The Syderstone Parsonage haunting and Rev. John Stewart's overnight investigation

In the spring of 1833 the parsonage at Syderstone, near Fakenham in Norfolk, was home to the Rev. John Stewart and his family. For about six weeks they had heard noises almost every night. Tapping and scratching. Groaning and sobbing. Tramping and knocking. On 6 May the Weekly Dispatch reported that the noises were "becoming more violent". Two days later the Bury and Norwich Post added that "one of the servants has left through absolute terror." Several ladies and gentlemen sat up all night. They found no cause.

A low moaning reminded Stewart "very much of the moans of a soldier on being whipped". Knocks came "as loud as those of a hammer on the anvil". The maids were "actually incapable of motion". Yet nothing was ever seen. Every report was of sound, heard in every room.

Stewart wanted witnesses. On the night of Wednesday 15 May they came. The Rev. John Spurgin of Docking brought his wife, Maria. So did the Rev. Samuel Titlow of Norwich, the Rev. Henry Goggs of Creake and the Rev. John Lloyd. John Banks, a surgeon from Holt, completed the party.

"At ten minutes to two on Thursday morning the noises commenced," Stewart wrote a week later, "and lasted, with very little pause, till two hours after daybreak." It began in the bedroom of Miss Stewart. It sounded like "the clawing of a voracious animal after its prey". "Three powerful knocks were then given to the sideboard, whilst the hand of Mr. Goggs was upon it."

When they tried to communicate, a "low hollow moaning" answered. Three tremendous blows sounded, apparently in the wall. Some knocks matched the number the investigators asked for. There was a scream. Spurgin felt the moans came from the bed of a Stewart child of about ten, who he was sure could not have made them. One of the party admitted they "left it all equally bewildered."

At first everyone present agreed the family had not deceived them. On 1 June the Norwich Mercury printed corrections from Titlow. The noises "were not loud", he wrote, and the watchers "were all in good humour". A ventriloquist, he suggested, could produce such a scream. He proposed a test with the family absent. John Baker of Leeds went further: "the Syderstone Ghost is a ventriloquist."

Spurgin answered in the Norfolk Chronicle. He dismissed the doubts as "ridicule and insinuation!" and accused Titlow of "bearing false witness against an unoffending brother". Titlow had the last word. "Time, Sir, and facts duly authenticated … may hereafter prove what or who is the evil spirit at Syderstone."

On 22 June the Norfolk Chronicle printed statements collected by Thomas Seppings and John Savory from people who had served earlier clergy at the parsonage. A shepherd had heard groanings like those "of a dying man" while the house stood empty. Elizabeth Goff, servant to the Rev. William Mantle, said the trouble was already there when he arrived in 1785. Mantle boarded up two rooms. His sister saw something "which had greatly terrified her". Local tradition blamed the ghost of Mantle, a dissolute former incumbent.

No exposure, confession or resolution was ever recorded. The Marquis of Cholmondeley had the ground around the house excavated in search of a vault. In 1910 Elliott O'Donnell printed Stewart's letter in Ghostly Phenomena. In 2023 Tim Prasil called the surviving material "unusual". It is one of the earliest well-documented organised overnight ghost investigations in Britain, in a line of clergy-house hauntings from Epworth Rectory to Borley Rectory.