The Bother at Drinsey Nook

A Story With a Moral in Which Murder and Ghostly Visitations Follow a Country Wedding

THOMAS BURKE

THIS story is not only true—all my stories are that—but it actually happened, and although it happened a hundredand-twenty-two years ago it could easily repeat itself to-day, by permission of the Society for Psychical Research. (Anti-Vice Leagues and Watch-Dogs of Social Purity, please note.) I found the story in an old provincial newspaper of the middle Nineteenth Century, and I have talked to a man who knew the man who got the story from the man it happened to. If you want stronger evidence than that, then I don't care tuppence whether you believe it or not.

Anyway, it happened, and here it is.

It began on a day of November, i8o5—a fortnight after Trafalgar—in a village of Lincolnshire some four miles from the city of Lincoln. It concerns Thomas Otter and John Dunkerly. Hollywood may think that it knows something of speedway marriages and electric divorce, but in the year of Trafalgar a simple English peasant had all Hollywood records under a glass case. On the morning of November 3, 1805, Thomas Otter married a wife, and at seven o'clock that evening he murdered her. John Dunkerly saw him do it.

JOHN DUNKERLY appears to have been what was known as a good scout, popular with his fellows and conforming to local customs and occasions. His only blemish was a certain sniggering little vice, found to-day in both town and country yokels, particularly yokels of middle-age. He was a casual labourer, and, on the late afternoon and evening of the day of the murder, having finished his work, he spent some hours of liberty, equality and fraternity in the bar of the Sun tavern at Saxilby, near Lincoln. As, in those days, the tavern offered a no-limit accommodation from half-past five in the morning until midnight, meetings often broke up, through the exhaustion of their members, at astonishingly early hours. This one broke up soon after six. The others went towards Lincoln, and Dunkerly, who lived at a village called Doddington, was left to a five-mile tramp along the bleak, chilblain countryside of East Anglia. To reach his village he had to pass a spot called Drinsey Nook, and as he came to the lane that led from Drinsey Nook three men, friends of his, met him and said, merely as one passes the time of day—"You'll have company, John." They nodded towards the lane, and told him that Tom Otter and a woman had just entered it. Dunkerly passed into the dark lane, and once there, it seems, decided to do a little practical scouting. He heard the footsteps of Tom Otter and the woman ahead of him, and then (he said) he heard Otter say—"Sit down. You can rest here." That remark was a cue for Dunkerly, as it would have been to others of his turn of mind; and he thereupon climbed through the hedge on to the damp turf of the field, and came silently alongside and behind them. This action, otherwise purposeless, for neither Otter nor the woman was anything to him, was clearly inspired by the hope of seeing what such creatures do hope to see when they crawl upon a love-making couple. But what Mr. Dunkerly saw exceeded his expectations, and the punishment that followed his hope of gratifying a slobbering curiosity was sharper even than that of Tom of Coventry.

Suddenly (he said) while he waited for the comedy to begin, the tragedy began. Otter left the woman, climbed into the hedge within three paces of the croucher, and with a mighty twist pulled a stake from the hedge; pulled it out of two feet of earth. Dunkerly's story goes on—"The moon shined on his face at the time and his eyes frighted me, there was such a fiery look in them, like a cat's eyes in the dark, and I heard him say to himself—

'This'll finish my — wedding!' Then

he climbed down to where she was sitting with her head hanging down, and he swung the hedge-stake with both hands and hit her a clout on the head. She give one scream and called on God for mercy, then tumbled over with her head on the ground. He hit her head again as it lay on the grass, and that time the knock sounded as though he had hit a turnip. I saw her legs and her arms all of a quiver-like for a while, and then she was as still as a cobble-stone. I think I went off in a faint. When I come round again the hedge-stake he had murdered her with lay close beside me. I took it up and my hand was covered with red, and my smock sleeve dabbled with it. Then I thought if they found me in that state they'd take me up for the murder and hang me, so for days I wandered about, I don't know how long, working on the roads and getting a job as how I could. I come back to Doddington on the twentieth of March."

THAT is the beginning of the story. The next point is the finding of the body and the arrest of Tom Otter. And here began the first of a series of oddities that marked every stage of this affair. The Sun tavern at Saxilby has a prominent place in them. In this tavern Tom Otter was arrested. Its sign was The Sun, and it was by sunshine that he was caught. He was sitting by the window, in a shaft of winter sunlight, and the sunlight fell upon a portion of his coat and threw up a multi-coloured sheen; and this sheen or scintillation was so marked that it held the eye of a rural constable on duty in the roadway; a constable who had had enough experience of farmyards to recognize that sheen. To the Sun tavern, too, the body was brought for inquest. The cart that carried it had a bare floor, with gaps between its planks, so that the road it travelled was stained with blood, and blood fell upon the steps of the Sun's door, and the domestics who were asked to cleanse them resigned their positions in a body. The Sun tavern, again, acquired from the police, as an exhibit to attract custom, the hedge-stake with which the murder was done; and the household knew no peace until they were forced to part with it.

