After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Witches of Cornwall

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

From the spookiest corner of the British isles, comes two stories of witches. Stories of fairies and magical powers, of skeletons and haunted history. Our guest is the manager of Bodmin Jail in Cornwall - Jess Marlton.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Freddy Chick. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, we're your host's Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like After Dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal, ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. In 1646, a young and unassuming servant girl claimed to be visited by six fairies. She alleged that the creatures gave her powers, powers that allowed her to heal the sick, see the future, and perform spells that would deeply shock witnesses for the rest of their lives. But in a world rife with paranoia, at the end of the first English civil war and the very peak of the witch trials,

her gift was also a curse. This is the incredible true story of Anne Jeffreys, a woman born with nothing who defied physics, logic and authority. Welcome to After Dark. In a large house down one of the twisting lanes of Cornwall, a boy of about six years old is peering through the keyhole. It's the keyhole of a room that, belongs to his beloved servant Anne. She's told him to wait outside while she finishes eating,

but he can guess the real reason why she's making him wait. His eye strains desperately to see what's going on inside the sunny room. He watches as Anne puts down her plate, then stands up and curtsies. Who is she curtsying to? Is it to them? Are the fairies in there with her now? Anne comes to the door and lets the boy in, gives him a piece of her bread to eat. Decades later, after the boy has grown and gone to London and has suffered all of life's ups and downs, he still remembers that one piece of bread. It was the most delicious thing he had ever or would ever eat. A morsel of otherworldly magic, a crumb from the fairy table.

handed down to him by his very own witch. Hello everybody. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And you might recognise our guest from today's episode because she was on one of the very first episodes we ever did. In fact, it was number eight. How do you know that? It is written in the script. Oh, fair enough. If anyone wants to go back and listen to it, the title of that episode is hauntings, hangings and a beast, Bodmin Jail. I thoroughly recommend that. It is, of course, the manager of Bodmin Jail herself, which is in Cornwall for our international listeners. It's Yes. Martin, Jess, welcome to the pod. Hi, Jess. Hi, it's great to be here. We are so happy to have you back. We've been talking about getting you back on. Go, for about two years and a half now. Yeah. It's been a long time, but we've finally managed it. We are going to be talking about one major story and maybe a little one tacked on to the end later. But I want to begin, Jess, because you brought something all the way from Cornwall. Ladies and gentlemen, Jess has been on the train for several hours today. That's the commitment level she has to coming into the studio. And you've brought us a gift. What is it? The Little Pampford in front of me was written just after the events you were talking about in the 1690s by Moses Pitt. And it tells the story of Anne Jeffers. This was the young lady at the time who was looking after Moses. He's the young boy in the story. So we're going to be talking about Anne and Moses today, but mostly Anne.

But we get some Moses too. You were telling us before we started just that there's a little introductory passage that describes Anne before we get into her story. I think it might be a nice way to let listeners know exactly who we're dealing with. So could you read that for us now and then we'll get into her history in a little bit more detail? Absolutely. So this is Moses writing and he describes Anne as follows. He says she was a girl of bold, daring spirit and that she would venture at those difficulties and dangers that no boy would attempt. I want that on my gravestone.

It's fantastic. We should say the title of this pamphlet is, and this is a classic 17th century wordy title, an account of Juan Anne Jeffries now living in the County of Cornwall, Deep Breath, who was fed for six months by a small sort of airy people called fairies and of the strange and wonderful cures she performed. Catchy. I mean, I would say now, if you handed that into an editor, they may be like, no.

Let's slightly cut that down a little bit, but there's some interesting details in there. It gives you a clue of what's to come, I think. I'm on board. Yeah, no, I mean, the one thing I like about these 17th century titles is that you're getting an awful lot of information so you can decide whether or not. You've practically read the story by the time you've done. But Jess, let's talk about the person at the heart of this story. And that, of course, is Anne Jeffreys.

