The Lamb Inn poltergeist: the Giles sisters of Bristol, 1761 to 1762

The Lamb stood just outside Lawford's Gate, on West Street in Old Market, on the Gloucestershire side of Bristol. It was a coaching inn with a yard and stables, said to date from 1651. The landlord, Richard Giles, was a carrier who ran wagons between Bristol and London. He lived there with his wife, her mother Mrs Nelmes, and his children. Two of them were Molly, aged 13, and Dobby, aged 8.

Late in 1761, it began. Most accounts give 5 November. Others say 13 November, or December. First came scratching at the girls' bedroom window. It seemed to travel to their beds.

Rapping followed. The family devised a code, and the knocks tapped out letters in reply. Witnesses reported furniture moving, chamber pots being thrown, a clothes box rocking and overturning, and bed curtains rising and falling.

The girls were bitten on the arms and necks, slapped, pinched and stuck with pins. They were thrown from their beds with such force that three men could not hold them down. Once, Dobby went missing. She was found pinned under her bed. A woman in a ragged dress, a brown chip hat and great holes in her stockings had forced her there, she said.

The spirit gave a name. Malchi. It said a witch from Mangotsfield had sent it, hired by Giles's rival in the carrying trade. A cart horse had a fit. Wagons stuck in mud reportedly needed eighteen horses to free them. On 12 May 1762 Giles's harness broke on the road back from Bath, and a mysterious old woman was there. He fell ill with something his doctor could not identify or treat. As the spirit's hold on the girls weakened, its power over "the old one" grew. Richard Giles died on 16 May 1762. The spirit blamed witchcraft.

Henry Durbin, a devout chymist of Redcliff Street, spent several nights at the inn. He was "an eye and ear witness of the principal facts." He watched a wine glass "rise from the drawers (on which it had been placed) without hands … about a foot, perpendicularly from the drawers; then the glass seemed to stand, and thereupon inclined backwards, as if a hand had held it; it was then flung with violence about five feet."

Durbin brought in about seven clergy. Among them were Rev. Symes of St Werburgh's, Rev. J. Camplin of Bristol Cathedral and Samuel Seyer, headmaster of the Grammar School. They questioned the spirit in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. It answered. Their exorcism did absolutely nothing.

The end came not from a priest but from a cunning woman, said to be from Bedminster. She called Malchi "the head of the familiar spirits, knowing all human languages and knowledge." On her advice the girls' urine was put in an earthenware pipkin on the fire. "Beautiful colours came out of it like a rainbow." By December 1762 the spirit was gone.

William Dyer, a Bristol accountant, was caught up in the controversy throughout 1762 and recorded it in his diary. The affair "divided Bristol with many suspecting fraud but others unable and unwilling (for religious and personal reasons) to rule out that supernatural forces were involved." Durbin himself came to the case inclined to believe in evil spirits and witchcraft. The usual explanations are deception by the two girls, fits read through the beliefs of the age, and an accusation shaped by trade rivalry.

Durbin died in 1790. His Narrative appeared in 1800. In 2012 Jonathan Barry edited Dyer's diary for the Bristol Record Society. The inn is long demolished. Nothing of the building remains.