The Drummer of Tedworth

There are objects I would probably avoid bringing into my house if there were even the slightest possibility that somebody had cursed them.

Old dolls are an obvious one. Anything containing human hair can remain exactly where it is, and if I ever find a mysterious box with instructions specifically telling me not to open it, for once in my life I am going to respect the instructions.

I can now add a drum confiscated from an angry seventeenth-century travelling musician to the list.

Admittedly, that one is quite specific.

The story begins in Wiltshire in 1662 with John Mompesson of Tedworth, now Tidworth, and a travelling drummer named William Drury. Drury had been moving around the area playing his drum and asking for money while carrying documents that supposedly authorised him to do so. Mompesson knew two of the men whose names appeared on the papers and believed the signatures had been forged.

Drury admitted the deception, according to the later account, and his drum was confiscated. It eventually found its way to Mompesson’s house, where it was kept in the room used by his mother. His children apparently played with it there.

That should have been the end of a very minor dispute involving a questionable travelling drummer.

It was not.

SOMEBODY IS TRYING TO GET IN

One of the reasons this story is more useful than many old haunting tales is that we are not relying entirely on a Victorian writer remembering what somebody supposedly said two centuries earlier.

Letters written by Mompesson while the disturbances were happening survive.

In a letter dated 6 December 1662, he described returning from London in May and being told by his wife that the household had been terrified by noises during his absence. They had assumed thieves were trying to break into the house.

A few nights after Mompesson returned, the noise came back. He got out of bed, armed himself with pistols and searched the house. He heard what he described as a strange hollow sound but found nobody there.

This continued. The sounds seemed to move around the outside of the house before eventually concentrating around the room where the confiscated drum was being kept. Mompesson wrote that the disturbance might occur four or five nights out of seven, beginning shortly after the household went to bed and continuing for as long as two hours. The sounds could be violent enough to shake the windows and beds.

Already, I would be returning the drum.

No questions. No receipt required. Come and collect your property, William.

THEN IT STARTED DRUMMING

According to Mompesson, the noises did not remain random.

When the disturbance was ending, the household sometimes heard what sounded like a military drum rhythm. He described it as the kind of beat used when guards were dismissed and insisted that it was played as accurately as any real drum.

So Mompesson had taken a drummer’s drum, put it in his house and was now lying awake listening to something perform military signals.

There comes a point when stubbornness becomes unreasonable.

What is especially interesting is that the physical drum itself does not seem to have been leaping around the room and playing itself in the way later versions of the story can make you imagine. The family reported hearing drumming and other noises associated with the house. The connection to Drury’s confiscated instrument was an interpretation of those events.

That distinction matters.

The drum was real.

The noises were reported by the household and visitors.

What caused them is another question entirely.

THE HOUSE BECAME MUCH STRANGER

The drumming was only the beginning of what Mompesson claimed his family experienced.

In the same December letter, he described servants being lifted while still in their beds and then put down again. At other times, something seemed to press heavily on their feet. Candles were said to behave oddly during disturbances, and Mompesson remarked that even when the sounds came suddenly and violently, the dogs did not bark.

I dislike that last detail enormously.

If I am awake in a seventeenth-century house listening to something hammering against the walls, the dog and I are absolutely dealing with this together. I am not accepting a complete lack of participation from the dog.

Mompesson also said the noises could be heard beyond the house, sometimes waking neighbours or being audible from the fields. People began coming to Tedworth to experience the disturbances themselves, and by December he was already complaining that the stream of visitors had become expensive and disruptive.

Which feels surprisingly modern.

Your house becomes famous for being haunted and suddenly everybody wants to pop round.

THEN HIS MOTHER ASKED IT FOR MONEY

This may be my favourite detail in the entire case.

On 26 December 1662, Mompesson wrote another letter describing a conversation his mother had had with a neighbour earlier in the day. The neighbour mentioned old stories about fairies leaving money in the shoes of unmarried women.

Mrs Mompesson replied that she would quite like whatever was troubling the house to leave some money behind as compensation for the inconvenience and expense it had caused.

Fair enough.

That night, according to Mompesson, the house filled with the sound of money jingling. They apparently expected to find the place covered in half-crowns the next morning.

There was no money.

So, if we accept the account as written, the thing in the house was not only listening to daytime conversations but was capable of sarcasm.

Wonderful.

I would still like the money.

THIS IS WHERE THE STORY STARTS TO GROW

As the months passed, accounts of the disturbances became increasingly elaborate.

There were reports of strange lights, noises in the chimney, objects turning up where they should not have been, iron objects or knives appearing in beds and a Bible being found among the ashes of a fire. One servant was said to have seen a large shape with red, glaring eyes. Later reports even included several human-like figures appearing around the property.

This is the point where we need to separate the layers.

Some details come directly from Mompesson’s surviving letters written during the disturbances. Some appear in other contemporary material. Others come to us through Joseph Glanvill’s published narrative, which drew heavily on Mompesson’s correspondence but also expanded the story using interviews, other reports and his own interpretation.

Historian Michael Hunter has compared the surviving texts and shown that Glanvill’s later narrative closely followed Mompesson’s early letters in many places but also developed them into a much more deliberate argument for the reality of spirits and witchcraft.

