A Touch of Evil

11/4/2025

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
England known for its ancients houses and ghost stories to go with it, even during modern times had a spate of dark occurrences, that harkened back to it pagan roots.

The ghost was thought to be Gladys Drury, dubbed Mrs. It who died in the house around the 1930s

In 1950, an ancient ritual was used to lay a spirit at Bristol house. On a cold night in January, doors were locked and windows shrouded in the Victorian house built in the 1870s. Reverend Francis J. Maddock from St. Anne's Church performed the exorcism to drive the ghost of a little old lady in black from the house of William J. Baber at 13 Highworth Road. He was accompanied by a sacristan, Robert Rockett and sub-sacristan, George Compley. Mr. Baber represented the family and took part in the exorcism.

Rev. Maddocks, 35, trained at Oxford and he was a curate in Southfields until 1944. He told newspapers he consulted ancient and authentic authorities dating back to the earliest days of Christianity that conformed with the teachings of the Church of England. He did not use incense or holy water, and there was no Catholicism in the service.

He had received permission to conduct the service from Bishop Ivor Watkins of Malmesbury. The family of four which included William Baber, his wife Doris Baber, their daughter Heather, 6, and Doris' nephew Arthur Probert, 15, said they had all seen the ghost.

The Dean of Bristol said, "It is something quite beyond my experience. The Church of England has no set service for this sort of thing that I know of."

A week before Rev. Maddocks came to perform the service, ghost hunter and author, Elliott O'Donnell held a vigil at which Doris Baber collapsed when a pencil was snatched from her hand.

The apparition was a little old woman in black with a glow around her head, which usually showed up about 6 a.m. and followed them about the house. It was believed she was Gladys Drury who died while living at the house 18 years before.

Highworth Road c.2020

The ghost made the first appearance six months before, soon after Mrs. Baber opened a storeroom filled with the previous tenant's possessions. "Mrs. It" as she had been dubbed first appeared to Heather Baber, 6, while she slept in the attic. Eventually the rest of the family would see the old woman.

Mrs. Baber had violated a clause in the rental lease which stated: "This room, in which the former owner died, must under no circumstances be opened."

The Sunday before the service four trunks full of papers which belonged to the old woman were carried down from the attic to the end of the garden, in the hope she would leave the house.

Mr. Baber was uncertain if the service would free his family, and just in case he had filed an application with the City Housing Dept. saying "I desire fresh accommodations on the ground of ghostly disturbances in the present home."

It seemed the ghost was laid, and the family decided to stay since in 1955 Heather Baber, now 11 years old won a singing contest. They were still living there in 1962.

This is contrary to stories stating that after a month Mrs. It returned as a poltergeist, and the Babers moved away.

Robert Fabian's article written about black magic being practiced in London c.1954

In 1954, Robert Fabian, one time inspector for Scotland Yard was writing an installment of articles, based on his book, London After Dark. In 1945, he investigated the ritual killing of Charles Walton in a Warwickshire hamlet.

He wrote of "diabolical religious rites in the heart of London". According to him there was more active satan-worship then than when witches were publicly burned upon Tower Hill in the Dark Ages.

Fabian said regarding the rising practice of black magic in the U.K.: "Cases seldom reach the courts; satanists take great pains to keep meeting places secret and their foolish victims are too frightened to talk."

Fabian believed many of the cultists were wealthy members of prominent families whose apparent respectability provided a façade behind which they sheltered. The gracious country estates or handsome townhouses in Kensington served as their temple.

He told of an instance in 1931, when the authorities of Helsingfors, Finland (Swedish name for Helsinki) reported weird, midnight gatherings in churchyards.

It all started two weeks before when a number of hands, feet and one head which had been severed from the bodies of nine persons were found in a well near Helsingfors.

The police followed clues to a pauper cemetery, and about 50 recently buried bodies were exhumed with 40 of them being mutilated in various ways.

Helsingfors' mortuary caretaker named Saarenheimo was arrested. He was suspected of opening coffins and mutilating the remains. He had previously served in the Red Army, and while in custody he continuously sang psalm melodies with cabalistic words.

