Old Rectory, Epworth

The story

Epworth lies in the Isle of Axholme, in Lincolnshire, and its Old Rectory is one of the most important buildings in the history of Methodism. From 1697 to 1735 the rector of Epworth was the Reverend Samuel Wesley, who lived here with his wife Susanna and a family of 19 children. One of them, John Wesley, would go on to found the Methodist movement.

Samuel was not a popular man in the parish. He was a Tory and a High Churchman who had little patience with local folk beliefs, and his relations with his parishioners were often strained. Fire seemed to follow the family: in 1702 flames ruined around two-thirds of the building, and on 9 February 1709 the timber rectory burned to the ground. Some have suspected that locals set it, but nothing was ever proved. Samuel rebuilt in brick, at a cost of £400 from his own pocket, and the new Queen Anne-style house was ready by December 1709. That is the building that stands today.

Even the Wesley marriage had its political tensions. Samuel had at one point left Susanna for about a year because she would not join in prayers for King William III. That detail matters to the haunting, as we will see.

The house stayed in the hands of the Church of England until 1954, when it was sold to the Methodist Church of Great Britain, with financial help from the World Methodist Council. The architect Thomas Rayson restored it, returning some exterior features to the appearance the Wesleys would have known, and it opened as a museum in 1957. A board of trustees appointed jointly by the World Methodist Council and the British Methodist Conference manages it, and it became an accredited museum in 2009.

The legend

The disturbances at Epworth, often called the Wesley poltergeist, are among the most famous in English history, largely because they were written down at the time by an educated, articulate family. Samuel kept a dated account, and nearly everyone in the household wrote letters about it. The eldest sons, including John and Charles, were away at school and learned the news by post.

The noises seem to have begun around the start of December 1716 and grew worse toward Christmas. The family heard groans and knocking at night, often in sets of three, and sometimes in daylight. Susanna described a commotion in the room above them that sounded like several people walking and then running up and down the stairs, so loud that she worried the children would be frightened. Around Christmas Day the family reported the sound of coins being poured out and of bottles being shattered by a heavy stone; on 26 December Samuel knocked on the wall and something knocked back. Later accounts speak of rattling through every room and of an invisible horn blown at deafening volume. Most of the noise seemed to come from the attic, which became known as Old Jeffrey's Chamber.

The spirit was given a name, Old Jeffrey (sometimes spelled Jeffery). Wikipedia and the Methodist heritage collections credit the nickname to Hetty, one of the daughters; other retellings, which we could not confirm, give it to her sister Emilia and say it recalled an elderly man who died there. In time the Wesleys decided they were dealing with the spirit of a person who had died at the rectory before they came. A few strange sights were recorded as well: on 23 December Susanna saw a badger-like creature with no head beneath the daughters' bed, the servant Robert saw something like a white rabbit in the kitchen, and one daughter described a man's gown trailing behind her with no one inside. Samuel bought a mastiff for protection, but the dog reportedly cowered and whined whenever the sounds started.

There was a political flavor too. According to retellings we could not confirm, the knocking was loudest during family prayers for King George I, and Samuel decided the ghost must be a Jacobite. Historian William Gibson, in a 2021 Oxford University Press study titled "The Wesleys' Tory Ghost", reads the whole episode as an expression of family, political and community tensions, including Susanna's Jacobite sympathies.

How long it lasted is disputed. Wikipedia says the activity ended suddenly in January 1717, but some studies speak of about three months, and family letters from late March and early April 1717 still mention a wooden trencher dancing on a table and a door opening on its own. Decades later, in 1784, John Wesley printed his own narrative in the Arminian Magazine under the title "An Account of the Disturbances in My Father's House", which fixed the story in Methodist memory.

The case has had skeptics for a long time. Samuel himself first blamed neighbors playing tricks, then young men courting his daughters and sneaking into the house. In 1908 the writer Henry Addington Bruce compared the sources and found that the earliest records describe little more than creaks, knocks, footsteps and groans; he argued that memory had inflated the story over time and suggested that Hetty produced the effects herself. Trevor H. Hall's New Light on Old Ghosts (1965) also proposed natural explanations. No modern television investigation of the rectory was found.

What remains today

The rectory is a Grade I listed Queen Anne-style house, essentially the brick building completed in 1709, restored in the 1950s. It is run as a museum by trustees of the Methodist Church. The attic linked with Old Jeffrey is part of the house's story, but the museum's website pages we read do not feature the ghost or list ghost events.

Visiting

The Old Rectory is a public museum, open in season (roughly April to October) on certain days of the week, with guided tours on some days; it closes over the winter. Check the Epworth Old Rectory website for current days and hours before you travel. Visitors interested in the poltergeist should ask the guides about the family's letters rather than expect a ghost tour; this is primarily a place of Methodist heritage.

Sources

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15. "Old Jeffrey: A Wesley Bros Re-run" — United Methodist Insight (Charlie Baber, 17 Oct 2022) — United Methodist Insight (Charlie Baber, 17 Oct 2022
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Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.