Notes and Links
Devil folklore and landscape
Nearly Knowledgeable website about Shropshire folklore, she has a real interest in devil folklore: https://nearlyknowledgeablehistory.blogspot.com/
The Devil in Marston Moretaine:
Witchcraft information
Ronald Hutton biography and books: https://www.waterstones.com/author/ronald-hutton/566642
BBC podcast Witch: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001mc4p
Willow Winsham blog about folklore and witchcraft: http://willowwinsham.com/blog-3/
Satanic Panic
CBC podcast about the Satanic Panic: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/472-satanic-panic
Jon Ronson’s BBC podcast Things Fell Apart episode 4 Believe The Children: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/believe-the-children/id1592984136?i=1000540368101&ign-itscg=30200&ign-itsct=bbc_podcasts
Kevin Gates book
Kevin Gates book The Paranormal Diaries: The True Story of Clophill’s Black Magic Church is currently available for free if you have a kindle unlimited account: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Paranormal-Diaries-Clophill-Clophills-Church-ebook/dp/B00O1B1MRE
History of the church
There’s some great pictures and a detailed history of the church on Clophill History website:
https://clophillhistory.mooncarrot.org.uk/oldstmaryspost1848.php
History of Leprosy in England
Historic England have some good information here: https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/1050-1485/time-of-leprosy/#:~:text=Leprosy%20had%20entered%20England%20by,weakening%20of%20the%20skeletal%20frame.
Show Transcript
ClopHill
Did I ever tell you that I’m afraid of the devil?
No, well on today’s episode you’ll find out why.
I’m going to take you back to November 1983. A gloomy afternoon. In a school playground, children aged 9 and 10 huddle in small groups, wearing brig.htly coloured anoraks and parkas, pixie boots and leg warmers, sheltering where they can against the drizzle. There is one large group of children bunched around a boy with jet black hair. We’ll call him Graham. He’s telling stories of his Dad’s video shop. The latest video nasties that he’s snuck a look at. I’m hanging on the edge of the group but hanging on Graham’s every word. He’d recently told me the most terrifying story I’d ever heard of how a girl in Meppershall, a nearby village, had been attacked by ghosts through her TV and dragged into another dimension. A dimension filled with spirits and demons. It took a psychic woman from his Mum’s women’s institute group to rescue the girl. This little blonde girl was now safe, but she would always be altered, made different by the experience. It would be some years until I’d discover that Graham had in fact told me the plot of the 1982 film Poltergeist. Adding the bit about his Mum’s Women’s Institute group was a stroke of storytelling genius. Graham was good with stories.
But on this murky November afternoon Graham stops talking about videos and starts telling a story I’d not heard him tell before. A story about an abandoned church on a lonely hilltop. A church that’s no longer a place of God.
Graham tells it like this.
“My brother Stuart went up Clophill church on Saturday night.”
There were gasps from the kids listening. It was clear to me that this wasn’t a place you visited lightly, especially at night.
“He went up there with his mate Colin, for a dare. Danny Albone said he’d pay ‘em a fiver if they did it. He waited at the bottom of the hill. All they took with them were torches. They were bricking it stew said as they walked up the hill their torches casting huge jagged shadows because they couldn’t hold them still, they were shaking so much! Then… they heard an owl hoot and they jumped out of their skins in shock! Col thought it might be a signal from a person, not a real owl, that someone else was up there. They switched their torches off just in case. So, they went through the church gate in the pitch black. Stu said it was so quiet up there, no wind nothing. Still as death.
At first, they thought the church was empty and they were about to turn their torches back on but then the moon came out from behind a cloud and they both saw a shadow move in the ruins. You know what it’s like up there. The tower’s crumbling and there’s no roof and you can see right into the church through that massive window in the side that’s got no glass. Well, they saw this shadow like a monk in a cowl, move across that window, kind of glide. Stu said he nearly wet himself! They turned and ran all the way back down the hill. Danny gave them the fiver though he could see how scared they were.
So, on Sunday in the day, I went back up there with Stu. It’s not as bad up there in the day but it’s still maga scary. We took our dog Bess, and she doesn’t like going into the church at all, but we dragged her over for protection. There’d definitely been people up there the night before because you’ll never guess what we found…”
“One of the graves had been, kicked in and a skull taken out and put on the altar up there. The skull was all mottled brown with some strands of stringy old grey hair still attached. There were bones too placed in an upside-down cross shape and there was even blood smeared around the bones. Like some kind of writing in blood but we couldn’t read it. Bess was whimpering so we had to take her away from there pretty quickly. But there had definitely been someone up at the church doing a ritual. Stu said it was a black mass! They were summoning the devil.”
The story then broke down into different kids either disputing what Graham claimed to have seen or others stating they’d also seen graves opened up there in the past or shadowy figures walking amongst the ruins.
I’d never been to the church, so I didn’t know that there was no altar left in the ruins. That what Graham was describing were in fact details from a 1963 newspaper article. But unlike most of the kids in my class I had a very real and visceral fear of the devil. One that tortured me for years and years, and so if I am going to tell you the story of this abandoned church which was a tabloid newspaper sensation from the 1960s to the present day, which has many mysterious ghost stories attached to it, and folklore as well. I need to explain why this story terrified me so much as a child and why for me the devil wasn’t a hooved cartoon character with a prong and a twisty moustache but a living, breathing entity who tormented my dreams.