That does not mean Glanvill invented the case, it means we need to know which Glanvill we are dealing with. Witness, investigator and campaigner were all the same man.

JOSEPH GLANVILL GOES TO TEDWORTH

Glanvill was a clergyman, writer and natural philosopher with a serious interest in supernatural claims.

More importantly for us, he actually went to Tedworth.

He visited in January 1663 and stayed at Mompesson’s house while the disturbances were still being reported. He spoke with the family and other witnesses and deliberately tried to experience the phenomenon himself.

He did. Just not quite in the spectacular way the later legend might lead you to expect. The event Glanvill personally described most clearly happened in the children’s bedroom.

He heard a loud scratching noise coming from behind the bolster of the bed where two young girls were lying. He could see their hands and believed they were not making it. When he put his own hand behind the bolster, the scratching stopped there and seemed to move elsewhere on the bed. When he removed his hand, it returned.

Glanvill then tried scratching a set number of times himself.

Five scratches. Seven. Ten.

According to him, whatever was making the noise copied the number and stopped at exactly the same point. He searched behind and beneath the bed, examined the bedding and checked the wall without finding an obvious source.

That is much creepier to me than half the spectacular material that came later.

No floating furniture required, just somebody standing beside a child’s bed in 1663, deliberately scratching the sheet and hearing something scratch back.

AND THEN IT STARTED PANTING

Glanvill’s account becomes stranger.

After the scratching had continued for some time, he said the disturbance seemed to move into the middle of the bed beneath the children and began making a noise like a dog panting heavily.

He put his hand against the bed and believed he could feel something pushing upwards beneath it. He searched for an animal and found none. The movement, he said, was strong enough to shake the bed and windows.

I am aware that the correct historical response here is to consider hidden mechanisms, animals, acoustics, children, servants, expectation and the reliability of the narrator.

My actual response is that I would no longer be in the room.

Glanvill came away convinced that he had encountered something supernatural. That conclusion, however, needs its own context.

He was not a hardened sceptic who arrived intending to expose a ghost story and reluctantly left believing in one. He already believed that spirits and witchcraft were real, and he was becoming increasingly concerned that fashionable scepticism about such things was connected with religious unbelief. The Tedworth case would eventually become one of his most important pieces of evidence.

He may genuinely have heard exactly what he described.

That still does not tell us what made the noise.

TEDWORTH WENT VIRAL, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY STYLE

The story escaped Wiltshire remarkably quickly.

By June 1663, Samuel Pepys was discussing the case over dinner with Lord Sandwich. Pepys recorded that Sandwich was sceptical but considered the Tedworth affair one of the strongest ghost stories then being talked about. One detail being circulated was that the mysterious drummer could supposedly respond to tunes played on another drum, although Sandwich said there was at least one tune it could not imitate and considered that suspicious.

By 1664, Samuel Butler could make a passing joke in Hudibras about people who had heard the Devil beat a drum and expect readers to understand what he meant.

The story had reached court too. Mompesson was taken to tell Charles II about the disturbances, and royal representatives were sent to investigate the house.

They experienced nothing extraordinary. Naturally.

Imagine travelling all the way from court to investigate the most famous haunted house in England and the ghost decides to take the evening off.

Glanvill later argued that the failure of a particular visitor to witness anything proved very little because the disturbances were intermittent. His critics found the timing much more convenient.

WILLIAM DRURY WAS HAVING A TERRIBLE YEAR

While all this was happening, the man whose drum had started the story was dealing with problems considerably more earthly than ghosts. William Drury was arrested on an unrelated theft charge.

Specifically, he stole two pigs.

At the Gloucester assizes on 31 March 1663, he was convicted. He successfully claimed benefit of clergy, which could allow certain offenders to escape the usual punishment, and was eventually sentenced to transportation.

Then things became ridiculous.

Drury was put on a barge with other prisoners to be taken towards the ship that would transport them. He escaped by jumping overboard, made his way back to Wiltshire and, according to the surviving evidence, acquired another drum.

Of course he did.

At this point I am beginning to respect William’s commitment to the profession.

THEN MOMPESSON HAD HIM ACCUSED OF WITCHCRAFT

Mompesson had heard claims that Drury had taken responsibility for the disturbances while imprisoned and that he had blamed Mompesson for confiscating his drum. Drury was therefore accused under the Jacobean witchcraft law of causing the trouble at Tedworth.

This was not a harmless bit of supernatural gossip. Witchcraft was still a criminal matter, and an accusation could have devastating consequences. The case reached the Wiltshire assizes at Salisbury in August 1663.

According to Mompesson’s later account, the grand jury accepted that there was a case to answer, but the trial jury acquitted Drury of witchcraft. That is an important part of the story because later retellings sometimes blur his various legal problems together. Drury was not convicted of witchcraft.

He was, however, still a convicted pig thief who had escaped custody.

After his acquittal on the witchcraft accusation, he was returned to Gloucester and again sentenced to transportation. What happened to him afterwards is uncertain, although historian Michael Hunter suggests he probably began a new life in the colonies.

