The Demon of Spreyton

Spreyton is a parish in Devon, just north of Dartmoor, adjoining Cheriton-Bishop. Our record of what happened there comes from two texts written in May 1683. One is a letter from the minister of Barnstaple, passed on by Rev. Andrew Paschal, Rector of Chedzoy, to John Aubrey, who printed it in his Miscellanies in 1696. The other is an anonymous London pamphlet, A Narrative of the Demon of Spraiton.

About November 1682. Francis Fry, a servant of Philip Furze who would be twenty-one next August, was in a field near his master's house. He saw "an aged gentleman with a pole in his hand", the kind used "to kill moles withal". It was Philip's dead father. Several legacies under his will had not been paid.

Fry carried twenty shillings to Mrs. Furze of Staverton, who refused it as money from the Devil. So the ghost sent him to Totnes to buy a ring of that value, and that she accepted. On the road home, Fry seemed to carry an old gentlewoman behind him, who often threw him off his horse. Back in the yard, his horse "sprung at once twenty-five feet." Then the old man stopped appearing.

The woman did not. She was the dead man's second wife, and she came in forms "sometimes horrid". A dog belching fire. A horse that seemed to ride out of the window, "carrying only one pane of glass away".

Fry bore the worst of it. His head was thrust between a bed and a wall, where a man's fist could not enter, and handkerchiefs and cravats nearly strangled him. His best periwig, locked in a box, was torn "all to flitters". The daughter of the parish minister, Mr Roger Specott, saw a shoe-string leave his shoe "without any visible hand" and fling itself to the farther end of the room. A great barrel of salt marched from one room into another, and the clothes of Anne Langdon were torn on her back.

Coming home from work, Fry was caught by the woman spectre by the skirts of his doublet and carried into the air. Half an hour later he was heard whistling in a quagmire. From above, he said, his master's house had looked "no bigger than a hay-cock." One shoe lay on each side of the house. Next morning his periwig hung from the top of a tall tree.

It followed him to Crediton. On the eve of Low Sunday, a bird flew in at the window with a stone in its mouth and struck his forehead. What lay beneath him was "not a stone, but a weight of brass or copper".

The inquiry was clerical. The Barnstaple minister gathered testimony and examined the torn glove himself, judging that no person or cutler could have done it. Still, he suspected "something hidden" and urged that Fry be removed from the house. He noted the family relied on nonconforming ministers, and that he had once clashed with Mr Furze over a conventicle. The letter also mentions Mr. Glanvil, who was collecting such histories.

Later writers have offered a simpler story. Legendary Dartmoor reports a theory that the whole affair was a poltergeist centred on a "mischievous and idle youth". The activity did cluster around Fry. Modern retellings have framed the bog episode as hypothermia. No hoax was ever proven, and as Tristan Shaw notes, Fry's eventual fate is unknown.

The pamphlet closed with reflections against "drollery and atheism", placing Spreyton beside cases like the Tedworth Drummer. The servant's name drifts between Fry, Pry, Fey and Frey. The story does not.