Welcome
Welcome to Weird in the Wade, I’m Nat Doig and today I’m going to tell you the story of St Mary’s Old Church Clophill. It’s history, it’s notoriety as a place desecrated by vandals and associated with what the press called “black magic,” “devil worship” and “witchcraft.” A church that the police wanted to knock down in the 1990s because so much trouble was associated with the site. And a place that modern day myths and legends swirl around. But first I need to tell you a bit about 9-year-old me.
The exciting church
I was tall for my age, slim with long blonde hair with blue framed NHS glasses with thick lenses. And although the more spiteful kids at school called me “Tripple glazing” or would yell “Fit the best fit Everest” after me and sometimes I’d thump them if they got too nasty, no one actually bullied me at this point at school. They were just kids being mean kids. I had a good group of friends.
Outside of school I had a couple of really good friends who weren’t in my class, but we hung out all the time at home. To the extent that my Mum and I started going to church with them and their family in the nearby town of Biggleswade. Up until then Mum and I had gone to a church on the air force camp where we lived. It was just a normal non c of e protestant church. Nothing exciting, just plain old Christian worship. Sunday school and barbecues in the summer. That kind of thing.
This new church in Biggleswade was different. It was exciting. It was full of noise and activity. There was no Sunday School, kids stayed in church with their parents. At the exciting church they sang lively choruses, clapping hands and dancing. Old ladies in salvation army uniforms who sat on the front row would speak in tongues. To me it always sounded like they were saying jabbawoky jabbawoky over and over. The holy spirit was real and visceral moving amongst the congregation causing them to call out and shriek, dance or even faint.
Retired missionaries would preach sometimes, telling fantastical stories of real-life miracles that they’d witnessed in the 1920s and 30s in Africa or the far east. Deadly snake bites being miraculously cured. Healing and the laying on of hands was practiced regularly. Miracles for this congregation were real. Magic really happened but you could never call it magic. They were miracles but to a child, it makes no difference. I met people who believed the impossible was possible and believed they had witnessed it with their own eyes. And they were on a mission to make you believe them too.
Because now we get to why I’m telling you about this church and its congregation who were all lovely people if you met them in the post office or went for tea at their house as we often did. You see for the congregation of the exciting church the devil was a real and ever-present threat. Not a story nor a metaphor, not a warning, nor a distant concept. The devil was real. The devil was loose in Biggleswade. I joke about it now. That phrase I’d hear so often in church, that the devil was loose in Biggleswade. And maybe some of the congregation thought of it abstractly, the devil was there in the alcohol, in violence, in the drug taking that went on in small pockets of the town like any other town. But for the pastor and many others the devil was real, flesh and blood. Or at least able to inhabit flesh and blood.
Satan looked like an angel, because he was Lucifer, fallen from heaven. He could fool you with his suave looks and ways. His voice was like honey. He was basically Saruman from Lord of the Rings but God to me wasn’t like Gandalf. We were instructed on the devil’s wiles and tricks frequently. For this church the end of times was near, maybe we were already in them. So, we were being prepped for the big day. The show down between Christ and the anti-Christ. Revelations made up more readings in this exciting church than any other book of the bible.
There was a long list of things that the devil would tempt you to do and there were activities that were a sure way to be ensnared by him. Read your horoscope, go out trick or treating, tell ghost stories, or take up yoga these were all terrible temptations that had to be avoided. The one Halloween that we were attending the exciting church, I spent the night not dressed up as a witch as I had done the year before stuffing my face with sweets and chocolate but instead sitting in a friend’s living room children and adults all fervently praying for the souls of the misguided out there enjoying themselves. Any kids foolish enough to knock on the door got a Christian bookmark for their troubles. I did sit there thinking that this was all a bit of a swizz. But my two best friends were there, and we were kind of having fun… kind of. I was only 8 or 9.
This belief in the reality of the devil was something that was hard to shift though. Even when after a few months my Mum and I went back to the boring church on the Airforce camp where the elderly vicar had a wooden leg and told stories about the war. Where hymns were staid and traditional and where Halloween was enjoyed moderately. This was a moderate church. The devil was most definitely a metaphor. A learning tool, a lesson. Not a living breathing person, on the loose in Biggleswade causing catastrophe and mayhem.
In all my time at the exciting church in Biggleswade, Jesus never felt any more real to me, he still seemed like a kingly figure in a robe floating just out of reach. God was even more confounding to imagine. But the devil. Now he seemed utterly real. I was convinced of his existence. He became a living. Breathing, horror figure. Apart from my therapist I have never told a single soul until today about this. How for the next twenty years I was regularly plagued by nightmares and terrors of an unseen, but oh so real evil, an evil that I knew without a shadow of a doubt was the devil. It wasn’t completely unseeable. Sometimes in my nightmares it was like a smoke, or a patch of darkness darker than the night around it.
But I knew it was the devil. And he spoke to me. He said the most horrendous and upsetting things. He tormented me. In a voice that sounded like old mine workings scaping metal against metal. Stone against stone. Jarring, discordant utterly depressing.
Still a small part of me feels like I shouldn’t admit this. That just thinking about him might bring him back to my dreams. But after therapy for many other reasons one of the things that has changed for me, is that I have probably only had this devil night terror once in the last decade and maybe a handful of times in the last twenty years.