Mr. Hyvaarinon chief of the Helsingfors detective force, told the English detective about a leaflet found on Saarenheimo about mystical societies. Police also found an English treatise on black magic and necromancy, an old Swedish "Black Bible", photographs of corpses in their coffin, a saw knife and a grindstone.

The neighbors told police of mysterious nocturnal meetings at the mortuary for nearly two years.

Joanna Southcott

One of the leaflets in Saarenheimo's possession contained an article, which said: "If Joanna Southcott's coffin had been opened more truth would have been gained."

Joanna Southcott was a domestic servant, who in 1790, began to write prophecies. She moved to London in 1802, and started to catalogue her visions. Despite the lunacy of her prophecies she gained a following. She declared she was the "woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars" (Revelation, Chapter Twelve, Verse One).

When she was 64 she said that on October, 19, 1814 she would give birth to a son. Instead of becoming a mother, Miss Southcott died two months later in December, 1814.

She left behind a locked wood box that she said were filled with revelation about the Millennium. Southcott's instructions were that the box were not to be opened until a time of national emergency, and only in the presence of England's 24 bishops.

Joanna Southcott’s box (Source-Panacea Society)

During the Crimean War and WWI attempts were made to open it but no bishop was willing to attend.

In 1927, the psychic investigator Harry Price claimed the box had been sent to him by a mysterious Mr. F. M., who said it had been in the possession of a Welsh family of his acquaintance for many years. The box was a 12-inch walnut casket with a heavy lid and two rusty steel bands around it. He first x-rayed it and then opened it in the presence of the Bishop of Grantham.

The promised prophecies were nowhere to be found, instead it contained a few books and papers, dice, a lottery ticket, a night cap, earrings, a purse and an old horse-pistol.

The Panacea Society of Bedford, which continued until 2012, but was then renamed as an educational trust with revised aims, claimed that it was not the real box, and that they were in possession of the genuine article. The current trust continues to keep the location of the box secret.

Others have made wilder claims—such as that the true box was opened in Carlisle in the 1920s, and that the Shiloh (Joanna Southcott's promised son) has returned and is now occupying the body of Prince William.

Harry Price speculated that several boxes may have existed. The one he opened, genuine or not, seems to have disappeared.

Funeral procession arriving at Malmi Cemetery

The leaflet also had the name of a society on Ebury Street, London. It was thought Saarenheimo belonged to some secret magical society. The police now planned to open other private graves as further mutilations were suspected.

The Finnish authorities asked Scotland Yard what they knew of an international group known as the "League of Black Magic."

Scotland Yard said the leader of this secret society lived somewhere in London. It was suspected he was a naturalized Englishman.

Many persons interrogated by the Finnish police, denied any knowledge of the desecration. The penalty for the crime was one year's imprisonment. The police knew of no organization practicing satanism, but it was very popular in Russia before the Great War. Did the refugees who went to Finland on the outbreak of the revolution carry their practices with them?

In December 1931, a 70-year-old peasant named Nicolai Still was arrested. He was known as a sorcerer and faith curer. His former assistant told police that the sorcerer provided human skulls and fingers for a secret occult society made up of member of the higher classes.

Around this time a woman attendant at the mortuary connected to the Malm (Malmi) Churchyard stated that late at night she had seen a number of well dressed men in a car outside the mortuary receiving parcels.

In September, 1932 sentences of imprisonment ranging from 2 to 3 years were passed on members of the "black magic" cult who were responsible for the mutilations on the dead. The group included three men and three women, and two of the accused were acquitted. They said they had acted under instructions from the spirit world.

There were described as "primitive thinkers", and all mention of a high-echelon, occult society disappeared from the news. Why would the Finnish police have asked about the League of Black Magic, if the culprits were local yokels? Why would there be mention of Joanna Southcott, who had died over a century before?

The English connection to the case faded away, and with the conviction of the Finnish locals, mention of this strange event stopped.