And a lot of people will be asking this because it's not a name we're familiar with. Who was she? So we're really lucky that we have case material about Anne. So we can actually put some facts behind us. her. This isn't an interpretation. This is a real person who existed and lived and had these experiences. Anne was a young lady who was working in Cornwall. She wasn't from a rich family, so she was apprenticed out to work with the Pitt household. This was a well-to-do family just outside Bodmin on the north coast of Cornwall. And it was her job to look after their

youngest child, Moses, a kind of governess, although she was illiterate, she was there to watch out for him and make sure he was okay. And I think that that close bond between the two of them is really evident in that pamphlet we've just referenced. He speaks about her very, very fondly. And the fact that he writes about her later on in life suggests that she did have a big impact on him, right, that he wanted to spend time doing this. We know from the title of the pamphlet that fairies are going to come into this. So, How do fairies appear in her life? And how should we understand the Cornish fairy in this context? Right. So this is really interesting because we have an idea today of what we mean by a fairy, a very small person, probably with little flushery wings, and doesn't describe them that way.

She describes them as childlike in size and dressed in green. And these fairies are able to give gifts, but also to do harm. So there is one interpretation that could say that what we're talking about is a form of spirit. And given this is the 1640s when this is happening, that would seem to be a logical connection between the two. But of course, Cornwall is steeped in fairy folklore and particularly the Cornish Piskis. So maybe these are the forerunners of those stories beginning to come through. And certainly the fact that she has written about so passionately and so earnestly by Moses, I think shows you the public interest in Anne and those fairies. at the time and thereafter.

So we have this idea that there is a fairy type person or a group of people. And actually these childlike size things are actually slightly more terrifying than the little winged things to a certain extent. Children are petrifying. But it is this idea of this meeting of source. But what's happening? Why are they coming to Anne? Do we know what the purpose of their visitation is?

So she's 19 when she first talks about. encountering fairies. And it's described by Moses as happening in the garden. She's knitting in an arbor, as you do of an afternoon, when the fairies come to her. And she suffers something health-wise. It's very hard to understand what happens, but she becomes very ill. And nobody knows at the time that she has seen fairies at this point. It's not until she begins to recover that she says that they have come to her and given her gifts and that they're there to protect her and more importantly in the clue in the title here to feed her. She then from that point on stops eating with the family and the fairies will feed her

for the rest of the story from Moses. See, that's so interesting to me because there are a lot of stories like this that we come across in the 17th and certainly in the 18th century of especially young women, young girls who stop eating, whether that's people stopping them from having access to food or whether it's their choice. And usually they're associated with religious experiences. And that these children, these young girls say that they are being fed by Christ, by their spirituality. I think of Emma Donoghue's The Wonder, which is based actually on an 18th century story that happened in Staffordshire, where I'm from, in fact, which was a so-called true story of this girl who was

being starved, essentially. And, you know, whether we can interpret that as an eating. eating disorder, whether it's a hoax. There's a lot of complicated layers here. And it sounds to me like this is falling slightly into that genre, albeit with a magical folkloric element, not necessarily a religious element. I think you're absolutely right. I think she could easily fit into that category of fasting girls. She's never named as such, but actually her devotion and conviction around the fairies and also around her faith. She has a strong faith. She's very outspoken about how people should practice their faith, and her lack of eating normal food feeds into that fever, I think. And in fact, Moses sees her, he's a scene that he describes as spying on her

through the keyhole of her eating bread that the fairies have given her as if to keep that connection going, and she offers him some. I think it's probably the only actual account we have of a real human being claiming to have eaten fairy food, but he does claim it was the finest food he'd ever tried. Oh, wow. So he's sold on this concept, or he's selling this concept as well, whichever, because he's writing this later in his life, obviously, right? Now, one of the things I have here is an image of Anne and the fairies, and it is very

interesting for many reasons. So I'll describe what I have, and then we can talk about it a little bit more. This is from 1837, so we're right at the cusp of the Victorian age. So, you know, what we understand is modernity is dawning at this point. And we have this very, in many ways, bucolic scene, there are trees, it's, you know, very verdant. It's a black and white image, but you can imagine it being quite green. And we have Anne at the very centre. The house is in the background that she is working in. And then around her up to her knee, essentially, are these fairies, all female in presentation from what I can see. And you can't help but draw some sort of parallels between the Cottingly fairies that they're all in a very dance-like posing. Then in the background, there seems to be a little boy. I wonder if it might be Moses himself, who knows. But, you know, the fences are wooden made.