And I know that this figure of fear with the terrifying voice represents something deeply traumatic and psychological from when I was extremely small. Related to having to be in hospital and having many operations as a baby and young child. Of moving house, a lot, and being visually impaired in a world that excludes me. It’s a whole bundle of fears conjured up by my young mind but the devil inhabited them so perfectly. Maybe if we’d never gone to the exciting church this bag of trauma would have been an Egyptian Mummy, age 7 that was what regularly terrified me. But how could anything compete with the devil when it came to embodying my worst fears and torments. All the centuries of folklore and churchlore, of power over so many people. Fear is the devil.
So that’s the backdrop to me hearing for the first time about an abandoned church where devil worshipers were supposed to meet regularly. I was right in the thick of attending that exciting church in Biggleswade where the devil was loose. And if there was something almost as frightening as the devil himself it was the thought of fellow humans choosing to worship him and do his bidding. Every time I heard stories about the old church at Clophill, which was frequently, I’d feel sick. But I was also inexplicably drawn to these stories. And that to me seemed to be proof that the devil was involved tempting me to find out more. I was stricken with guilt every time I listened eagerly to the twisted tales and scary stories. Caught in that clichéd dilemma between the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other.
The Devil
But listen to the stories I did, and remember them. I knew the tale of the black magic church was one I had to tell on this podcast. But before I do we need to talk about the devil some more.
I’m no expert in devil folklore. For reasons I’ve just explained. Even with my love of the supernatural and the strange I’ve steered away from studying folktales and lore about the devil specifically. I even felt a little thrill of trepidation when I embarked on this episode because I would have to confront that childhood fear. But after a couple of days researching and writing I think I’ve walked my demons sufficiently that I’m no longer feeling that dread.
The UK has a lot of devil folklore especially geographic folklore and if you’d like to know more about that you can’t go wrong visiting Nearly Knowledgable’s brilliant website where Amy focusses on the folklore of Shropshire which has its fair share of devil related stories, which unlike me she has no fear of and absolutely loves.
Bedfordshire does have its devil related places and stories. In a future episode I’ll cover the village of Odell and its devilish claw marks on its church door. There’s also a standing stone in the village of Marsten Mortaine known as the “devils’ toenail.” A great name for what some speculate is in fact the base of an old medieval cross. But Bedfordshire doesn’t seem to have an overabundance of devilish associations before the Clophill church gets its link to Old Nick.
As children we simply knew the Clophill church as the devil worshipers church or the black magic church. And before I investigate these claims there’s a few things I need to cover about the devil, devil worship and black magic.
The low down
The Christian devil is a complex thing. He exists as a Christian concept, is mentioned in the Bible, has various names and roles. Lucifer the fallen angel of light, the anti-Christ, Jesus’s enemy tempting him during his 40 days and nights in the desert. Over the last 2000 years the role of the devil has changed and shifted. It seems likely that early Christians took some of the non-biblical sourced descriptions and stories associated with the devil from existing folklore and customs. It was a good way to paint local non-Christian beliefs and customs as bad by associating them with the devil. Similarly, some cautionary legends about the fairy folk or mythical creatures were turned into warnings about the devil. It’s not a trickster sprite or goblin you needed to avoid on that path; it’s the devil.
There has always been a fire and brimstone interpretation of Christianity which has almost revelled in the devil as a figure to scare, shame and guilt believers into behaving. But likewise, there have always been Christian thinkers who were less into the devil than others and his popularity or should I say prominence as such has waxed and waned over the centuries.
But did and do people worship the devil? One of the most famous historical periods where belief in devil worship was prolific was during the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe during the witch trials. The church and others in power believed or chose to believe that there was an epidemic of devil worship sweeping Christendom which must be stopped. Those who were accused in Britain were predominantly older women and women who were disabled, different or just considered difficult. The church believed that these poor women were not so much as worshiping Satan but doing his bidding, seduced by him and his minions. In turn Satan lent these unfortunate women his magical powers.
It may sound like nonsense and bigotry to our ears but in the 16th and 17th century many were willing to believe it. The devil was real to them in a way that is hard for us to understand. I’ll be looking into the witch trials in the spring of next year with a special story about a mother and daughter accused of witchcraft in Bedfordshire. But it’s important to understand that although belief in the devil was a real thing in 16th and 17th centuries, that belief was exploited by the church, and those in power including the King, to exact control over the population. It’s highly unlikely that organised devil worship was actually sweeping the country. In fact, all the evidence shows that it wasn’t.
The enlightenment brought a slow but steady end to the beliefs that fuelled the witch craze as it’s sometimes called. But the devil lived on in church doctrine, local stories, and personal belief. During the 18th Century a group of aristocrats dubbed rakes and atheists by the press, took to forming clubs like the Hell Fire Club near High Wycombe where they supposedly drank toasts to the devil and blasphemed whilst indulging in debauchery such as womanising and gambling. This was scandalous behaviour for the time, but as it was being carried out by wealthy men legislation was used to try and dissuade the unchristian activities. A very different approach to how the poor women were treated a century or so before.
Towards the end of the 19th Century, it was beginning to become fashionable in an edgy way to flirt with either atheism or beliefs that ran contrary to the predominant Christian orthodoxy. Most of the population still considered themselves Christian but those with money and who were in a position to let their reputation be thrillingly tarnished started to dabble in the esoteric, and the magical which for some meant flirting with the devil.