Headquarters of the Theosophical Society in England was sold in 2023. Built as a town house by the Portman Estate in c.1800, occupied by the Portuguese Embassy in the 1920's and then purchased by the Theosophical Society since 1931.

According to Robert Fabian when a Sunday in December falls on the 13th day of the month, as it did in 1953, which is the 13th day before Christmas, men and women would congregate at midnight in secret temples of South Kensington, Paddington and Bloomsbury, strip off their clothes and worship satan with ritual and sacrifice.

Fabian wrote that some firmly believed the world is a battleground between God and satan, and those who declare they are followers of the devil would be aided in their success in life, with even a certain amount of comfort in Hell, with the chance of being reborn periodically as leaders of earthly wickedness.

He guessed that the majority attended a Black Mass for a cheap thrill, since they had heard of naked priestesses, and blood sacrifices involving animals; this accompanied by evil drums. Coincidentally, around these years it was noted there were rashes of thefts of holy objects that had no intrinsic value, and could not be easily disposed of. These were the type of items used in a Black Mass.

There was a file in Scotland Yard of a 21-year-old girl who went with her mother to a lecture on satanism. She was invited to a garden party at the house of a woman calling herself a "high priestess", who persuaded the girl to sing a magical invocation, while hypnotizing her. She did not return home for months.

Scotland Yard helped her parents recover the girl, and she told of being exposed to occult obsenities so persistently that she almost went insane. Her own pet dog ran howling in fear from her. It took two years to restore her mind. Without evidence there was no prosecution. She had been "willed" to forget how it happened.

Dawn, a 23-year-old nightclub dancer said she was tricked into attending a black mass in London. She told her story to the Sunday Dispatch in which described it was held in a cellar in Bayswater, a respectable residential district near Marble Arch. She was blindfolded and taken into the cellar. It was a dimly lit room draped in black and occupied by 30 people. They wore black cloaks and hoods with holes for their eyes and mouths. At one end of the room was a black-draped altar, with a large cross on which was a shape like a bat. On the altar was a nude woman, bound hand and foot with a gag in her mouth. On either side of the altar were two men with whips. The reporter didn't write the rest of Dawn's story, stating he could not describe it in a newspaper.

Fabian said: "People from the provinces come to London and pay heavy fees to take part in these revolting ceremonies. Police women who had infiltrated black mass ceremonies had their hands tied behind their back in the form of a cross. An inquisitor in a monk's cowl flogs her to make her confess. What is she to confess? There is a secret pattern ... secret infamies to give away."

The witch by Martin van Maële c.1911

Some ask if the cultist only harm themselves, but it seems there are repercussions if they ever attempt to break away.

In 1952, a 39 year-old woman who lived in the Welsh county of Glamorganshire was missing from her home She was found dressed only in a coat. Her hair was partly cut off and her face and body were daubed with paint. Police were shown anonymous threatening letters she had received along with black magic symbols and a 6-inch doll piereced with pins.

In 1955, Sharia Jones, 42, from Birmingham told police; "M head was forcibly shaved by black magic men. I was warned that this attack was coming by a witchcraft sign. I found nine pebbles from a graveyard set in a circle on my doorstep. Inside the circle was a cross of twigs. I knew what that meant. I was attacked 30 yards from my door just after midnight. One man held my head down while the other tore at my hair. Then they made off in a car." She showed police a bare oval patch 2 1/2 by 2 inches on the top of her head, crisscrossed by tiny cuts.

In 1960, a pretty, blonde teenager was found wandering on a country lane on the Isle of Wight. Her arm was slashed by a knife. They found a taxi driver who took the girl accompanied by two men to the town of Totland. The driver told police she had looked reluctant to be with them. When she was found four hours later by a farm worker she would only say, "I want to get away from here." Totland residents linked the incident to the men in the long robes they had seen walking by night in an abandoned chalk quarry, where the smell of burning incense hung in the air.

Satan being worshipped in the 1922 Swedish film Häxan.