Her hair is up, with some of it's falling down. She's got her sleeves rolled up. I can imagine the sun, and I can imagine the heat of the day. And it's something quite relaxing about this image. It takes you in a little bit. She's sort of a fair country made, isn't she? Yes. Yeah, it's very, you know, you know she's been working. It's hugely romanticised.

Yes. Because that image, I think, is typical of what happens. in the 1800s when Cornish folklore was beginning to be collected. And by that point, her story has entered truly into folklore. Because the reality of it is, this is the 1640s. The country has gone through brutal war. The king's on his way out. Cornwall is a strong royalist county and they've lost. And Anne is a royalist. She makes no qualms about it. So her position at the time of dancing in the garden with small folk is very far from reality, I think, of what she would have been facing, added to which the fact that she had

been most terribly ill, she's described as not being able to walk properly as being a lacking of sense, so speculation about had she had a stroke, was there something that had happened to her in the garden that had caused all these things to happen in her mind, maybe, if very don't exist. So this wonderful image we have is the beginning of that romanticising of the West Country and we'll see it all the way through the 1800s. I'm very interested in Moses' account, which obviously comes in the 17th century before this great romanticisation. But I'm interested in, I suppose, the distance between that reality you're talking about of Anne's experience and her illness and the political climate, the spiritual climate in that moment in Cornwall. And the fact that

he's writing years later remembering a childhood experience, if he is indeed remembering it and not fictionalising it. And if we take him at face value and he is recalling it from the years earlier, what does that mean as an adult to look back on your childhood experiences, particularly things that stood out to you and sort of enchanted you in some way? So can you give us a little bit more information about who he is, who he grows up to be? And we know that he has this relationship, I suppose, with Anne, and that she is charged with his care. But how does he perceive her? So there is a fondness between them.

She describes him as her child, and there's no double layering there. He isn't, but that is how close she felt to him. When her troubles begin, and we'll come on to those, I'm sure, to do with what she's saying and how she's acting, when she is finally released from prison, she isn't allowed to go back to him. She has to go and live with his father's widow. She isn't allowed back with the family. So they're separated.

So I think he is writing from a point of nostalgia. But Moses, when he grows up in his 50s, he becomes a writer. And in fact, he loses a lot of money. He strikes some very bad deals in his life, tens of thousands of pounds. So he's pretty crippled in debt. And he ends up in debt as prison. He's written numerous accounts of what that was like. And Anne's pamphlet is one of the last, if not the last piece of writing that he did.

And he reached out to her. She was still alive. She didn't have seven tears and he said, would you help me write this? And she wanted nothing to do with it. She said she'd had quite enough of talking about it, that she didn't want to be in broadsides and pamphlets, the paparazzi and social media of their time, I'm sure, and that she just wanted to live her life quietly.

So she isn't involved in the pamphlet, although she could have been, but he still publishers. One of the things that I want to just pop in here before I go on to talk about what exactly Anne's powers are and what she's saying, just to situate listeners in that we are in 1646, and as you say, Jess, there's an English civil war going on at this point. Parliament is in control. Charles I first is still alive, but he has about three years left in him, and he's a prisoner trying to play opponents off one another. As you said already, Jess, Cornwall is a very royalist stronghold. So, you know, there's a lot of social tensions and cultural tensions and political tensions that are unfolding in the country at this time. It's a time of great unrest. That's the broader context, but let's zone in on Anne again a little bit closer.

So what is she saying? And what are the powers or the abilities that this interaction is giving her? So I'm going to use two words in relation to her. And we've circumnavigated one of them, which. And the other one, prophetess. Anne is very unspoken. Moses tells us that, to begin with, she's bold. she is willing to do what some people, even men, would not do.