Alister Crowley springs to mind when talking about this kind of thing. Labelled the most wickedest man in the world. He even called himself the Beast 666 like the devil. Just hearing his name as a child gave me nightmares. He doesn’t scare me anymore. He was a fascinating but in many ways repugnant man. But he is the shining example of late Victorian and early 20th Century provocateur scandalising a nation by inventing his own religion, carrying out magical rituals, being bi-sexual and saying all kinds of things about Satan. From claiming that he was trying to meet the devil personally to pointing out that anything that the church historically didn’t like got labelled as belonging to the devil. He’s not wrong on the last point.
It’s fair to say Alister Crowly had a huge impact on the counterculture of the 1960s and beyond. He also influenced some people to form a new type of belief system based around the devil and rejecting some Christian principles. And during the late 60s and onwards different forms of satanism, different churches, temples and belief systems emerged. Now the numbers of people who follow satanist beliefs is tiny. In both Canada and the UK, the number is so negligible you can’t get a useful percentage out of it for the population. For the England and Wales in 2021 there were about 5000 satanists in a population of almost 60 million.
Yet in the last 60 years there’s been a disproportionate amount of fear about this belief system. The satanic panic of the 1980s saw satanists accused of corrupting children through heavy metal music, playing dungeons and dragons, and video games. There was also a belief in satanic abuse that had no actual grounding in evidence-based fact. Satanic ritual abuse is a fascinating and upsetting topic which is far too complicated for me to cover here. But many innocent people were deeply damaged by those who misguidedly thought they were doing good by attempting to prevent satanic cults. There are some brilliant podcasts about the satanic panic of the 1980s which I’ll link to in the show notes on the blog.
Magic
And finally magic. The Church bundled magic up with the devil, linking the two even when there was no actual link. I mentioned earlier that the Christian church believes in magic, but they call it miracles or god’s works. Miracles are good but magic that can’t be linked to Christ or God they considered bad. Magic was the domain of the devil. Magic is like anti-miracles. However, many people throughout history have believed in and used magic, whether it was healing herbs or potions, rituals for good fortune, love potions, spells for finding lost goods, curses or the study of alchemy or astrology.
The academic studies of alchemy in the 16th and 17th centuries were performed by men and supported by the monarchy and ruling classes at least. The puritans weren’t so keen on this kind of thing and by the time of the enlightenment, science was displacing these old alchemists.
The working people’s beliefs in magic were less tolerated. Much of it condemned as superstitious and considered of a devilish kind. But some cunning folk and herbal healers were tolerated and used by local people right up until the early 20th century. Obviously providing their services was a dangerous enterprise during the 16th and 17th century witch craze.
So, there was and still is for many a kind of concept of good and bad magic. Church belief, wealthy men studying alchemy, some local people using healing herbs was ok but anything that looked a bit too devilish was bad. And do remember for a big chunk of time after the reformation anything roman catholic was seen to have a whiff of devilry about it.
When we get to the 20th century and the rise of new paganism, wicca and new forms of witchcraft the media in particular began to differentiate between good and bad magic by calling anything they associated with harm or the devil as black magic, and anything else as white magic. Many believers in magic will tell you that magic is neutral, and it is the intention of the person performing the magical ritual who uses the magic as either harmful or beneficial. But a more detailed discussion of magic well that’s for another podcast and another time…
There was a fascination with witchcraft during the 1960s, the tabloid press were keen to cover stories about covens and speculate as to what witches got up to. Stories of naked dancing, orgies, and occult rituals in the woods or on lonely hilltops sold newspapers and they didn’t much care if what they were reporting was accurate or not. If you’re interested in the history of witchcraft and wicca you can’t go wrong reading the books of Ronald Hutton, I’ll share links to his work in the show notes on the blog. Or listening to the brilliant BBC podcast Witch.
So, what I really wanted to say in summary before getting on to the church at Clophill is that:
- We, as in Europeans of a Christian background have a long and complicated history with the devil and magic.
- People have used the devil in art and culture to scandalise and shock people for over 1000 years.
- In the late 20th century, a panic about satanism and witchcraft was blown out of all proportion ruining innocent people’s lives for all kinds of different reasons.
- A very small number of people actively identify as satanists.
- Satanists as an organised group didn’t even exist until the late 1960s
St Mary’s Old Church
Today St Mary’s Old Church or to give it it’s full name: The Church of St Mary the Virgin lies ruined. It has a ragged square tower and is built of a grey flinty looking material. Even before it fell into disuse I imagine it was a very modest rather mean looking church, in that old use of the word mean as in small, meagre without fripperies. It’s a recent ruin, not some relic from the reformation like so many abbeys and monastic buildings are. Until 80 years ago the church although not used for worship was used for storing items including at one point being used as a morgue.
The church was originally built in the 11th Century but was redesigned a century later into the perpendicular style, the one we’re so used to seeing in old English churches. Think straight lines, big windows, arches. One unusual feature of St Mary’s is that the architect certainly went for the large window motif and then some. The church has one huge window in its south side and no others on that side at all. It’s led many to describe the church as ugly which I think is a little unfair.
Now there is a curious claim about St Mary’s Old Church that persists to this day. That the church is built the wrong way round. That it faces the wrong way. Churches tend to be built facing east. That places the tower or spire at the west and the altar at the east. But does St Mary’s face the wrong way and as such invert it’s Christian sanctity? This is ridiculously easy to investigate now with google earth and I can confirm that St Mary’s Old Church is indeed aligned the right way. It faces East. In fact, it has a more easterly orientation than some other local churches. I have also visited in person and can confirm that the images on Google earth are correct.
