The Willington Mill Haunting and Edward Drury's Overnight Vigil

Willington Mill was a steam-powered flour mill on a semi-circular promontory at Willington Quay, on the banks of Willington Gut between Wallsend and North Shields. Joseph Procter, a Quaker corn miller, became a partner in 1829 and moved into the mill house in 1831 with his wife Elizabeth.

Then the noises began. Some sources place the start in 1834, while Procter's diary opens in January 1835. He wrote of a noise "like that of a pavior with his hammer thumping on the floor", along with coughs, sighs, groans and heavy steps on the stairs. Two visiting sisters felt their bed "lifted up, as if a man were underneath pushing it up with his back." A child spoke of a lady on the bed: "She has eyeholes but no eyes, and she looked so hard at me."

One moonless night, Thomas Mann, the mill foreman, stood in the empty yard with his wife, his daughter and a lady connected to the family, and they looked up at a window. A bare-headed man "in a flowing robe like a surplice" glided backwards and forwards about three feet from the floor. It was "semi-transparent and as bright as a star, diffusing a radiance all around." They watched for about 10 minutes as it assumed a blue tinge and faded away from the head downwards. Later folklore called him "Old Jeffrey".

Edward Drury was a young surgeon from Sunderland, said to have been inspired by John Wesley's account of the Epworth haunting. On the night of 3 July 1840 he took up position on the third-floor landing with his friend Thomas Hudson, a chemist. Joseph Procter and one servant were also in the house.

At about 11:50 p.m. both men heard "a noise, as if a number of people were pattering with their bare feet upon the floor." Drury heard knocking, a hollow cough and a rustling on the stairs. His watch "wanted ten minutes to one." A closet door opened.

He saw "a female, attired in greyish garments, with the head inclining downwards and one hand pressed upon the chest as if in pain." Her right index finger pointed at the floor. "It advanced with an apparently cautious step across the floor towards me." As it neared the dozing Hudson, its right hand reached towards him. Drury rushed at it with "a most awful yell", fell upon his friend, and recalled nothing distinctly for nearly three hours.

Drury's letter, dated Sunderland, July 13 1840, was printed in an 1842 pamphlet now held by Newcastle University Special Collections. The story reached Catherine Crowe's The Night-Side of Nature in 1848. Procter's diary, found after his death in 1875, appeared in the journal of the Society for Psychical Research in December 1892. The Procters left in 1847. Under the next occupants, the activity reportedly "passed away altogether".

Hudson heard one unexplained sound and saw nothing. A modern blogger has suggested children, the noise of the steam mill, the tides of the Gut, expectation, sleep paralysis and half-asleep hallucinations. In 2011 Michael J. Hallowell and Darren W. Ritson claimed to have finally explained the case, pointing to a murder at the site and a body buried in the cellar.

Andrew Lang suggested the case inspired Bulwer Lytton's The Haunted and the Haunters. The house is gone. Its site is a car park. The mill survives, cut down to four storeys, inside the Bridon-Bekaert rope works. Staff there still speak of being pushed, of feeling watched, and of shadows.