Fabian wrote that the door to black magic was through the back offices of two or three dusty little London bookshops that specialized in volumes on the occult, diabolism and alchemy. Satanists looked for new victims among "likely-looking students" at lectures on spiritualism, necromancy and tribal rites.

He described a house in Lancaster Gate that consisted of two, one-room flatlets. The landlord and his wife occupied the ground floor and basement. Each room had a covered wash-bowl, a rickety bed, a table and two wooden chairs. Down in the cellar was a small doorway, probably at one time it was a fireplace. It led through to the house whose walls adjoined it. The front door of this house faced upon an entirely different street.

The landlord's wife dabbled in spiritualism, and held private seances. Her husband was an amateur herbalist. Their extra flat was seldom taken for more than a few days, since they were dingy and uncomfortable. Guests would come and go—among them were satanists.

This neighboring house was privately owned and from its cellar, stairs went to an old-fashioned service lift-shaft, up which a spiral metal staircase ascended and stopped at a sliding door padded with black felt. Beyond this door was a private temple of satanism.

The entrance had purposely been designed to be difficult and furtive. You would go in at one house, down into the cellar, through the narrow hole in the wall, up twisting stairs, which were not lighted until you came to the sliding, black, sound-proof door. This would bring you to a large room with sickly incense odor and two tall braziers.

The stench in the room came from wick lamps that burned a dark green fat. At one end of the long room was an altar, exactly as in a small church except the altar candles were black and the crucifix was turned upside down. There were no seats and along the wall were low divans. Next to them were saucers full of dried herbs meant to be burned. Pentagrams and sigils were painted on the low ceiling. On the left side of the altar was a black, African idol. It was nearly 4 feet high, squat, repulsive and obscenely constructed. It had been rubbed to a "greasy polish by the ecstatic bare flesh of worshippers."

He wrote that the black magic disciples had set the stage to capture not only the adolescent instinct of "secret societies" but also the adult hunger for some strong religious impulse and the "immemorial superstitious fear of devils".

Coincidentally in 1931, the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in England was located at 45 Lancaster Gate.

The ruins of St. Mary's church in the background, field where Jenny Humberstone's bones were stolen from.

The chapel of St. Mary's is a picturesque sandstone ruin, without a roof and no altar stone, which dates back to the 12th century. It's located about 40 miles north of London. In 1848, a new St. Mary's church was built down the hill from the old one. The original structure had services once per year in August, and was used as a mortuary chapel. In 1956, lead sheets from the roof were taken, and without any protection the interior deteriorated.

The winter of 1962-63 was a snowy one in this part of England, and no one had any interest in trekking up the hill to the old church. The weather warmed, and snow was still on the ground on March 17, 1963, when two boys discovered a skull impaled on an iron stake inside the southwest door of the church. The spike had been wrenched from a window frame and stuck into a crack on the floor. The rest of the skeleton was arranged around the stake on where the altar stone was previously situated.

The bones belonged to Jenny Humberstone the wife of Lawrence Humberstone, a country surgeon and apothecary, who died on January 30, 1770 from smallpox at the age of 22. She was buried in a deep, brick-lined vault at lonely Clophill Churchyard in Bedfordshire. The composition of the vault did not allow her bones to rot away.

Part of the stone slab of the former altar had been cleared of dust and rubble. No dead rooster was found, but bloodstained feathers and entrails were left behind. There was also a recently carved cross within a circle on the wall. It was painted red, and even though it appeared to be Celtic, some have said it is similar to the Mark of the Beast as described by Aleister Crowley.

Five other tombs were chipped by a crowbar; strangely all the graves belonged to women. Jenny Humberstone's was the sixth, and the only one they were able to open. The desecrators had climbed down 8 feet, ripped part of the coffin apart and carried the skeleton into the roofless church.

Authorities concluded the church had been used in a Black Mass, most probably a week before on March 10, when there was a full moon.

