5 People Who Died Mistaken for Halloween Monsters
This Halloween, you might dress up as some character from pop culture. You might dress as some meme from four months ago. We don’t recommend, however, that you dress too convincingly as some classical demon. While that sounds like fun, it won’t be so fun when you run into a slayer with a crossbow who mistakes you for the real thing. Just look to the following examples of people who found themselves on the wrong side of witch hunts and paid with their lives.
The Hammersmith Ghost Murder Case
In 1803, one area of London received many reports about a ghost haunting the place. The ghost was a man who’d killed himself and had been buried in the cemetery, people said, since suicide is a sin and no soul like that can rest in peace. Some people said they saw the ghost arise from a tomb. One pregnant woman said the ghost sprang from behind a tombstone and grabbed her, and stories claim she later died of fright.
Citizens formed an armed patrol to search for the ghost. Granted, guns don’t sound like very useful weapons against a restless spirit, but maybe they’d get lucky and shoot someone made of flesh. One member of the patrol, Francis Smith, did just that. After an unsuccessful day of ghost-hunting, he set off on his own and shot a figure in white. It was actually a bricklayer, dressed in his laundered uniform.
At the trial, the judge informed the jury that even if this bricklayer had been the ghost, that was no excuse for killing him, and when the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter, he sent them back till they called it murder. Later, the Crown pardoned Smith, since shooting a suspected ghost wasn’t that bad of a crime, actually.
Amid all this, a cobbler named John Graham came forward and admitted to being the person that people were calling the ghost. His motive? One of his apprentices scared Graham’s kids with ghost stories, and Graham wanted to give him a taste of his own medicine.
The Vampire Elixir
In New England in the 1800s, people thought tuberculosis patients were vampires. It got pretty weird, and it reveals (in case there were any doubt) that our understanding of medicine is fairly new. In Exeter, Rhode Island, one family called the Browns first lost its matriarch, named Mary, followed by her daughter, also named Mary. Another daughter, Lena, died a decade later in 1892, while the son Edwin remained sick.
The father, George Brown, now approached a doctor. The neighbors had been talking, and they suggested that perhaps the women he had buried were not dead but undead. “The dead body was living on the living tissue and blood of Edwin,” was how a newspaper described the belief, most confusingly. George got this Dr. Metcalf to preside over an exhumation of the bodies. If the corpses’ hearts still contained blood, reasoned George, they were perhaps vampires and were feeding on Edwin.
Two of the bodies turned out to be far too long gone to contain any blood. But Lena’s was fresh enough that her heart seemed to contain some of the stuff, if in a congealed state. Dr. Metcalf said this proved nothing, observing that her lungs “showed diffuse tuberculous germs” (which reveals that our understanding of medicine isn’t that new after all). George didn’t believe him and figured the only certain way to end this was to burn Lena’s heart on a convenient nearby rock.
He fed the ashes to Edwin, in hopes that this tonic would save him. It did not, and Edwin soon joined the ranks of the dead.
The Woman Who Shoved Eggs Into Chickens
History, of course, offers many examples of women put to death for witchcraft. But we find especially interesting the story of the Yorkshire Witch, Mary Bateman, who was innocent of witchcraft but still was guilty.
In 1806, Bateman displayed for paying customers a hen that appeared to lay most unusual eggs. Each egg, coming straight out of the bird, contained a message: “Christ is coming.” It was a prediction of Doomsday, which became less convincing when you learn that she wrote the messages herself and then inserted the eggs back into the hen through the orifice whence they came. If that doesn’t horrify you enough, well, there’s the small matter that after selling a customer quack charms, Bateman killed her by feeding her poison pudding.
via Wiki Commons
They hanged Mary Bateman on March 20, 1809. It was no longer legal in England to execute people for witchcraft, but newspaper accounts listed witchcraft among the charges against her. Afterward, a doctor sold leather made from her skin. Some of it was used to bind books, while people used other bits to ward off evil spirits, which probably qualifies as actual witchcraft on their part.
Attack of the Ninja Sorcerers
Fear of spellcasters remains even in modern times. In 1998, for example, in the Indonesian village of Kaligondo, there was a guy named Soemarno Adi, who claimed to be a sorcerer. As proof of his powers, he turned off all the electricity to the marketplace one night. We can think of one or two methods he might have used that required nothing supernatural, but it cemented his reputation for sorcery.
When a bunch of cows started dying, the village thought Adi might be responsible. They demanded that he abandon black magic, and he refused. So, they stoned him to death. News soon spread that it was open season on sorcerers, and by the end of the year, the people of East Java had killed 308 more suspected sorcerers. Sometimes, accounts would refer to these sorcerers as “ninjas” (they dressed all in black, supposedly), suggesting that the cases against them was never very clear.
Indonesians remember this panic as a case of mass hysteria and have taken recent steps to prevent something like this from recurring. In 2022, they finally passed a formal law criminalizing supernatural powers. This way, you see, if we suspect someone of sorcery, we can turn them over to the authorities instead of lynching them.
The Auto Werewolf Slayer
No one accused Jan Potocki of being a werewolf. No one, that is, other than Jan Potocki himself.
Potocki, who lived in Poland until 1815, pioneered travel writing. Many explorers had previously recorded accounts of their travels, but Potocki wrote memoirs of his visits to places that were thoroughly charted, and yet readers found them entertaining. He also served as a member of parliament. It was a promising life, right up until he came down with a case of clinical lycanthropy, which means he believed he was a werewolf.
He should have consulted a doctor about this. Instead, he forged a bullet made of silver and used it to shoot himself, saving the world from this threat. Some sources say he got a priest to bless this bullet, though we’re unaware of any denominations that believe in werewolves or preach silver as a cure.
If you yourself believe you are a werewolf, do not take the route Potocki did. Instead, embrace your role. Be a creature of the night. Just take care not to be caught.
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