It’s hard to track down when this wrong way round rumour started. Some sources imply that it was before the church fell into ruin but was in disuse. The rumour being the Victorian’s abandoned it because it was of the wrong orientation. But the newspaper Bell’s New Messenger reports on 24th of December 1848 that a grant has been awarded to build a new church at Clophill because the present one is inconveniently situated for the majority of parishioners. Which it was, on top of a steep hill. Although the village of Clophill may once have been based on and around the hilltop where St Mary’s Old Church stands, certainly from the 16th century the village buildings were situated below and away from the hill.
This apparent repositioning of the village led to rumour number two. That the village of Clophill that had once surrounded the hilltop church was abandoned because of plague. And that the church is built on a plague pit. Now it is true that the worst of the black death in the 14th century took a terrible toll on the inhabitants of the British Isles. In total 30 – 40 % of the English population perished and some villages were wiped out and abandoned with 80-90% of inhabitants dying. There is no evidence however that this happened at Clophill, although there is also no evidence that it didn’t. Kevin Gates in his detailed and excellent book The Paranormal Diaries: Clophill: The True Story of Clophill’s Black Magic Church has discovered a list of a handful of villagers who succumbed to the black death. The accepted narrative however, is that the move from the hilltop was a pragmatic one, building on a hill is difficult when a village’s population grows, and it makes sense to expand away from the hill.
But the rumours of death and disease seem to stalk St Mary’s Old Church and rumour number three is that the church is built on the site of a leper colony or burial site. Nowadays we call leprosy Hansen’s disease because of the stigma attached to the word leprosy. I’ll use the word leprosy here because we are talking about the 12th – 14th centuries. There is no indication that there was any hospital or monastic building to house people with leprosy at Clophill. And during medieval and early modern times, cases of leprosy and the housing of people with the disease was well regulated and documented. The disease was feared especially after the black death in the 14th century, so people developing symptoms would be sent away to live in specially built buildings usually linked to monasteries and funded by the church and even the King. Poorer people who developed leprosy may not have ended up in one of these organised houses, but it is highly unlikely that Clophill housed more than the usual number of people with leprosy at St Mary’s church or nearby.
So why all these rumours? I suspect the rumours began after the church was abandoned because only 6 years after the new church was built below in Clophill village and the old one abandoned, there are reports of body snatchers plundering the graveyard. You see the burial ground was still used even though the chapel wasn’t. It’s easy to see why the church yard would be tempting for grave robbers because of its lonely position. There are also reports in the 19th century of bones from the graveyard somehow making their way down the hill into farmland below, which erosion and poor weather could possibly cause. Either way not long after it was abandoned the churchyard had a reputation of not being secure or safe. A place where bodies were disturbed, and bones could wander.
In the 20th Century it’s understandable that locals began to wonder why the church might have been left on the hilltop, unloved and unlooked after. The growth in rumours may well have begun then.
The church’s fortunes took a sudden turn in the 1950s when lead was stolen from its roof. It was this act of theft which sealed the sad fate for St Mary’s. Without the protective lead the church soon fell into decay. What happened a decade later in 1963 would thrust the church from being just a sad old building into something far more sinister and salacious.
Desecration, decay, and the devil
1963 had one of the harshest winters on record. Snow fell long and deep and St Mary’s Old Church on the top of Clophill was completely cut off from the rest of the village for some months. It was during one of these cold February nights that the rector of Clophill the Rev Lewis Barker received a phone call.
“Hello, the rectory reverend Barker speaking”
“Oh, hello reverend Barker, I hope you don’t mind me calling you out of the blue. I’m currently researching a book and was wondering if you are aware of any occult practices taking place or ever having taken place up at St Mary’s Old Church in your parish?”
“No, no I am not. There are no occult practices going on around here I can assure you.”
“Really, you’ve never found any graves disturbed, odd symbols daubed on the walls up there? It’s a lonely eerie spot don’t you think?”
“No I have not. May I ask who you are and why you are asking about this.”
“It’s for a book Reverend, it’s for a book I am writing. Good night to you.”
The same week some villagers in nearby Ampthill were stopped by a stranger who said he was embarking on a tour of the area, looking for occult sites for a book he was researching. He wondered if they knew anything about the old abandoned church on the hill at Clophill?
It sounds like the start to horror movie. I’m reminded of the second Poltergeist film and Cain in his black hat, his skull like face, singing softly to himself as he knocks on doors asking after the family of little Carol Anne.
But maybe this mysterious stranger is just a coincidence because he didn’t seem important until the weekend of the 16th / 17th March when the fortunes of St Mary’s Old Church were changed forever.
Two young lads out for the first bike ride after the thaw, who had intended to visit the American Airforce base at nearby chicksands, took a detour to the church on the hill. It was there that they discovered a truly gruesome sight. Kevin Gates managed to track down one of the boys, who in 2010 was in his 60s. He explained that he and his friend had wandered into the ruins to find bones strewn about the floor of the church and a skull placed on a metal spike that had been driven into the ground. Curious and never having seen a skeleton before they took the skull and some of the bones outside with them to look at more closely. It was there that a couple tending a loved one’s grave came across the boys “playing with a skull” the newspapers reported. The couple scolded the boys and sent for the Reverend Barker.