Jenny Humberstone's bones c.1963

The rector at Clophill, Rev. Lewis Barker found that after the bones were collected, he replaced the covering, and when he returned to re-inter the bones the slab had been moved aside again. He decided he would not return Jennie's bones until her grave could be encased in concrete. He realized whoever took the bones understood that due to the way Jennie Humberstone had been buried, her bones would probably be intact.

A great bar of oak lying near the grave was used as leverage to lift the heavy tomb slab. An operation that had taken 4 policemen to put it back in place, ruling out it had been teenagers who had opened it.

The police were trying to trace a man who toured the area a month before saying he was writing a book on black magic. He asked the police if they could help him, and identified himself as a reporter, which they then believed was not true.

The churchyard stands on a hillside a mile from Deadman's Hill. This was where James Hanratty, 25, murdered Michael John Gregsten, 36, in 1961. Hanratty was hanged in 1962. Through the years there were claims he was not the murderer, but in 2000 DNA comparison tied him unmistakably to the crime. This was the closest the village at Clophill had come to notoriety, until a frosty March night in 1963.

In the book The Paranormal Diaries, the author wrote that in Volume 2 of the The Victoria History of the County of Bedford from 1908, there was mention made of 'the churchyard possessed the unenviable reputation of being a haunt of body snatchers, and many human bones have been dug up in the fields of Brickwall Farm.' It seems that the graveyard spread out much further afield than was realized during the 20th century.

Prior to the opening of the Humberstone grave, baby corpses had been stolen from a church near Luton.

Rev. Lewis Barker

Reverend Lewis Barker, had been appointed to St. Mary's at Clophill only the year before in 1962. In prior years he had served in Africa. As he brought the bones down from the old to the new church he said: "It's the first time in my life that I've been out late at night with another man's wife under my arm."

The desecration of Jenny Humberston's grave would mark the beginning of ill fortune for the poor rector. His daughter died after being hit by a car in Sheffield. He became convinced the witches who desecrated the old church had put a curse on him, and his health suffered for it. Despite his intentions to bury Jenny bones, he grew leery and believed he was being watched.

By the time Rev. Barker retired in 1969, he had lost his wife and daughter. He left to a cottage at Hitchin. One morning he found the burnt remnants of a ceremony on the track leading to the remote cottage. He told a couple staying with him that he believed he was the target of the witches, who wanted to kill him.

Perhaps they asked him why he believed this. It turned out he still carried Jenny Humberstone's bones in the trunk of his auto. The opportunity to rebury them in a secret spot seemed to have escaped him. Eventually he sought obscurity by moving to Devon, and the details of his death are unknown.

All the time I was haunted by the fear that the ghouls responsible for this dreadful event would be watching me. I dreaded least they should again profane and violate the church. – Reverend Lewis Barker

Clophill Cottages c.1900

The month after the St. Mary incursion, two boys found the heads of six cows and one horse in Bluebell Wood near Luton. Two eyeballs were cut in half, two jawbones wrenched apart. Two of the cows' heads had missing jawbones. All the animals had been shot twice. The heads were hidden in an inaccessible place as though being secreted until later. The authorities guessed they had been there about 3 weeks before being discovered, placing the time right about the time the graves were disturbed in St. Mary's, which was only 15 miles away.

In order to reach the site one would have to walk two miles along a rough track, which a vehicle could not use. There were marks of horse hooves going and coming from the wood. The bodies of the animals were never found.

Inquiries within a 50-mile radius of the incident found not one farmer who had reported the loss of livestock.

St. Mary's at Clophill c.1849

Perhaps the satanists were driven to Luton, since six villagers had decided to keep a vigil during the full moon, starting in April, 1963. In May, they chased out about 40 students from the Shuttleworth Agricultural College, who were found wearing surplices made from white sheets. The college principal sent a letter of apology to the rector of Clophill explaining that it was only a student lark.

On May 1, the eve of the Witches' Sabbath the charred bones of a rooster were found on the high altar of a ruined 14th century abbey near Tunbridge Weels.

Ten days later, Father Albert Davey, a Catholic priest at Garston, Hertfordshire complained to the police because he thought black magic ceremonies were held in his district. He called in another priest to exorcise his home after a series of "evil incidents" at his church.