It's a very big statement. Anne speaks out publicly against Parliament. She speaks out in favour of the king, and in fact she prophesises, because she claims the fairies have given her that power, that the king will come back. Evidently, the fairies are wrong, unless they were talking about his son.

Yes. But to say such things in a politically charged climate such as that is diversive, and it caused a lot of tension within Cornwall. She was known as someone who spoke up about what prayer book you should read, whether the king was on the up, whether Parliament was on the down,

and all of this prophesised by spirits. So you've got a woman in the 1640s of low birth, in the serving classes, who is dictating what should and shouldn't happen in government and what will and won't happen in Parliament and claiming that she's been told these things by spirits. It's a interesting move. Yeah.

I mean, I'm sort of amazed on the one hand that a woman from this lowly station is able to speak out in this way and to be telling people, particularly men, what prayer books they should be reading, what they should be doing, and what's going to happen in the future. I mean, that's incredibly bold. But we think about the time of the civil wars and the complete upending of social class and the liberation to a certain extent, I suppose, of some of those people in the lower orders. I'm thinking about the levelers,

these people who are born into circumstances and a station to which they don't have any opportunity to rise, and yet they find their voice in this period. So I think in some way she is of her time. There is a context to her, which is amazing. But tell us a little bit about the third character in this story, because Anne is all well and good out there making these profits, season, saying these royalist things, and predicting the king is going to return all of that.

But there is a foil to her work, isn't there? Who's this? Yes, it's the local magistrate. There should be some dastardly musing cuts in here. This is Jan Trigigel, who is infamous actually in folklore. And there's a little bit of irony here that we have two such strong characters whose stories converge at this point and then diverge. And Jan Tregegel is one of those. He is a Cornish bogeyman.

So he's known elsewhere in his own right outside of the story. So there's two parts to Jan Tregeel. One is living man, local magistrate, who became famous for trying to get land off a young man whose family had died. He wanted the property. And that was when he became vilified. But of course, the Anne element also impacted that. So Anne, who is prophesizing and curing and laying on of hands and talking about fairies, Jan Tregeagle is having none of this in the 1640s and she's arrested.

And she's put into Bobman jail where they deny her food and water. And they say, if your ferrers are all powerful, they can feed you. It's a test of religious proof, really, isn't it? There she is saying, we can do all of this, me and my fairies. And I'm like, prove it. he is so dissatisfied with how that works out that he puts her in his own house to make sure that she doesn't get food

Yeah, it doesn't get freedom of water But now taking on a whole lot of other thing I think there are two ways you can read that One you can read it as in he wants to break her and prove that she's wrong So my faith is better than your faith My parliament's better than your king My system of belief and power is better than yours

And all this prophesising is nonsense The people shouldn't listen to you The other way, interestingly, I think you can also read it as this sounds uncannily like the methods used to detect a witch. So you keep them awake, you deny them food and water, you incarcerate them, you question them. And she was in prison, we know, for around six months. And tell me this, just, was she arrested as a witch, or was it something else? So, unfortunately, this is the one thing Moses doesn't tell us what the charges were. I think we can absolutely infer that that is why she's arrested.

She's talking about spirits and fairies and cures and prophesising, and she's being very vocal. Yeah, she's a prime target for it. So my interpretation is that's exactly why they haul her in. Jan Trigigel, again, treats her to our eyes appallingly, and I think also to the common people of Cornwall, who were evidently listening to what she was saying. equally made him out to be a villain and of course this is an individual

Anne Jeffers who I think people were a little bit frightened of Moses Pitt describes his mother as not wanting to vex her she doesn't want to upset her and this is staff she's a member of staff right so there's some sort of unusual charisma about it isn't she and as you say a boldness that she's able to step out of you know she's not staying in line

she's able to step out of her own context and for me she's one of those characters in history that I think we have brushed over and really deserves a revisit. You were talking earlier about fasting girls and these unique girls. I think there's a whole series of young women throughout history who have these strange and uncanny encounters and use their voices very often associated witchcraft

and then later with hauntings. I know you've spoken about the Cochlein Ghost and the Enfield Paltgeist. All of those are young girls. It's almost you can watch them through the centuries. I think Anne's one of those. Absolutely, my new book, by the way, just cover the cockling ghost and the little girl in that. And I do a sort of, yeah, I suppose a feminist deep dive into what was happening there and what her role was. So I'm very interested in this.

