Old Mother Leakey: the Minehead ghost and the Privy Council inquiry

Susan Leakey was a widow of Minehead, in Somerset. She was remembered as pious, with "a free, pleasant and cheerful temper". Yet on her deathbed she reportedly said she would come back "in the devil's likeness". She died in 1634, in the house of her son Alexander, a merchant and shipowner. Shortly after her burial, knockings were heard in the room where she died.

March 1636. Elizabeth Leakey, Alexander's wife, found her mother-in-law in her bedroom one night. The figure returned. Again and again. Elizabeth challenged it to say what it wanted. The ghost gave her two tasks. She was to see a sister about a gold necklace. And she was to carry a secret message to Dr John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford, husband of Susan's daughter Joan. "Go to Joan Atherton in Ireland and tell her these things." Elizabeth asked whether Susan was "in Heaven or in Hell." No answer came. By one account, the ghost groaned and vanished.

Others saw her too. A Welsh maidservant knew her by her "black gown and wrinkled face". A grandson of 14 fell to a mysterious illness and died, saying he "could not be quiet for his grandmother". Some claimed the ghost had suffocated him.

The curate of Minehead, the Rev. John Heathfield, had told Elizabeth her vision "was nothing but her fancy". Then came 16 October 1636. After a christening feast he called at the Leakey house. At about 9 pm he opened the kitchen door to relieve himself. As he turned to come back in, he "found the apparition of old Mrs Leakey standing within four feet of him". He said nothing of it until he had seen it himself.

The story reached London. Charles I's Privy Council appointed three justices of the peace to investigate. Sir Robert Phelips, Somerset landowner and politician, was among the commissioners of February 1637. Bishop William Piers of Bath and Wells also looked into the case. Four witnesses gave statements. Elizabeth, and three others in the town who said they had seen the ghost and spoken with it.

Archbishop William Laud reported the result. The justices had "examined the business of the apparition, and certainly it is a fiction and a practice, but to what end cannot be discovered." He called Elizabeth "a cunning woman". Her husband was "in decay", in financial trouble. "It may be some money business."

Elizabeth said she was charged to tell the message to no one but Dr Atherton. A verse pamphlet of 1641 filled the silence. The ghost had warned that Atherton must repent, or hang. In one modern account the secret concerned an alleged affair with his wife's sister Susan, and a murdered illegitimate child. On 5 December 1640, John Atherton was hanged in Dublin for buggery, under an Irish Act he had helped bring in. He was the only Anglican bishop executed for that offence. From 1710 onward, some argued that Atherton had been framed. The secret the ghost supposedly revealed is as disputed as the ghost herself.

Then folklore took over. The ghost was blamed for whistling up storms that wrecked Minehead ships. Sir Walter Scott spread that version in the notes to Rokeby in 1813. She is still said to roam near Culver Cliffs. In the 1980s there was a ghost bus, and a teashop called Mother Leakey's Parlour.

In 2007 the historian Peter Marshall published Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story. Reviewing it, James Sharpe stressed that in the 17th century "ghosts appeared for a reason". In Minehead, the dead woman came back with a message. Nearly four centuries on, nobody has settled what it really was.