The silly stories actually began long before Joyce Coley began collecting them. In the Worcester Archive is a letter from Alfred Armistead of Bath, Somerset, dated 26 November 1953 and addressed to the Chief Constable CID, Worcestershire Police. It referred to an article a year earlier in the Sunday Pictorial asking the public’s help in connection with a variety of unsolved murders and missing persons. The letter writer remembered ‘a case of some woman being stuck into a tree’ and he had a vivid picture in his mind of a man who had travelled for miles and could get no rest (the last two words were underlined in the original). Armstrong made a sketch of the man he pictured, with one leg raised on a bank or a stone wall and looking at the tree in question. The sketch is still in the Archive and is so vague and badly drawn as to be useless. Armistead had clearly come across the name Anna somewhere and wondered whether she was the sister of the man in the sketch. She ‘feels there’s an unwritten chapter still to be unfolded’.
There is no reference to any police follow-up to this and I suspect it was stashed into the ‘time-wasters’ folder at Worcester CID’s headquarters.
Another letter was sent to the chief constable, the long-suffering Captain J.E. Lloyd Williams on the same day as the one quoted above, which can only be a coincidence. This one was from a clairvoyant, Mrs Zita Boyden of Compton Road, Wolverhampton. She had visited Quaestor and was absolutely convinced that she had discovered the truth about Bella. She cited Scotland Yard, Carmarthen police, Richmond police and Halifax police in the context of recent murders, such as the Towpath murder and the Harries murder, both of which were headline-grabbing at the time, if only because the government was seriously toying with the abolition of the death penalty (not actually removed until 1965). Alfred Whiteway raped and murdered two teenaged girls, Barbara Songhurst and Christine Reed on the Thames towpath near Richmond. He withdrew a confession to the police and claimed that the axe which was the murder weapon had been planted on him by them. Albert Pierrepoint did not believe that any more than the jury did and he hanged Whiteway at Wandsworth on 22 December. The trial had only ended three weeks before Boyden wrote to the chief constable. Thomas Harries killed his relatives John and Phoebe for money at their farmhouse in Pendine, Carmarthenshire in October 1953. He was charged with the crime only a fortnight before Boyden wrote and did not meet Pierrepoint until 1954.
Did Zita Boyden pester the chief constables of London and Carmarthen in these cases as she did at Worcester? It seems likely, although what convicted both Whiteway and Harries was good old-fashioned police work and hard evidence. It was the era, however, of the psychic detective. Such people offered their advice, which was rarely taken, in the Meon Hill murder of Charles Walton in 1945, but the most celebrated was Dutchman Peter Hurkos who located the symbolic Stone of Scone stolen from Westminster Abbey by Scottish nationalists in 1950 and helped Boston police with their enquiries into Albert de Salvo who strangled a number of the city’s elderly female residents in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Zita Boyden’s visionary ability – ‘call it what you will’4 – told her that Lou Bella, as she called her, was ‘a country type, slow-spoken, fresh coloured’ with brown hair. She worked as a domestic in some sort of Catholic institution. The man who put her body in the tree was ‘tall, blond, tanned, fresh skin’. He wore a leather jacket with a sheepskin collar. ‘He was, I believe, a Dutch Canadian with a name such as Franz or Franc (short for Francis).’ The surname could be Christener or Kristener. Boyden saw him as a motor-cycle ‘“cop”’, dressed in dark uniform and riding a motorbike. Bella’s dress denoted ‘Institute clothes’ and the place she worked had polished oak floors. She probably had a child aged about 12, who looked like her father. The ring she wore was worn on ‘the middle finger of her right hand and it may have had a depiction of a saint on it’.
