The Weston Vicarage haunting: the Tweedale family's ghosts in Wharfedale

Weston is a small parish in Wharfedale, about 2 km north-west of Otley. In 1905 it lay in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Its vicar was Rev. Charles Lakeman Tweedale, educated at Durham University and a maker of violins. Something had happened once before. In 1902 Mrs Tweedale saw the apparition of a man's figure when the couple were about one hundred yards from the house. Otherwise, Tweedale wrote, nothing unusual. Then, on 13 April 1905, Tweedale's aunt Leah Coates died.

"In August, 1905, loud blows began to be heard upon the doors." So the vicar recorded it. The phenomena at Weston Vicarage built for years, arriving at their height during the autumn of 1910 and the spring of 1911. They came without a moment's warning. The family used rappings to talk with whatever was there. Voices spoke. The house gong rang with nobody touching it. Bells sounded. Furniture moved and bedroom ornaments broke.

One Christmastide a figure in a flowing white robe appeared. Mrs Tweedale tried to grab hold of the spectre. It walked right through a wall and the Christmas tree, and Tweedale chased it down the hallway. The family heard a dog barking loudly at the stairs. They knew that dog. A short-haired white terrier, skin showing through its coat, that in life shivered continually. It had died about five years before Leah. Witnesses watched it run up the stairs, and the servant Ida saw it leap at the gong, making it ring. After many appearances, before six witnesses, the figure gave a name. Leah.

Other things followed. Keys passed through a wall and struck Mrs Tweedale on the head. A mouldy bag was thrown into the house. Inside was jewellery belonging to Tweedale's mother, lost for more than 20 years. A woman was seen going up the stairs carrying a small coffin and singing. On 14 June 1914, at about 11 a.m., daughter Marjorie twice saw a black hand waving in the passage in broad daylight. Shortly afterwards Mrs Tweedale saw it too. Tweedale linked it to the late Rev. W. Clarke, who had married the couple and always preached in black gloves. The servants were frightened enough to barricade themselves in the kitchen.

Between 1910 and 1911 the vicarage received W. W. Baggally, a member of the Society for Psychical Research and an expert on conjuring. According to Tweedale, Baggally resided for weeks in the house, took sworn statements from the servants Ida and Rosetta, and visited former servants. Baggally then signed a statement in the vicar's journal that the experiences "were probably the most remarkable on record."

No report by Baggally appears in the SPR's own journal. The verdict survives through Tweedale's book. Tweedale counted the witnesses as "a score of persons, male and female, young and old", and the accounts filled seven large volumes.

In April 1913 the Leeds Mercury took up the story and found that the vicar's spiritualism had driven away most of the parishioners. The New York Times ran a piece on 13 April 1913. Tweedale published Man's Survival After Death in 1909 and reissued it in 1920, 1925 and 1931. In the early 1920s Tweedale founded the Society of Communion for spiritualist Anglicans. The reports continued, principally until 1923.

Frank Podmore of the SPR suggested some of the visions may have been hallucinations. Tweedale wrote that "the presence of a psychic is essential", a line that points toward the family as easily as toward the dead. A shadow also fell from elsewhere. Tweedale defended the spirit photographer William Hope, exposed by Harry Price in 1922 for substituting pre-exposed plates. In 1919 Hope photographed the Tweedales with a claimed spirit form of Mrs Tweedale's late father.

No one has alleged a hoax at Weston itself. Wikipedia puts it plainly: you either believe the witnesses or you don't, for there is no other evidence.

The case invites comparison with Borley Rectory, another haunted Anglican rectory. Tweedale kept writing, through The Vindication of William Hope in 1933 and News From the Next World in 1940, and claimed séance contact with Arthur Conan Doyle after 1930. Tweedale died on 29 June 1944. Afterwards, the family said the vicar came back too.