A chance meeting with a 400 year old witch

My parents were up country for their grandson’s wedding so it was a great chance to take them to see my Uncle and Aunt in the nearby county of Leicestershire. We all had a wonderful reunion, after which eight of us descended on a quaint little pub for lunch. Although I was enjoying a rare break from checking for lost souls, enjoying the family camaraderie, it was inevitably time to pop to the Ladies and out of pure habit I whipped out my dowser to check ~ I can’t help myself!!

Wow! Within seconds, four lost souls had shot through the portal and into the Light…

The fifth, however, paused before following them to freedom:

“Witch hunt!…” she cried…”t’were a witch hunt!….’ung me in a gibbet!!!” My dowser flailed wildly as she was being pulled in the direction of the Light but struggled to make her voice heard;…”Me bairn! They snatched me bairn; ripped her from me bos’m!” When a soul is extremely distressed like this it is my duty to try and calm them down so that their passing will be as gentle as possible. I sympathised greatly with her, feeling the awful pain that only a mother can feel when something so terrible comes between her and her child.

“Evelyn Peasgood…” she said clearly, “Evelyn Peasgood; that’s me name…Forget me not!…” ~ then she passed serenely. I scribbled her details onto a scrap of paper in my back pocket and slipped it to my husband upon return to the table. Not all my extended family were aware of my other life as a ghost rescuer and it was easier to keep quiet about my encounter. However, there is a time and a season to every purpose under heaven as, only 10 minutes later, my father thrust one of my calling cards in front of my Uncle’s face. (Oh no! Such a lot of explaining to do and I’m sure he will be a sceptic…) To my amazement he was very interested in my work, so I took a chance and told him how I’d just met Evelyn Peasgood, who told me she had been hanged as a witch. He gazed into my eyes earnestly…

“Just 2 miles up the hill in that direction,” he said, “several witches were hung…” Perhaps Evelyn had given me her name so that I could look into history and complete her story? Once home I studied a map of the area and found that midway between Husbands Bosworth and Church Langton, where I found Evelyn in the pub, there is road named Gallow Field Road. Research into witchcraft in Leicestershire revealed that on July 18th 1616, alongside poor Evelyn, eight other woman were executed by hanging, their remains grotesquely hung in gibbets. Tragically, they were executed for their ‘supposed involvement in the alleged bewitchment of (a young lad named) John Smyth’ (recorded July 18th, 1618)…In this modern age we now know that John Smyth, far from being possessed of evil spirits, was suffering from epileptic fits.

It is recorded elsewhere that these poor women were made to chant incantations over the boy in a bid to retract their so called evil influences.

Why did Evelyn Peasgood insist I remember her name? When I found her details in that ledger (she directed me to the correct entry), it read: ‘Anon 269 is hanged as a witch on July 18th 1666 at Husbands Bosworth, Leicester’. To add insult to injury, she and all those innocent women were completely stripped of their identities. Just numbers in a Ledger! Mercifully, each had left their bodies after death but Evelyn could not bear to leave her young child motherless and had stayed by her side until she grew, and then left for the light after her natural death. Evelyn, however, was unable to leave the magnetic vibration of the earth and therefore remained in limbo for almost 400 years.

“All is not lost!” interjected Evelyn from the other side as I wrote: “We are all reunited in love and forgiveness of one another ~ hallelujah, Praise the Lord!” Now, thanks to that chance encounter in the pub, not only has the spirit of Evelyn been returned to her rightful place in heaven, but she has retrieved her rightful identity.

To honour those poor women wrongly hunted and murdered as witches, the other numbers registered in that Ledger are 301 (died while in custody in gaol), 300, 298, 297, 295, 294, 293 and 292 ~ is it not strange that Evelyn was numbered 269 and was the only soul to remain earthbound for the next 400 years? (In numerology, 2+6+9=17=8 ~ a symbol of everlasting life!)