Old Jeffery, Ghost of Epworth

While touring the Old Rectory of Rev. Samuel and Susanna Wesley in Epworth (England) on August 15, 2017, I asked the guide to tell me more about the latched door at the top of the staircase that read “To Jeffery’s chamber.”

“Old Jeffery is what the Wesley girls called the ghost sounds they heard at night coming from the attic,” she said.  “Some tapping… a bit of rattling, and some broken dishes.”

“That’s all?” I asked.  

“That’s was all there was too it, and it only lasted a couple of months,”  she said, obviously minimizing the phenomena John Wesley compiled and published as “An Account of the Disturbances in My Father's House” (Arminian Magazine 7, 1784):

“When I was very young I heard several letters read, wrote to my elder brother by my father, giving an account of strange disturbances, which were in his house at Epworth, in Lincolnshire.  When I went down thither, in the year 1720, I carefully enquired into the particulars. I spoke to each of the persons who were then in the house, and took down what each could testify of his or her knowledge.”

JW then proceeded to detail a series of disturbances over a two month period beginning Dec. 2, 1716 and ending at the end of Jan. 1717: “Dismal groans…strange knockings… and loud rumblings above stairs or below; a clatter among a number of bottles, as if they had all at once been dashed to pieces; footsteps as of a man going up and downstairs at all hours of the night; sounds like that of dancing in an empty room, the door of which was locked; gobbling like a turkey-cock; but most frequently a knocking about the beds at night and in different parts of the house.”—according to Wesley family members.

Distinct tapping’s, knockings, and broken dishes…

At some point after the disturbance began, John returned home from school and took it upon himself to interview friends and family members, and compile family letters and statements in order to thoroughly document what he called the “Supernatural Disturbances “  The kind and quality of the evidence John compiled included four eye-witness accounts and collaborating stories contained in the following documents:

• Mrs. Wesley's letters to Samuel
• Mrs. Samuel Wesley's statement to her son John
• Emily Wesley's account to her brother John
• Molly Wesley's account to her brother John
• Susannah Wesley's account to her brother John
• Nancy Wesley's account to her brother John
• The account of the Rev. Mr. Hoole, Vicar of Haxey
• The account of Robin Brown, manservant to John Wesley
• Summary Narrative drawn up by John Wesley and published by him in the     Arminian Magazine

Given its significance to John Wesley and his readers at the time, and the extraordinary detail of its documentation during his life lifetime, the “Disturbances” at the Epworth Rectory in 1717 became a permanent part of the Wesley Family story and the legacy of Methodism. The Epworth Case, 200 years later, according to biographers and researchers, constituted “one of the best authenticated case studies in history of psychical research” (“The Epworth Phenomenon” by Dudley Wright, 1917).

Here’s a summary of what we know about the Wesley family ghost story, based on  John Wesley’s’s account of the “Disturbances” in this family home in Epworth, and some standard Methodist remarks: http://archives.gcah.org/bitstream/handle/10516/5866/MH-1992-October-Discovery.pdf?sequence=1

Most interesting to me is the political leanings of Old Jeffery which the ghost made known when Samuel Wesley prayed for the King.

You see, John’s parents did not see eye to eye on matters of religion and politics. 

Samuel insisted that the Wesley family pray for the King in their evening prayers at home. Susanna did not believe that King William was the rightful King of England and therefore could not in good conscience say "Amen" to her husbands prayers for the king.  So serious was the disagreement that the couple separated for a year. 

Old Jeffery years later seemed to agree with Susanna Wesley.  Whenever Samuel prayed for the King, the disturbances in the house turned violent, the ghost apparently “knocking loudly and fiercely at the mention of King George.”

When Samuel stopped praying for the King, the hauntings ceased—a possible clue to solving the mystery of the Ghost of Epworth.  “That Samuel labeled the ghost a Jacobit,” writes Wesleyan scholar Kelly Deihl Yates, “suggests that the ghost was a symptom of the family’s anxiety over the Hanover ascension [the succession of an illegitimate German King rather than a legitimate Jacobite King to the English Throne], and perhaps a symbol of the entire country’s angst over the political instability of the times.”  (“Jeffrey the Jacobite Poltergeist: The Politics of the Ghost that Haunted the Epworth Rectory in 1716-17”, Wesleyan Theological Journal  Nov 1, 2015)

Note: A Jacobite in early 18^th C England was a political supporter of James II of Scotland as the rightful King of England, not the German line of the reigning King.

I can't help but think how families are politically divided today in America over whether the current President of the United States is the legitimate leader of the country.  What would Jeffery say?