When Barker arrived at the scene, he discovered that the grave of 22 year old Jenny Humberstone, who died in 1770 had been raided. Her headstone dug up and her coffin plundered. As Rev Barker made his way into the church, he found bones scattered on the floor, a celtic cross daubed on the church wall in what he thought was red powder, but the press reported as blood, along with chicken or cockerel feathers fluttering about. There were signs that at least 6 other graves had also been disturbed.
The police were called, and the press notified so that by Monday morning the UK’s most popular newspaper of the time, the Daily Mirror ran the story of the desecration of graves at Clophill Old Church and the performance of black magic rituals. The police claimed “black magic practices” were behind the outrage. Finding feathers strewn about the church was a sure sign they said. Though Bill Ellis in his book Raising the Devil, Satanism, new religion, and the media suspects that the police were influenced by books like Denis Wheatley’s the Devil Rides Out which were immensely popular at the time, rather than any actual knowledge of occult practices.
And just an aside here, this wasn’t the first time that journalists had descended on Clophill nor the first time that the British public had been aware of this sleepy village. Just a year before a horrific murder, rape and attempted murder had taken place just a couple of miles from Clophill on the A6 road. The case would have been fresh in people’s minds and the convicted murderer was executed on the 4th April 1963 just a couple of weeks after these news stories about St Mary’s church hit the headlines. In fact, incorrectly the place of the murder, dead man’s hill is often mistakenly confused with the hill that St Mary’s Old Church stands on. The conviction and execution of James Hanratty was to prove a controversial one until 2002 when DNA evidence proved that he had been the murderer and rapist. But back in 1963 many of the British public would have associated Clophill with this shocking crime. It must have seemed odd to have the village making headlines yet again.
The police tracked down the two young lads from Luton and quickly ruled them out as suspects. There was no way two skinny lads could have lifted the grave stone with two crowbars, which was found close by. The police were convinced that the vandalism was the work of shadowy figures steeped in occult knowledge, a witch’s coven or the like. The ritual they said had been performed on the weekend of the 10th March because that coincided with the full moon.
Reverend Barker fretted over what to do with the bones of poor Jenny Humberstone, who had been the young wife of an apothecary. Some of the press believed her grave had been targeted because she was a woman and had links to healing practices but there was no evidence to back this up just speculation. Jenny was reinterred by Barker a week later, but by the 2nd April her remains had been removed once more and cast about the church. The press were back and Barker took Jenny remains into safe keeping hoping that interest in the church would soon die down.
But Things took another dark turn later in April when newspapers reported that 15 miles south of Clophill a young boy had come across the decomposing heads of 6 cows and a horse arranged around the outside of a circular clearing in bluebell woods. The heads were under a thicket of brambles, and some had had their jaws removed. The animals had been shot in the head, and an RSPCA spokesperson said death would have been quick, but the dismemberment was amateurish. The bodies of the animals don’t appear to have ever been found. The police again linked this to black magic practices. With it being only 15 miles away from Clophill and it was thought the slaughter took place around the same time of the first grave desecrations, the press linked the two events in their coverage. Kevin Gates makes an interesting connection between this incident and cattle mutilations which have been linked to UFO activity by some. Though I wonder if the bodies were never found because they were taken away to be eaten. That this was just poaching.
1963 was to see a panic sweep the nation about black magic. The incidents at Clophill church sparked copycat activity as more and more church yards were damaged, vandalised, or strange occult objects were found in them ranging from animal skulls, feathers, or chalked symbols to a sheep’s heart pierced with thirteen thorns found in an Essex graveyard. What started at Clophill spread like a contagion.
In May several Bedfordshire college students came forward to apologise for carrying out rituals up at the church both before the incident in March 1963 and the ones soon after. They claimed it had all been a big joke and they hadn’t expected anyone to take it seriously. But they denied being the perpetrators of the March 1963 vandalism. Yet the police and Rev Lewis Barker continued to push that the original desecration was the work of occultists, witches, or purveyors of the dark arts.
St Mary’s Old Church was now a place of interest to many across Britain and further afield. Within days of the first news story breaking, Rev Barker reported that a man with a foreign accent and driving a car with a London number plate had appeared up at the church asking about the rituals and occult associations. The church appeared on TV with folklorist Eric Maple falling into one of the open graves whilst reporting. Sadly, the footage no longer exists. Maple also went on to describe the church in a popular coffee table book he wrote on witchcraft. He commented on the eery and oppressive vibe, said he never wanted to return to the place but advised others to visit to experience its unique gothic atmosphere. Not a weekend went by in the 1960s without people visiting the church whether to just sight see, scare each other or to attempt a ritual, whether serious or for fun it’s hard to tell. Midsummer and Halloween were worst for damage and occasionally revellers up at the church were arrested and fined by the Police, but they were people holding rowdy parties, rather than witches or occultists.
Sadly, more vandalism did happen with graves being smashed up including poor Jenny being disturbed again. In the end Barker collected Jenny’s bones saying he would reinter them somewhere secret. The reverend spent many a night up at the church keeping watch and as the 1960s progressed and the notoriety of the church didn’t abate, he became more and more unsettled. When Rev Barker retired in 1969, he lamented that not a week went by without some trouble or other being reported up at the old church and quote “some rite was performed.” We’ll return to Rev Barker later as although he left Clophill in 1969 the church and its reputation would not leave him.
