Now! Then! Debauched and ruined, Walter Calverley is crushed to death today at York for the murder of two sons at Calverley Hall (Bradford), but is revived by 1830s schoolboy ghost-raisers as the Rev. Samuel Redhead (age ca. 55)

5 August 1605: Debauched and ruined, Walter Calverley is crushed to death today at York for the murder of two sons at Calverley Hall (Bradford), but is revived by 1830s schoolboy ghost-raisers as the Rev. Samuel Redhead (age ca. 55)

Phantom. 1874/03/28. Calverley Forty Years Ago. Bradford Observer. Bradford. Get it:

Excerpt

Report says he was conjured down under a broad stone in Calverley Wood Lane, the crossing of which at nightfall used to bring on a kind of tremor that one does not forget in a hurry. The part I am most anxious to depict is the raising of the veritable ghost of this jealous and infuriated man. About a dozen of the scholars used to assemble after school hours close to the venerable old church of Calverley, and there we used to put down on the ground our hats and caps in a pyramid form. Then taking hold of each other’s hands we formed a “magic circle,” holding firmly together and making use of an old refrain: “Old Calverley, old Calverley, I have thee by ‘th ears,/ I’ll cut thee in collops unless thou appears.” While this incantation was going on, crumbs of bread were strewed on the ground, mixed with pins, while at the tune we tramped round in the circle with a heavy bread, and some of the more venturesome had to go round to all the church doors and whistle aloud through the keyhole, uttering the bewitching couplet that was being repeated by the other small boys. At this culminating point the figure used to come forth ghostly and pale, in the same manner as the weird sisters in Macbeth and the shadow of Hamlet’s father at Elsinore; for, although old Calverley was conjured down, he was obliged to break open his prison-house. The figure that we saw was like that in the finishing canto of Don Juan, called Fitz-Fulke. In our hurry to escape detention and to avoid the fearful grasp of a ghost, we used to fall down over each other, our hats and caps being lifted behind a buttress or scattered over ground, while we scampered off afraid of the spirit we had thus called forth.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations

Comment

The first murder was on 23 April 1605. The execution date was 5 August (Lake 1975). It sounds like the author attended the village school at Calverley, like the civil engineer Thomas Rhodes, also from Apperley Bridge, rather than Woodhouse Grove School, also about a mile from Apperley Bridge. I take the apparition to have been the perhaps prematurely aged Rev. Samuel Redhead, born 1778, appointed to Calverley in 1822, renovated its church in 1844, died 1845 (Favell 1846).

Here’s part of A Yorkshire Tragedy, a dramatisation by Thomas Middleton previously attributed to Shakespeare:

HUSBAND.
Oh thou confused man! thy pleasant sins have undone thee, thy damnation has beggerd thee! That heaven should say we must not sin, and yet made women! gives our senses way to find pleasure, which being found confounds us. Why should we know those things so much misuse us?—oh, would virtue had been forbidden! we should then have proved all virtuous, for tis our blood to love that were forbidden. Had not drunkenness been forbidden, what man would have been fool to a beast, and Zany to a swine, to show tricks in the mire? what is there in three dice to make a man draw thrice three thousand acres into the compass of a round little table, and with the gentleman’s palsy in the hand shake out his posterity thieves or beggars? Tis done! I ha dont, yfaith: terrible, horrible misery.— How well was I left! very well, very well. My lands shewed like a full moon about me, but now the moon’s ith last quarter, waning, waning: And I am mad to think that moon was mine; Mine and my fathers, and my forefathers—generations, generations: down goes the house of us, down, down it sinks. Now is the name a beggar, begs in me! that name, which hundreds of years has made this shire famous, in me, and my posterity, runs out. In my seed five are made miserable besides my self: my riot is now my brother’s jailer, my wife’s sighing, my three boys’ penury, and mine own confusion.
[Tears his hair.]
Why sit my hairs upon my cursed head?
Will not this poison scatter them? oh my brother’s
In execution among devils that
Stretch him and make him give. And I in want,
Not able for to live, nor to redeem him.
Divines and dying men may talk of hell,
But in my heart her several torments dwell.
Slavery and misery! Who in this case
Would not take up money upon his soul,
Pawn his salvation, live at interest?
I, that did ever in abundance dwell,
For me to want, exceeds the throws of hell.
[Enter his little son with a top and a scourge.]
SON. What ails you father? are you not well? I cannot scourge my top as long as you stand so: you take up all the room with your wide legs. Puh, you cannot make me afeared with this; I fear no vizards, nor bugbears.
[Husband takes up the child by the skirts of his long coat in one hand and draws his dagger with the other.]
HUSBAND.
Up, sir, for here thou hast no inheritance left.
SON.
Oh, what will you do, father? I am your white boy.
HUSBAND.
Thou shalt be my red boy: take that.
[Strikes him.]
SON.
Oh, you hurt me, father.
HUSBAND.
My eldest beggar! thou shalt not live to ask an usurer bread, to cry at a great man’s gate, or follow, good your honour, by a couch; no, nor your brother; tis charity to brain you.
SON.
How shall I learn now my head’s broke?
HUSBAND.
Bleed, bleed rather than beg, beg!
[Stabs him.]
Be not thy name’s disgrace:
Spurn thou thy fortunes first if they be base:
Come view thy second brother.—Fates,
My children’s blood
Shall spin into your faces, you shall see
How confidently we scorn beggary!
[Exit with his son.]
(Middleton 1608)

