Odd this day
Joseph Ramsay died in Akenham, giving rise (eventually, and circuitously) to the ‘legend’ that if you walk round the church anticlockwise 13 times, the devil himself will rise out of one of the tombs. And there are still, supposedly, supernatural happenings to this day.
Joseph was just two, and according to some sources, died on his second birthday. This was at a time of high infant mortality, but that won’t have been of the smallest comfort to his parents. Perhaps the reverse. Either way, they were not helped by the fact that they were Baptists, who believed that people should only be baptised as adults, so young Joseph hadn’t been christened. Because their local vicar was Reverend George Drury, an ultra-ritualist Anglo-Catholic, who insisted on bells and smells and “flamboyant vestments” (according to Verity Holloway in Hellebore magazine, October 2020), which led his flock to see him — not entirely unreasonably — as a beastly Papist.
He did not help himself in this regard by starting up a convent of Benedictine nuns — “leading to accusations of keeping a harem” (Suffolk magazine, October 2020), and another community for men led by a hellfire preacher, the tonsured Father Ignatius. His rectory was painted with anti-Catholic graffiti, a nun was ‘rescued’ from inside, and Drury responded to all this by putting up a nine-foot wall — and neglecting the church, which began (Hellebore again) “accumulating a carpet of dead birds”.
Anyway, Drury would not allow the boy to be buried on the south side of the church, near friends and neighbours, only the north, where stillborn children and people who had been excommunicated were put. It’s even said (Hellebore again) that the sexton told the grieving parents he’d be buried there “like a dog”.
When Drury arrived on 23rd to conduct the funeral, he was surprised to find a crowd outside this usually deserted spot. There were at least 30 nonconformists present, and a congregationalist minister, Wickham Tozer — who had, according to one telling, already started the service. A sign inside the church, however, says Drury got there at 5 and was annoyed because Those Dreadful Nonconformists didn’t start until 5.30.
Either way, Drury tried to break it up — or interrupted to insist that the burial happen immediately (presumably so he could leave and not witness a service of which he strongly disapproved). Voices were raised (and, quite possibly, fists), and he stalked off, locking the churchyard as he went. When the time came, the small coffin had to be stuffed through a gap in the hedge (or carried over a wall — as ever, accounts vary).
Two days later, an article appeared in the East Anglian Daily Times detailing the dreadfulness of Drury — including a not-entirely-supported-by-evidence accusation that he’d brandished a red hot poker at someone. Drury sued, and won — but in doing so he won the battle, not the war.
Tozer wasn’t just a minister, you see — he was also a journalist, and had written the offending article. The nonconformists, who wanted the law on where they could be buried to change, had set a trap for Drury, and he had leapt two-footed into it. He was awarded 40 shillings by the court, but they started a fund for the legal fees which raised the equivalent of £250,000. They put up a headstone for Joseph, and were seen to have won a moral victory. Two years later, the Burial Laws Amendment Act of 1880 gave them a real victory — anyone else who refused to bury nonconformists next to Anglicans could go to prison for two years.
The writer Verity Holloway thinks this could explain where the Satan’s grave business comes from: folk tales down the decades of dead birds in the church, a disliked vicar with a dark reputation, and the idea of consecrated ground being now open to anyone… it has all, she writes:
survived as a folk belief in something wicked invading the realm of the sacred.
Naturally, there are still people credulous enough to give these ideas oxygen. Some sensible people — like this blogger — visit the isolated, abandoned church to take beautiful, atmospheric photos, and recount the story. Others, unfortunately, walk round it anticlockwise 13 times, and claim to feeeeeel things — foreboding, vibrations and the like — or remark on black clouds suddenly appearing. (English weather, after all, is known to be unremarkable and unchanging…)
When the East Anglian Daily Times wrote a ‘Weird Suffolk’ piece about Akenham in 2018, for example, it prompted a reader to send in a photo of the church which featured a ‘ghostly’ figure (see top image. Yes, that’s definitely not just a patch of light, or a bit of curtain behind the window, or some other rational explanation. Good heavens, no.) And not only that: this thing which cannot possibly be explained was, apparently
too odd for a coincidence.
Which rather goes against everything we know about coincidences.