The 1970s
St Mary’s Old Church’s reputation was set. Known locally as the black magic church or the devil church, it was still widely visited during the 1970s and 80s. It featured in many books on folklore and witchcraft in Britain. The local newspapers would recycle stories about it around midsummer and Halloween. In 1977 two letters appear in the Bedfordshire on Sunday newspaper complaining about inaccuracies in the previous issue’s article on the black magic church. Sadly, the issue in question is missing from the archives and so all I have are the angry letters not the actual article. One of the letters is from a follower of Alistaire Crowley who claims his Mum was one of Crowley’s scarlet women. He disputes claims made by the newspaper about witches, covens, and magic. Part of the letter rather ominously reads:
“You can take my word for it that no journalist would get near to a witch’s coven without serious consequences to himself. “
The other letter is from the former brother-in-law of Reverend Lewis Barker, who lived in the rectory at Clophill alongside Barker during the height of the disturbances at the church in 1963 and 64. It appears he is aggrieved by the suggestion that Barker was somehow involved in some of the shadier happenings at the church. Something he’s keen to deny. This does seem to be rather sloppy journalism on the face of it, as Barker was vociferously against what he saw as occult rites happening at the church in the mid 60’s. But hold that thought because we’ll be back to Barker later.
The newspaper does attempt to defend itself by saying it’s article was meant to be light hearted.
It’s also interesting to note that during the 1970s the church is still largely being associated in the media with witches and witchcraft.
Poison Pens
The 1980s saw me and my family move to Bedfordshire, and stories about the church were still well known not just to us school kids. But something very peculiar happened in Clophill halfway through that decade.
It’s the Christmas holiday’s 1984 in Clophill village. Florrie Smith is up early, insomnia getting the better of her again. It’s still dark outside but in her kitchen, it is warm and light. Florrie’s putting the finishing touches to a trifle that she’s making for her grandchildren, humming along to the Christmas tunes on the radio, when she hears the clatter of the letter box and then a thump on the door. She jumps, dropping her spoon back into the bowl of whipped cream.
Florrie shuffles into the hallway perturbed by this early morning intrusion the postman’s not expected for at least another couple of hours. Lying on the door mat is a piece of paper. She ignores it and opens the door making sure it’s on the safety chain. But there’s no one there. Certainly no one waiting on the doorstep. She closes the door and locks it again. She has that sensation of being watched. But she shakes her head and carefully bends down to retrieve the piece of paper.
As she unfolds it and tries to make sense of what she sees, she almost drops it in confusion. It’s covered in strange drawings and symbols. It’s handwritten printed in weirdly shaped letters making it hard for Florrie to read at first. She wonders if it’s one of those chain letters her granddaughter gets so upset about. The ones being sent around at her school pressuring children to write out more letters to more children threatening them with curses and bad luck if they don’t.
But after sitting down with a cup of tea, and reading the letter through a few times, Florrie realises that there’s no chain element to this letter. It’s just goes straight to the curse. Florrie has been sent a poison pen letter and it also mentions the old church up on the hill. Florrie sighs, she thought all that nonsense was now relegated to kids at Halloween. What she doesn’t realise is that she isn’t the only person to receive such a letter at the end of 1984 and beginning of 1985. These poison pen letters were being sent to residents of Clophill leading to a police investigation and more local newspaper stories.
Florrie is my imaginative invention, but these letters appear to have been received by many residents young and old. Bedfordshire on Sunday printed an extract from one of the letters on 6th January 1985.
I’ll describe it to you.
At the top are written some names some of which are familiar there’s Asmodeus ( apparently he’s the king of the demons) Agyotes (which I think is a misspelling of agares another demon) Lucifer (the fallen angel of light) Gabriel (the angel I’m guessing) Mendes (who I think is actually Baphomet a big shot demon) Beelzebub (spelt wrong, who is the lord of flies another name often used as shorthand for the devil but was in fact a Philistine god originally) and Toru – I have no idea about this one. The names are written in capitals separated by dots.
Either side of them there’s a cross with roman numerals below it and an upside-down horseshoe with more roman numerals.
Then there’s a line of weird hieroglyphs and runes. The kind of magical symbols you find in alchemy books and the like. There’s a hand with a finger pointing upwards in the middle. Then underneath in a curiously flowery but hand printed text are these words:
“The above states that all the people in “Clophill” are cursed and dare to invade the sacred mass at the grounds of the church the power within the sacrificial ground which no one can find will remain among us and the church”.
The newspaper says that this is just an extract. But understandably it upset and scared many residents in the village. It’s important to remember that with no internet, knowing the names of demons wasn’t necessarily an easy thing to find out. You needed books either religious, esoteric, or occult. And although libraries had occult sections, it was nowhere near as easy as it was for me just then to look up who Asmodeus was. So, a bit more power and mystique were attached to just knowing names like that and knowing symbols. It wasn’t knowledge that was readily available to everyone. And that made it frightening to many. The newspaper initially takes the story seriously reporting that the police are investigating but as is often the case with the Bedfordshire on Sunday newspaper at the time, the story takes a dive into farce in the following weeks.
On the 13th January it is reported that a “cult leader” from Bedford named Les has dismissed the letters as rubbish and the work of kids.
On the following the Sunday a letter from Les is printed in the newspaper where he denies he’s a cult leader nor an expert on the occult.
I did a bit of digging and it appears that this Les was I quote “ a local character” who was often featured in the local newspaper for all kinds of reasons from the bizarre to the rather troubling. It sounds like the journos at Beds on Sunday were having a bit of fun with Les.