Otter was tried on March 12, 1806, sentenced to death, and hanged on March 14. He was "turned off" at the corner of the Castle wall at Lincoln at the moment when the famous bell, "Great Tom" began to strike twelve. But the sentence carried the extra penalty of gibbeting; after death his body was to be hung in chains at Drinsey Nook until it dropped. Around this gibbeting other things began to happen. It was not until March 20 that the post and chains were ready, and March 20 was a day of gale. A body of strong men was engaged for the business of rearing the gibbet and fixing the body in its chains, but even their strength could hardly conquer the wind of fen-land, and there were accidents. Nature seemed to be on the side of the murderer. After the cart bearing the body had crossed Saxilby bridge, the bridge broke down and dropped a score of the attendant crowd into the river. When the post was at last erected the tackle by which the men hauled the body to the beam broke twice, and the body and its irons fell upon them and flung them to the ground. Among those hauling was Mr. Dunkerly. When, the second time, they had hauled it to the top, Dunkerly made a rash, and, in the solemn circumstances, tactless remark. Glad, no doubt, to reclaim and display his equanimity after his scare of the past few months, he said lightly—"Well, he won't come down any more." And down came Tom Otter, crashing heavily on Dunkerly's hand.

Even when he was finally and for ever hauled and fixed, it seemed that he had not finished with Dunkerly. Whenever Dunkerly wished to visit the Sun—and he frequently did—he had to pass that gibbet. He could never pass it without looking at it, ond one night, having forgotten his lesson at the gibbeting, he was again ill-bred enough to address the body. "You gave me a bit of a turn once with your eyes," he told it, "and you made my hand quite bad. But you'll do nowt to me no more." And with that a sudden gust of wind swung the body forward, so that the iron on the swinging boot only missed Dunkerly's temple because Dunkerly dodged.

BUT the centre of the story is the hedgestake. It spent many years at the Sun tavern, and, as I have said, it caused some trouble there. Once a year, on the morning of each November 4, it was missing, and on each occasion it was found a mile away— lying in the field behind the hedge where the murder was done. After some years of these happenings, the landlord decided that there was something a little queer about this hedge-stake, and with an air of altruism he passed it to a tavern at Torksey that had long coveted it. Here, the landlord, who set a value upon it and suspected that it might be coveted by some of his customers, had it clamped to the wall of one of the public rooms with two or three iron hasps. But on the next November 4 they found the hasps torn out of the wall, and no stake. It was recovered, as before, from the field at Drinsey Nook. This landlord, feeling, in his turn, that it was no ordinary hedge-stake, passed it to the Peewit Inn, and its .new owner engaged a blacksmith of Saxilby, the blacksmith who had made the gibbet irons for the body of the murderer, to make three cast-iron staples to secure it. On the night of the next November 3 both stake and staples were missing. The stake was recovered, and again clamped to the wall with six clamps. There it remained until the next November 3, when a party of villagers agreed to stay the night in the inn and sit up with the landlord and watch it. But they had to sit in the dark and in silence, and only trained watchers can do that. One by one the party went to sleep, and when they awoke in the morning the stake was gone.

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But that was the last of its outings. The story got about, and created unrest and superstitious fears, and rumours of these matters began to trouble the halls of authority. It was decided that something must be done to allay Jthe superstitious fears of the peasantry—anything that we don't experience ourselves is superstition— so by order of the Bishop of Lincoln, the stake was removed from the inn, and one night, with a lofty scorn of vulgar errors, it was solemnly and superstitiously burnt under the walls of the cathedral. Thereafter there was an end to vulgar gossip, and there was peace for John Dunkerly.

For the secret of the stake's outings lay with him, and if he had died suddenly it would have remained with him. But during his last illness he had the frequent ministrations of a pastor, and to him he told the story. In nearly these words:

"It was the very night of the murder, exactly a twelve-month afterwards, that I felt doley-like, so I went to bed about dusk-hours, and what I'm going to tell you is as true as I'm a dying man. I couldn't nohow sleep, and while I was like that, all of a sudden Tom Otter stood in front of me in his chains and says—'It's time. Come along.' And I had to go with him. And he says—'Fetch it— make haste.' And I broke into the Sun Inn at Saxilby and fetched the hedge-stake that he murdered her with from off the nail where it was hanging up, and when I got outside the door they were both waiting for me, and we all three went over Saxilby draw-bridge together. She was walking behind and carrying a paper box in one hand and a pair of pettens in the other. She was wearing the light blue gown that she had on that very night the year before. He had the same light velveteen jacket and breeches that he had on when he came through the hedge and tore up the stake that I was carrying then. It was a kind of mist we seemed to be walking in. We turned down Drinsey Nook lane, and reached the same spot we reached before, and he used the very same words, and said— 'Sit down, you can rest here.' And she sat down with her head drooping on her breast, like before, and he come to me with his eyes more fiery than they was before-time, and says— 'Now then, quick!' And somehow I threw up the hedge-stake with both hands and murdered her just the way he murdered her a twelve-month before. I give her one clout when she was sitting down, and another when she'd fallen over. And every third of November for years, no matter where I might be, the same low, doley feeling come over me, and Tom Otter'd come to me in his chains and say— 'Now then, it's time'—and I had to go fetch the hedge-stake from wherever it might be, and do the same murdering over again, and twice when it was fastened up with staples he come and help me pull and said— 'You could pull hard enough when you helped to gibbet me!' And for years this went on, and the hedgestake was always found in the stubble field next morning where I'd thrown it like he did, and when I'd find myself walking back home I'd be all wet with sweat. And I hadn't no peace till the stake was burnt in the Minster Yard, for after that was done they never come to fetch me to go with 'em to murder her no more."