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Original

I have for a long time felt a desire to put down a few facts and data connected with and relating to rural life in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The time I have selected is about forty years ago. Before the days of railroads and telegraphy, at the time I refer to, the thought of electing a school board had never entered into the head of the most sanguine politician. There had been a dawning of a plan of education at New Lanark, and close upon that the Reform Bill had become an established fact. The schoolmaster was almost as a rule selected and qualified for his office on account of some physical defect, and as not being eligible for work of any other kind. I had my small amount of education to take at the hands of such, but out of respect to them, I will pass at once to the curriculum of knowledge that was administered to the youth of this country at the date above-mentioned, and also to qualify the conditions, I am wishful to say that the school was a mile away from Apperley Bridge, and about “twenty happy boys” used to roam through woods and green fields to that Parnassus of learning, armed with Markham’s spelling book. A number of sentences had to be committed to memory, marked out with the thumb nail of the tutor, lead pencils being scarce; also there was a dose of Lindley Murray’s Grammar to gulp down. The great lesson books were the English Reader, and Goldsmith’s History of England. Walkingham’s “Tutor” was the stock book, that from that time to the present has formed the great ladder of learning by which the clerks of the last half-century have had to be trained. The ferrule was a part of discipline that has left an impression; we also had to hold up a black oak block of wood occasionally overhead, having to stand on one leg during the operation. There was a great run of superstition, and the belief in apparitions and ghosts was very prevalent. I well remember some of the traditionary stories that I heard at that early date, which have left indelible marks that cannot be effaced even at the present time. I should like to relate a few experiences of the haunted world of spirits as set down before the “Medium” and “Daybreak” was thought of, or Maskelyne and Cook brought seeming evidence of the world of spirits. The ghost that I was best acquainted with was that of “Old Calverley,” who in his lifetime had been the redoubtable Sir Walter Calverley, who was pressed to death at York in the reign of King James, of whom report says he was conjured down under a broad stone in Calverley Wood Lane, the crossing of which at night-fall used to bring on a kind of tremor that one does not forget in a hurry. There is a bloody hand in the centre of the escutcheon of the Calverleys and Blacketts; also there is a play called the Yorkshire Tragedy, in which is an account of this said Old Calverley; but the part I am most anxious to depict is the raising of the veritable ghost of this jealous and infuriated man. The modus operandi was as follows. About a dozen of the scholars having leisure, and fired with the imaginative spirit, used to assemble after school hours close to the venerable old church of Calverley (before the innovation of restoring and dismantling these places was allowed), and there we used to put down on the ground our hats and caps in a pyramid form. Then taking hold of each other’s hands we formed a “magic circle,” holding firmly together and making use of an old refrain-
“Old Calverley, old Calverley, I have thee by ‘th ears, I’ll cut thee in collops unless thou appears.”
While this incantation was going on, crumbs of bread (left from our dinners) were strewed on the ground, mixed with pins, while at the tune we tramped round in the circle with a heavy bread, and some of the more venturesome had to go round to all the church doors and whistle aloud through the keyhole, uttering the bewitching couplet that was being repeated by the other small boys. At this culminating point the figure used to come forth ghostly and pale, in the same manner as the weird sisters in Macbeth and the shadow of Hamlet’s father at Elsinore; for, although old Calverley was conjured down, he was obliged to break open his prison-house. The figure that we saw was like that in the finishing canto of
Don Juan, called Fitz-Fulke. In our hurry to escape detention and to avoid the fearful grasp of a ghost, we used to fall down over each other, our hats and caps being lifted behind a buttress or scattered over ground, while we scampered off afraid of the spirit we had thus called forth.
PHANTOM March, 1874.

851 words.