The beautiful, rolling hills of the Yorkshire Dales have long been a haven for holiday makers. However, the area also harbours some disturbing secrets.  Discover the darker side of the Dales with this terrifying collection of true-life tales from across the region. Featuring chapters on ecclesiastic ectoplasms, ghostly creatures, ladies in black and star-crossed spooks, this book is guaranteed to make your blood run cold.  Drawing on historical and contemporary sources and containing many tales which have never before been published, Haunted Yorkshire Dales will delight everyone interested in the paranormal.

Haunted Yorkshire Dales

Strevens, Summer

History

History Publishing Group

On the morning of 20 March 1809, the woman who had earned herself the title of ‘The Yorkshire Witch’ was hanged upon York’s ‘New Drop’ gallows before an estimated crowd of 20,000 people. Some of those who came to see Mary Bateman die had traveled all the way from Leeds, many of them on foot, and many of them were doubtless the victims of her hoaxes and extortion. A consummate con-artist, Mary was extremely adept at identifying the psychological weaknesses of the desperate and poor who populated the growing industrial metropolis of Leeds at the turn of the nineteenth century. Exploiting their fears and terror of witchcraft, Mary Bateman was well placed to rob them of all their worldly goods, yet she did much more than cause misery and penury; though tried and convicted on a single murder charge, the contemporary branding of Bateman as a serial killer is doubtless accurate. Meticulously researched, this accessible, and at times shocking retelling of Mary Bateman’s life, and indeed her death, is the first since the publication chronicling her criminal career appeared in print in 1811, two years after her execution. Not only focusing on the details of her felonies and the consequences to her victims, it also examines the macabre legacy of her mortal remains, a bone of contention (literally you might say!) with the continuous public display of her skeleton in the Thackray Medical Museum until the recent removal of this controversial exhibit.

The Yorkshire Witch: The Life and Trial of Mary Bateman

Religion & Spirituality

Pen and Sword History

In 1706 19-year-old Mary Channing was convicted of poisoning her husband and became the last woman to be burned at the stake in Dorset. Despite her impressive attempts to defend herself, the jury had taken only half an hour to find her guilty. Yet on pronouncement of the death sentence, Mary 'pleaded her belly' and thus postponed her execution until after she had given birth to her child in gaol. When the day finally arrived, her execution was made into something of a county fair, with 10,000 spectators gathering to view the barbaric ordeal upon the floor of Dorchester's ancient Roman amphitheater, Maumbury Rings. Although the law extended an act of clemency allowing for Mary to be strangled to death before the fires were lit, there is evidence to suggest that she was, in fact, still alive when consigned to the flames. After the gory spectacle was complete, it was said ‘not one of those 10,000 people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that.’ More than 300 years after her dramatic demise, Mary’s fate still holds a macabre fascination, as it did for Thomas Hardy, who recorded some of the grislier details of her execution in his notebooks and used her as the inspiration for his poem, 'The Mock Wife'. Yet while Mary Channing has been granted a kind of grim celebrity, as well as an established place in the annals of female murderers, a measure of compelling sympathy for her case is nonetheless another lasting aspect of her legacy.

Burned at the Stake: The Life and Death of Mary Channing

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

‘For the sake of decency, gentlemen, don't hang me high.’ This was the last request of modest murderess Mary Blandy, who was hanged for poisoning her father in 1752. Concerned that the young men in the crowd who had thronged to see her execution might look up her skirts as she was ‘turned off’ by the hangman, this last nod to propriety might appear farcical in one who was about to meet her maker. Yet this was just another aspect of a case which attracted so much public attention in its day that some determined spectators even went to the lengths of climbing through the courtroom windows to get a glimpse of Mary while on trial. Indeed her case remained newsworthy for the best part of 1752, for months garnering endless scrutiny and mixed reaction in the popular press. Opinions are certainly still divided on the matter of Mary’s ‘intention’ in the poisoning of her father, and the extent to which her coercive lover, Captain William Cranstoun, was responsible for this murder by proxy. Yet Mary Blandy’s trial was also notable in that it was the first time that detailed medical evidence had been presented in a court of law on a charge of murder by poisoning, and the first time that any court had accepted toxicological evidence in an arsenic poisoning case. The forensic legacy of the acceptance of Dr Anthony Addington’s application of chemistry to a criminal investigation another compelling aspect of The First Forensic Hanging.

The First Forensic Hanging: The Toxic Truth that Killed Mary Blandy

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

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Books by Strevens, Summer

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Strevens, Summer. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Haunted Yorkshire Dales

The Yorkshire Witch: The Life and Trial of Mary Bateman

Burned at the Stake: The Life and Death of Mary Channing

The First Forensic Hanging: The Toxic Truth that Killed Mary Blandy