But just so much on this podcast, when we cover accusations of witches, stories about witches, we inevitably get to their rest as we have done here. But then we also go to trial. And often those stories end in very brutal ways. But you've alluded to the fact that Anne does not die. She lives to all right old age. So what's happening here? Is she saved by the fairies?

Twist surprise, hey? Yeah, what a shocker. She doesn't confess. And I think our local magistrate, Mr. Trigigel, probably has better things on his mind than a errant witch or healer, parliament. And the king are right there. And he is a man of business and quite dastardly business.

I think dastardly is a good word. for Mr. Trigiegle, they let her go. And when she is released, as I said, she doesn't go back to the family. She has to go elsewhere. She ends up marrying and probably living into the early 1700. She's got a good life. But this absolutely, I think, accounts for why she doesn't want to take part in this pamphlet when Moses writes it.

She's had enough of that trouble. The other way to read it is, if you talk about Ferris, they'll stop giving you power. Ah. This is part of law, isn't it? If you talk about them, if you show them, if you allude to them in any way, they can withdraw their favours. So the other twist is to say, actually, she doesn't want to take part in it because she doesn't want the fairies to stop helping her.

So it adds to the credibility almost. Right. But arguably what the fairies did do is get their own back on Jan Tregiegel. So I said there were two parts to him, the man and then the ghost. So after his death, he becomes a folk villain. He is the bogey man. And there are numerous stories of him throughout Cornwall, quite unusually from west to east and north Cornwall,

of his ghostly activities, emptying Dossemary Paul, which is a big outlet of water on the moors with a limpid shell. That's one of the things he has to do. Making a noose out of sand, there's another one. Drinking with a devil, doesn't sound too bad in my books, but he has to do that. And then the devil chases him across the moors with his hellhounds.

So he really enters into that canon of dark folklore. That's so interesting that it's this man who survives in folklore and not necessarily and that she's sort of disappeared from our knowledge. I'd never heard of her. And I visit certainly the north coast of Cornwall every single year. And I'm very interested in that. You know, I stay in a place where the Reverend Richard Hawker, who was a great 19th century collector of folklore lived and I have a copy of one of his earliest books.

and I always take it with me, and, you know, I'm very much interest in that landscape and stuff. And I wonder just what you think of this, that I suppose when it comes to Cornish mythology, compared to a lot of other places in England, certainly, there's a real brutality. And the stories that survive reflect that the brutal, violence, danger, darkness of the land itself. And that actually, it's therefore unsurprising that Anne would disappear from this story and that actually it's someone who has a much darker reputation. She seems on paper to be a bit softer, doesn't she? She's got fairies, and we all know how lovely and sweet they are not.

And the fact that she's written about a child that she used to look after this, is kind of maternal edge to her, and she's a servant girl. There's all these reasons why she would disappear from history books. Yes, and I think also perhaps an interpretation is that she was just a bit odd. Yeah. And not in a way that people were particularly interested in, as being chased by the devil was far more exciting. For me, she's a far more interesting character

because we have actual documentation about her. Not in her own words, but written at the time. That's really unusual. If you're going to look at the history of such accusations against women, you know, you've got Pendle where we have information on it, but here's another. They just don't say which. And they wonder if the pamphlet or the documents had used that,

word if she'd have been more prevalent. Right, yeah. So it's almost the selling point, the branding that's attached to her is. Before we move on to, because we're going to talk about another interesting dark corner story. And just to follow on from what Maddie was saying, because it's really interesting, this idea of the darkness and, and, you know, this is all reminding me of Ireland very much as well. And, you know, we're not that far apart in many ways.

