The Beaminster Apparitions: John Daniel Returns to His School Desk

Beaminster, Dorset, 1728. The town school met in a gallery of St Mary's Church, with its own churchyard entrance. John Daniel's mother, Hannah Collins, died on 15 October 1714, and his father Isaac married his servant, Elizabeth. His 1726 will left each son five shillings. Everything else went to Elizabeth.

Manor court records name both sons as tenants, and John named his stepmother as next tenant. Soon after he was found dead: in a stream, with unexplained bruising on neck and body, by one account; in an obscure place in a field, by another. He was buried on 1 June 1728 without an inquest. His mother said the lad had suffered fits. The shroud was in two pieces, one under the body, one over.

Saturday 22 June, about noon. Schoolmaster Mr Guppy had dismissed the boys, leaving three or four to sweep. A jingling like a bell seemed to come closer. A boy of about 14, coming down the gallery stairs, fancied someone followed him in boots, looked back, and saw a white coffin with brass nails on a writing desk. He cried out and fell down the stairs.

Boys at the churchyard door saw more. John Daniel sat at the writing desk he used when living, in the clothes he died in, his hand bound in linen as on the morning before he died. Those in the middle of the doorway saw boy and coffin distinctly.

Then Isaac, his half-brother, aged 10, threw up a stone: "There Johanes take it." The figure was gone. The church went exceeding dark. The boys could not see the windows. Outside, it was a clear day.

About six weeks later, during Wednesday prayers, a girl of 14 saw a woman in a dark coloured gown push open the school door and look in, body bent. The door shut with a great noise as the master ran down, though no wind blew; minister and congregation heard it. The churchyard was empty. The girl described a thin, pale woman, much broken with the pox; neighbours said it matched Hannah, John's dead mother. The girl had been born around the time Hannah died.

Colonel Brodrepp, the local justice of the peace, examined the boys apart; their stories agreed. The woman who laid out the corpse swore she had removed a cloth from his lame hand about four days before death. A warrant dated 5 July 1728 summoned a jury before Coroner George Filliter at the King's Arms, and the body was dug up. Two boys who had missed the burial recognised the gartering on the coffin handle; two women testified to a "black list" round the neck; a chirurgeon would not affirm any dislocation. The verdict: strangled.

No murder charge has been found. Elizabeth married Henry Gould and died in Beaminster in 1774, aged 78; the Dorset History Centre concludes that if she did it, "she apparently escaped prosecution." That same year the Gentleman's Magazine printed its version, reprinted by John H. Ingram in 1897: twelve boys, a sound like striking a brass pan, preaching and psalms, a coffin on a bench. Ingram puts Daniel more than seven weeks dead, which the burial register contradicts. Mysterious Britain asks how well the children were really kept apart.

The original manuscript was rediscovered in 2024. The story never left Beaminster. The Paranormal Database records a Bell Farm farmer seeing a young boy and a woman in a long white dress beside his livestock in 1998.