Sadly, I have not been able to find out much more about the poison pen letters. Though to me it looks more like the work of a local teenager whose spent some time in the occult section of their local library. But that doesn’t diminish the fear and annoyance theses letters must have caused. And I know for one that it reignited interest in the church again, I remember at school being told by other kids about the poison pen letters and stories about the church became all the rage again. We’d sit around in the playground making each other scared with every new detail we added to the story.
1990s
By 1992 the church is firmly being associated with devil worshippers. On the 1st November that year the press report that the police launched the rather obviously named “Operation Halloween” to keep quote “ghoulish devil worshipers” away from the church on the 31st October. The press describe the church as being a major headache for the police and locals. There are claims that more desecration of graves has taken place, whilst “demonic symbols” have been daubed around the church. It’s interesting to see that the satanic panic of the 1980s and early 90s has shifted the focus from witchcraft to devil worship as the latest fear when it comes to the occult.
In 1992 the police go as far as to call for the church to be completely torn down.
This isn’t the first time calls for the demolition of the St Mary’s have been heard. The Reverend Lewis Barker originally suggested it in the 1960s.
And it’s around this time, when black magic and devil worship are firmly associated with the church, that other stories, and other voices begin to be heard. Stories of a less human nature. Yes kids, teens and adults are visiting St Mary’s, most are not there to damage or desecrate. Most are there to satisfy their curiosity. To take photos of the striking ruin or to scare themselves. And it’s these visitors’ locals and those from further afield who begin to report sightings of a more ghostly nature.
And I’m going to share with you some of those ghostly encounters, not now but in the next episode. A Christmas special episode on the ghosts of St Mary’s and maybe some other Bedfordshire churches.
Reverend Barker
But what of the Reverend Lewis Barker? I promised to tell you what happened to him. Well Kevin Gates has done some great research, and it appears that the rev Barker never fully recovered from the initial shocking incidents in 1963 nor the continued disturbances at the church. I mentioned earlier how he was often seen holding lonely vigils at the church in a bid to keep practitioners of magical rites away. He really believed that there were groups of people, witches or occultists in his mind, who were doing harm at that church, and not just to the building or the graves.
He had suffered a lot of loss in his life. Losing a daughter and his wife. And it seems to have fuelled his fears and worries about the church. He was known as a drinker, and frequented many of the village pubs. There were stories circulating of how he would show regulars in the pubs of Clophill Jenny Humberstone’s skull and bones when he’d had a few pints. It later emerged that Barker had not reinterred Jenny’s remains somewhere secret. He was so scared that she’d be found again that he kept her bones in the boot of his car. And I wonder if it was stories of this reverend driving around with a two hundred year old skeleton in his boot that led to the story in the newspaper in 1977 that upset his former son in law so much.
After 1969 Barker moved to Hitchin, not far from Clophill over the Hertfordshire border. And Gates again tracked down lodgers who lived with Barker. He comes across as a kindly but troubled man. Still convinced that there were forces of evil connected to the church who were out to get him. There were rumours of threatening letters being sent to Barker in the early 70s and he seems to have believed that he was being followed on occasions. Followed by shadowy people, witches, and their creatures.
The last that Gates could find about Barker was that he moved much further away to Devon and disappeared into obscurity, before passing away. Hopefully he spent the last decades of his life feeling more peaceful far away from St Mary’s.
St Mary’s old church certainly cast a long shadow over the reverend Barker and many of the residents of Clophill. And those shadows still to this day stretch out far beyond Bedfordshire. The devil church, the scary church, the black magic church. A place that terrified me as a child, attracted rumour, folklore and uncanny stories like flies to Beelzebub.
Listen next time to hear all about the many ghostly sightings at St Mary’s church and to learn what has finally happened to this difficult ruin which so many wanted to pull down. I’ll tell you about my visit to St Mary’s earlier in the year and share some other church-based ghost stories for Christmas.
End
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. It was quite a personal one for me to make and that always leaves me feeling a little vulnerable but it’s good to be bold and take risks. I’m looking forward to sharing the ghost stories about St Mary’s with you in December and telling you all about my visit there back in May, where I made some recordings.
I’ve got quite a few thank you shout outs this time to the wonderful people who have supported the show in November by buying Weird in the Wade a coffee at our Ko-fi page.
I’d like to say a huge thank you to Catherine, Rhiannon, John, Claire and Abi. Your generosity is really appreciated thank you! You can find the show’s ko-fi page in the show description or at https://ko-fi.com/weirdinthewade
I also have an announcement to make which is that next year I am going to embark on a few extra episodes which take a wander away from the Wade and so I’d be really keen to hear about any stories or places you’d like me to cover. I’ve already got one Surrey story lined up that my Dad suggested, then my friend Tess has suggested a story in South Wales. I want to cover the lesser known stories, the ones you might only know if you’re a local. So, if you have an idea please do let me know you can email me at weirdinthewade@gmail.com or find the podcast as @weirdinthewade on twitter/X, Instagram, threads or BlueSky. You can also message me through the blog which is weirdinthewade.blog. On that blog you can find show notes and transcripts as well as photos and links to further reading for all the shows including this one.
Thank you again for listening and please do like, follow and rate the show where you listen as it really does help more people find us.
Weird in the Wade is researched, written and presented by me Nat Doig
Theme music is by Tess Savigear
All additional sound effects and music is from epidemic sound.
Weird In The Wade 