But what is it about Cornwall specifically do you think, as a lot? a resident, that lends itself so willingly to these stories and the enduring nature of these stories. Cornwall is other. We said before we sat down, it's a very long way away. And I also said, yes, and it's several centuries away as well. And I think that's true. There has always been a difference when you cross the Tamar. It feels a haunted landscape. It's certainly so for the Victorians who really, really looked at the gothicness of Cornwall, and we saw writers begin to write about the encounters and the strangeness and the weirdness of this last outpost of otherness in the British Isles, the last place to be connected by rail, the place that's

surrounded by sea, the places where you can't get anywhere easily. So stories and folklore remains. And it's having a real resurgence, that dark folklore of Cornwall at the moment, absolutely brilliant. So our giants and our beasts and our ghosts are all coming back into the public imagination. And I think that's a grand thing. So Jess, you've come here today tell us two stories. So we've had Anne. And now I want to talk about Joan. Is it white?

Yeah, it's white. In my script, it says she's the Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin, which is quite the title. Tell me a little bit about this. Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin. It's brilliant, isn't that? It's fantastic. We have a lot of documentation on Anne Jeffers, not a shred of information. exists that Joan White ever actually lived.

However, her story is a absolute humdinger. I think it's brilliant. So whether or not she's a real person or not, it doesn't matter. So Joan White, the fighting fairy of Bobmin, so-called, not because she was a fairy, but because she was quite short and had a foul temper, probably due to having an abscess in her tooth, she liked sweet things, so she was probably inconsiderable amounts of pain, lived at the end of the 1700s, and in 1813 was locked up in Bob Mingele for street fighting. Wow.

She's a brawler. Yeah, yeah. She's a brawler. But she's also meant to have been a culling woman, so she can heal you, can help the sick. You can go to her for magical remedies. And of course, by this time, the witchcraft act has changed. So it's no key for her to do that as long as she isn't selling you false stuff. So she's not in bomb in jail for being a fraud.

She's in bomb in jail for having a wicked temper of a gorgon and a sharp paraphists. I'm already obsessed with her. Before we go any deeper into her story, I'm going to make Anthony describe the second image. I got in there first. So this is a photograph of a museum display, presumably in Cornwall. It's the museum of witchcraft and. magic buzz castle.

Oh, it is is it. It is fantastic, which is always closed. I only go to Cornwall in the winter and it's always closed when I go and I always

look through the window wistfully hoping that I can go in and I ever get to go on, describe it for us. Well, I mean, on the surface of it, it's very plainly a body,

well, a skeleton at least, which is displayed in some form of cabinet. It's a black and white picture. It looks like actually this, I'm presuming a female only because what we're talking

about. I'm not qualified to differentiate skulls, I'm afraid. She always looks like she's in a very demure pose, actually, where she's kind of guarding herself physically. And then beside her, I think, am I seeing like femurs and other form of bones? And then there's like pictures on the wall in the display cabinet. And there's something else down there on the right hand side. I'm not sure what that is. And it's interesting as well that we're now talking about a skeleton because Jesse said that this person probably never existed. So we're... I'm confused. Yeah. So, explain, please. What you're looking at

is Joan's bones. Jones bones. And I have a soft spot for Joan because she's actually one of my earliest childhood memories which probably sums up my family I would imagine because I went to the museum

of witchcraft as it was known then when I was a little girl and as you came into the entrance way there was a glass coffin and in that glass coffin was Joan's bones. The last witch of Cornwall, those bones.

Right. Now, you were trying to describe them, do we know it's one person? Is it a demargramation of bones? We don't know. But it was labelled, this is who it was, it's Joan. And the reason the bones are there when she was in Bobmin jail in 1813 and then died in Bobbin jail is because the story says she was an anatomized and that the bones somehow ended up back in the jail and were then used in a seance as you do.

were terrible and awful things happened and they ended up in a collection in Boscastle, in a glass coffin like some really screwed up sleeping beauty labelled as the last witch of Cornwall. And they remained there until 1998 when its new owners said morally were a little concerned.