At the end of May the offertory box at the new St. Mary's church in Clophill was broken into.

In October, 1963 television scriptwriter Jacqueline Lodwidge advertised in the personal column of the Times for "witches, werewolves and warlocks" to help her in research for a Halloween program. She was inundated with letters, she said later: "There must be about 100 witch covens in Britain. They are strongest in Brighton. In the London suburbs alone, there must be between 10 and 15 covens."

Two months later a bell ringer surprised four men in the ancient church of Westham, Sussex in the act of staging a black magic ritual. They were chanting and dancing around candles placed in the form of a cross on the floor. The vicar and two other men arrived and a scuffle ensued. The altar cross and the candlesticks were reblessed at a special church service.

In a strange coincidence in 1964, police were called to Sandringham estate, which is close to Castle Rising for claims that black magic was found on the Queen's estate.

Prior to the group of events in the 1960s, in 1948 at Yarcombe, on the borders of Devon and Somerset a man was charged with sacrilege after a black mass was performed in Yarcombe's 13th century church. Gravestones had their crosses overturned, the image of Christ was turned upside down, altar pieces were reversed and candlesticks bore the stumps of black candles. Near one of the candles were charred communion wafers and the paw of a white cat, only recently amputated. The church had to be re-consecrated.

This occurred the year after Aleister Crowley died in Brighton.

Article detailing the comeback of witchcraft in the U.K. c.1960s

At that time it was estimated there were about 7,000 witches in the U.K., and most of them lived in the country. A Devon physician said witchcraft was widespread in his rural practice. He said, "I had one definite death from witchcraft, or I suppose I should say suggestion, while I was there."

Sybil Leek a witch who worked with ghost hunter Hans Holzer, said about two-thirds of all British witches were white or benevolent. The black witches or satanists were regarded as the troublesome minority, and to which blood sacrifices, drunken orgies and obscene rites were attributed. This included desecration of churchyards.

In August 1963, Surrey country police called Scotland Yard to assist in the search for the killer of a pig which was found dead in a locked pen with its throat cut and 30 stab wounds on its body. It was the fourth strange slaughter of an animal in the area within two years. In 1960, two sheep were stabbed to death, and six months later, another sheep was killed and left with its leg hacked off. The police believed the animals were sacrificed in a gory ritual, and the pig was killed two days before the new moon.

Tombstones were moved in three Sussex churchyards, black candles were left burning.

The spate of church desecrations continued into the following decade.

In 1970, Rev. Percy Gray, 38, vicar of St. Grispin's church, said he was asked to re-bury the body of a child which had been taken from a coffin at the Nunhead Cemetery which was closed. He believed the body was removed for a "black magic ceremony." He reported several incidents in which gravestone crosses were smashed and tombs were broken open.

In May, 1970 a 113-year-old vault in St. Gregory's churchyard, Canterbury, was opened and bones scattered. The words "Lucifer" and "Pigs" were written on a skull.

Workmen sent to prepare a grave in a little used chapel in a Score Valley cemetery near Ilfracombe found circles on the floor, six pointed stars and black candles.

In 1976, the grounds around St. Mary's Church were leveled, and tombstones were removed.

Dennis Wheatley who wrote books about occultism said: "I am satisfied by the evidence that there is a form of devil worship operating. I have had too many letters from genuine people—magistrates, doctors, clergymen and so forth—to doubt it."

Wheatley told of a letter he received from a chauffeur who described the weird activities of his wealthy employers. "They draw pentacles on the floor, and late at night the men dress up in silk smocks with the signs of the zodiac on them. The ladies come down wearing masks and red, high-heeled shoes. I've seen black candles, too ... No doubt about it, my employers are satanists."

Wheatley said: "I have made a rule never to dabble myself. In the first stage you get interested. Then your work suffers and then your family suffers. In the last stage you go off your nut. I think there are a lot of people in lunatic asylums in that category. They are possessed."