, but something about the way he talked and the way he looked just told me that he wasn't lying. He then offered me a little bottle, asking me to drink what was inside. When I asked what it was, he said it was a means of remembering.

I then looked at him and asked if I was one of his clients, and he laughed and said that I was- his very favorite client, whom he missed very much. He told me that when I was born, I was yellow- I had jaundice, and in my left hand, I was holding a clot of bright yellow pus; the midwife had even remarked (never having heard our local stories of witches) Oh look! This little girl's got the sun in her hand!

I drank the potion. I felt sick, and then fell asleep. When I woke up, the first thing I did was go down with my Man in Black to the churchyard, and spit on the grave of Farmer William. I would have spit on his wife's grave, but she was put into a mass grave somewhere, where no one remembers. And THAT is a happy ending.

Site last updated: November 2, 2005