It’s almost disappointingly mundane about the legal ending. One of England’s most famous alleged supernatural disturbances, and the only thing anybody could actually convict the drummer of was nicking two pigs.

PEOPLE CALLED BULLSHIT IN THE 1660s TOO

This is one of the most useful things about the Tedworth story. There was no period in which everybody simply agreed that a demon was beating a drum inside Mompesson’s house.

People were sceptical almost immediately. Rumours circulated that the disturbances were a fraud and, more damagingly, that Mompesson had admitted as much. One version eventually claimed that he had confessed the trick to Charles II.

Mompesson denied making any such confession. Glanvill also spent years responding to sceptics who claimed the case had been exposed. Modern historian Michael Hunter describes the controversy around Tedworth as a genuine conflict between believers and increasingly articulate sceptics rather than a simple story of a credulous age accepting a haunting without question.

So, the argument we might have now was already happening then. One side was saying there was compelling eyewitness evidence of a supernatural disturbance, and the other was saying somebody in that house was taking the piss.

We have barely progressed.

THE CHILDREN ARE AN OBVIOUS QUESTION

If we look for an ordinary explanation, the children deserve attention.

The confiscated drum had been kept in a room associated with Mompesson’s mother and children, and the children had reportedly played with it. Much of the later disturbance also clustered around their sleeping areas. Glanvill himself watched the girls’ hands while the scratching occurred because the possibility that they were causing it was obvious even then.

Could children or servants have produced at least some of the sounds? Certainly. Does that demonstrate that they did? No.

The household contained numerous people, and as Tedworth became famous it attracted visitors, neighbours, clergy, sceptics and curious strangers. Once a story reaches that stage, it becomes increasingly difficult to assume that every bang, scratch, moving object and rumour originated from the same cause.

There may never have been one single thing to explain.

EXPECTATION CAN DO QUITE A LOT

There is also a less theatrical possibility.

Imagine weeks of disturbed sleep. Your family believes something is moving around the house. Visitors arrive asking about it. People are saying the man whose drum you confiscated has bewitched you. Ministers are discussing spirits. Neighbours are listening for noises. The King has heard about your house.

By that stage, everybody is paying extraordinary attention to every creak, knock and movement.

Old buildings make noises. Animals get into structures. Sound travels strangely through walls, floors and chimneys. Frightened people misidentify things. None of that requires anyone to be lying.

A sincere witness can be completely truthful about what they experienced and still be wrong about what caused it. That is one of the reasons I like the Tedworth case. We do not have to choose between “every word was invented” and “there was definitely a demon in Wiltshire.”

History very rarely gives us only two options.

BUT THE SCRATCHING STILL BOTHERS ME

Strip the story down as hard as you can and Glanvill’s visit remains interesting. Forget the glowing eyes, the mysterious figures, flying objects and the more elaborate stories. A man went into a bedroom because he heard scratching.

He put his hand where the noise seemed to be coming from and it moved. He scratched a certain number of times and claimed the sound copied him. He searched the bed and could not find the source.

There are plenty of ordinary possibilities. Somebody may have fooled him. Sound may have travelled in a misleading way. His expectations may have shaped what he thought was happening. The account itself was eventually published by a man who had a very clear argument to make about the existence of spirits.

All true.

It is still a deeply unpleasant little scene.

I am quite happy to leave Joseph Glanvill standing beside that bed wondering what scratched back.

AND EVENTUALLY IT FADED AWAY

There was no dramatic final exorcism and no servant discovered behind a wall holding a pair of drumsticks. The chronology becomes less clear as the surviving contemporary material thins out.

At one point Glanvill reported that the house had been quiet for around nine weeks while Drury was absent, only for disturbances supposedly to return after Drury escaped. The timing is difficult to reconstruct precisely, and even Hunter notes problems in the chronology of Glanvill’s reports.

Eventually, however, the extraordinary reports stopped.

The house associated with the story no longer survives. Wiltshire’s local history service says the seventeenth-century Zouch Manor was demolished, although there is a tradition that some of its stone was reused in the later house.

So unfortunately, we cannot go and stand in the children’s bedroom to see whether anything scratches.

I say unfortunately.

I do not mean it.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED AT TEDWORTH?

I have no idea.

More importantly, neither does anybody else.

What we can say is that the Drummer of Tedworth is much more than a ghost story polished into shape generations later. Mompesson was writing about the disturbances in 1662. Other documents survive from the period. Visitors came to the house. Joseph Glanvill investigated and reported his own experience. The case reached the royal court, appeared in contemporary literature and was debated by sceptics almost as quickly as believers embraced it.

That tells us the story existed.

It does not tell us that a ghost did.

Perhaps members of the household were responsible for some of it. Perhaps several unrelated noises, tricks and misunderstandings gradually became one enormous story. Perhaps Drury or somebody connected with him found a very inventive way to torment the man who had confiscated his drum.

Perhaps a frightened household became so alert to every sound that ordinary noises began acquiring extraordinary meanings.

Or perhaps John Mompesson confiscated a travelling drummer’s instrument in 1662, and something followed it home.

I am not required to decide.

I am simply never bringing the drum into the house.