I'd rather not. We're uncomfortable with Joan Burns. There's a body in my house. Correct. And she was, interred outside Minster Church, a procession up through the woods and they gave her

that's on the hill above the funeral up there yes and she's buried somewhere in the woods there's a little gravestone to her which is delightful it's always surrounded and little offerings now people go there a lot more it's one of the best graveyards I've ever been to it's a fantastic graveyard

and she's just outside obviously she's not in consecrated ground but she was buried up there but her story just goes on and on and on layers and layers. And maybe because the gentleman who started the Museum of Witchcraft Cecil just created her. I think this is a fascinating exercise, isn't it? In myth-making and myth-making with objects, not least with human remains.

And as you say, that could be the skeleton of a single individual. It could be an amalgamation of lots of different people. And I think these ethical issues are very, very interesting when it comes to me. mythology and particularly folklore around women, you know, so much of folklore, in the 19th century in particular, you know, if you think about folk music, folk songs, there's so much about women being murdered or abused in some way, their bodies hidden in the landscape. There's this real history of women who have fallen out of documentation or whenever in the history books in the first place. There's no record of them existing, whether they're real or not, but the stories of them

and the abuses that they suffer continue to be told. And what I love is, the headstone that you mentioned there, I'll read the inscription on it, because I do think this is really apt. And I think this is a really powerful way of putting, yes, the skeleton to rest, but also something of her story to bed, actually. It says, Joan White, born 1775, died 1813, if she ever existed. Let's caveat. Died in Bobman, jail. Buried 1998, no longer abused. It's interesting, isn't it? It's also, I find that, you know, if she didn't exist, And, you know, I'm probably leaning on the side that she probably didn't. But if she didn't, she still then comes to represent what an awful lot of working class women might have been or might have experienced in the historical record and in the time period.

So she serves that purpose. I also find it really interesting of what we make her do, right? Like in different time periods, we put her on display. we make her be this, you know, story that that feeds us for whatever reason. We bury her in quite a formative way, yeah. To then alleviate some of that kind of cultural guilt that we have around ourselves. She is mythological in that sense, even if this has some kind of form of truth to it. I think she becomes a representation, doesn't she, in many ways?

And certainly at Bombin jail every year, every October, we go to her grave. and we leave her some rolling tobacco and some brandy and normally some fudge because, you know, why not? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for us, she represents the individuals who were outcast under witchcraft acts throughout the centuries.

That's how we remember her. That's how we mark her. You see it in Scotland a lot as well, don't you, where there's these cultural inventions of particular women who the archive doesn't support the existence of, but they come to represent. Exactly. And they come to represent those experiences beyond the archive.

And I think that's where these, you know, folkloric or mythic individuals are really useful. And you know the way I can often be around folklore where I'm just like, I don't get it, it's not real. I don't want to talk about it. But actually, the usefulness of this is really, pertinent, I think, and it's written on our headstone, essentially. And especially for Cornwall's continually shifting identity, actually.

You talked about the fact that in Cornwall now there's this huge revival in terms of the darker folklore surviving there, and the sort of addition to it as well. And I think in that way, she's a really good part of that, she speaks to, yes, the tradition of storytelling, the tradition of collecting objects associated with these kind of stories. but also, I suppose, a rewriting of some of that and a drawing attention to the difficulties and complexities around some of those stories and the fact that there are potentially real people, real human beings behind some of these myths.

I think absolutely right. And I think Cornwall and witches are synonymous in the West Country and Witches and, you know, Devon has Exeter, the last executions of four witches take place in Exeter, I think, in 1686. And you can still go to magic shops in Glastonbury and Somerset, et cetera, et cetera. You know, the whole area is so associated with that.

Exactly, right. And we'd certainly had White Witches practicing in the 1800s famous ones. Blight is a very good example of one of those whose portrait now hangs in the Cornwall Museum. So becoming famous again. I just want to finish before we round this up about talking about Bodman Jail and, you know, we have this association with Joan and or potential association with Joan. But I want to talk about maybe some of the more. unusual experiences that people have before we go when they come to visit you at Bobman.

Because these spaces, we talk about this all the time, these spaces are so evocative. They are, they ignite the imagination, they heighten the senses, they bring the past to life. And it's why we love going to these places. And it's why we know the listeners are often sent us pictures of places that they've been to that might have been covered on podcasts or whatever. are there any visitor stories or experiences that jump to mind that are particularly unusual or that lean into this darker side that we so often tread on after dark? What kind of experiences are reported by visitors there? So I think the question actually might be is, is it haunted?

Sure. If you want to take it there, Jess, you could tell, yeah, I was, well, yes. So putting a factual head on for a moment, Bob Mangell is an uncal. any place. It sits on a layline, the great east-west layline, that runs through Glastonbury, where smack bang on it. We also sit on a small stream in the Lee of the Valley. So geographically, there's your checklist for what makes a place Spooksville. We took every single box. We also have executions on site over a period of nearly 200 years, 55 individuals that we know of. And after 1832, they're buried on site, and their bodies are still there. So again, let's just keep layering up reasons for why it might be.

Does that mean it is? I think the very short answer is yes. When I first started working at the jail, if someone had asked me that question, I would have said, as you did about folklore, don't be so ridiculous. There's no such thing. There's something there. What it is, I don't know, and what it wants, I'm not keen to find out. I think two things that guests report with great frequency,

particularly those of our employees working early in the morning, as frequently as they walk through the prison, their hands are held. We had children on site. The age of criminal responsibility isn't set until 1911, so prior to that, kids were in that building. And they described it as little cold fingers holding theirs. Well, that's unsettling. Yes, deeply.

We feel deeply maternal. No, we don't. Don't quite shake them off. And the other one we have is a cell known as cellful in the bottom of the naval wing, which has a reputation for being particularly troublesome for young men. This was the dark landing or reception landing of the naval wing. We know that the individuals in there would have been the bad ones. And to join the renovation work, several of the builders working in that particular area reported feeling like someone was standing too close to them, that someone was getting a bit handsy.

We have blocked cell phone off because it's also a place where a lot of people kept passing out. So we decided that that wouldn't be open to the public because we can't have someone there the entire time. But it's also the door that despite it being closed off, likes to open. Oh, no. Yeah. What I love about this and what we love about all of this and, you know, you're living and breathing it every day is that it's this intersection between history and those actual, you know, the bodies you're talking about, the executions you're talking about, the people that you know were there. You're tracing that history of that naval area that you're talking about. These are layers of history that, again, you know, they ignite something in us on a really primal level that, that, you know, lead to storytelling and experiences.

We do occasionally get voices of criticism that you shouldn't exploit spirit, you shouldn't talk about, ghost, this is someone's religion. And I absolutely respect that. We come from it from a standpoint of going, these are stories. Yeah. And we are custodians of that building and all the stories associated with it. And if we treat them respectfully, if we keep the memories alive, if we keep talking about them, then we're preserving history and her story for generations. to come. Custodians of stories. I think that's such a fantastic way to end. Jess, thank you so much. If people want to visit Bodman Jail, how can they do that? Because it is also a hotel, isn't it?

So there's a hotel and there's a museum. We are open all year and we do a variety of different tours. We've got a new audio trail going through from October, which is a new paranormal audio trail. Oh, I love an audio trail. Like that's what I get everywhere. Oh, do you? Yes, yes, yes, that's my favorite thing. I usually don't, but I absolutely would in this. That would be new for October. We also run our heritage tours, our history tours, our ghost walks, and after dark ghost experiences.

All available on the website. Absolutely perfect. If you are thinking of heading to Cornwall, then absolutely go and do that. If you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to hit subscribe. Enjoy everyone, your spooky season. We are fully into it. the jumpers around everything is getting a little bit dark and spooky if you want to get in touch with the show then email us after dark at history hit dot com