The actual ring had appeared in umpteen newspaper photographs by this time and bore no relation to this. It was assumed to be a wedding ring worn on the left hand. ‘She had small, fat fingers with pointed ends.’ By this time, the fact that the dead woman’s right hand was found separated from her body was front-page news and being linked to the ‘hand of glory’ in the sensational witchcraft connection (see Chapter 14). Bella had ‘something wrong with her throat, maybe strangulation’. She was hauled into the tree using a rope ‘with a loop so that it could be removed’. No rope had been found in the wych elm but Boyden had to have an escape clause to explain this fact. She believed the name Hipkins might be relevant, but could not be certain. As for the Christian name, a popular song was Bella Bambina or it might have been ‘a joke that stuck to her that she was a daft loob, Ella’. Bella Bambina had been an Al Bowly number some years before but I can find no slang usage of loob meaning stupid anywhere.
Boyden was nearly as interested in Bella’s child as she was in the woman herself. It (she does not specify gender) was ‘solid, plump, with straight hair … broad, flattish nose, blue eyes’. She assumed that the murder had a domestic motive – a quarrel with a man in her life – ‘perhaps the man was already married?’ And, as if the police did not have enough to do, Boyden suggested that they should try all the institutions (what we would call care homes) in the Midlands.
Armistead and Boyden pale, however, beside what one journalist at the time called ‘the ramblings of Mr Elwell’. John Wilcox of the Birmingham Gazette forwarded a tape from George Elwell of Merriden Avenue, Wolleston which the reporter had made with him on 10 January 1954. Elwell was able to put himself into a trance to solve the case for the police. A railway clerk, Elwell, like many locals, was fascinated by the case and took to wandering Hagley Wood late at night, to pick up what today we would call ‘vibes’. After ten minutes near the site of the wych elm, he went home and using a mirror and light bulb to create a ‘strobe’ effect, hypnotized himself and was able to pick up messages.
He had set an alarm clock to wake himself up and whatever entity he believed he was talking to gave him the name of the dead woman and of the man who killed her:
Cold … it is very cold. I hear a horse neighing somewhere … it is cold, very cold … rain dropping on the trees, on the leaves … dark, very dark … horse neighing again. A tree, yes, a tree … what has he got on his shoulder? Oh, God! Untying string … Oh, my God! Blood down her face on to her hair. Oh, she is dead … she is dead.
Name, name, name. What is her name? Bradman, no, no. Bradley – yes, that’s it. Annie Bradley, of Leeds. Yes, the man. Tall … moustache … five buttons down his jacket … narrow trousers … light blouse … funny sleeves … John Connor … John Connor … C-O-N-N-O-R. Tying it up. Got to get away.
The recording lasted about fifteen minutes. What are we to make of it? It reads like a bad B movie script; good lighting and tolerable acting might make it acceptable to a cinema-going audience. A tree was hardly remarkable – Bella had been found in one. It was safe to assume that the disposal of the body happened at night, which explains the darkness. The implication is that Bella was killed elsewhere and her body brought to the wood in a bag. Blood on her head, which would imply blunt force trauma and probable damage to the skull, is not reported by Professor Webster, who assumed that the cause of death was suffocation. The names Bradman, Bradley and Connor led nowhere; neither did Leeds. According to McCormick, who had not seen this file but quotes Elwell extensively (presumably from the John Wilcox article), the police followed up Elwell’s suggestions, but there is nothing in the Worcester Archive to suggest that they did. Another cold trail; another waste of police time.
By 1953, the papers, especially local ones, were full of the Bella story. Quaestor was particularly good at keeping the story alive. In the Express and Star 16 January 1958, he not only repeated the Anna of Claverley story but seems to have added his own embellishments. An officer had come to see her late one night ‘in fact, on a day which was consistent with the expert assessment of the day of Bella’s death – and told her that something terrible had happened to him’. Here, we have a wilful misconstruing of Webster’s suggestion – he gave a six-month window for the murder, which contains an awful lot of ‘consistent’ days. Here, too, we have George Elwell’s five-buttoned jacket, the usual pattern of an officer’s full-dress khaki at the time. ‘He confessed to her under secrecy,’ Quaestor went on, ‘that he had a friend, a male trapeze artist then appearing at the Coventry Hippodrome and a Dutchman, in a car.’ Here was a garbled version of the ice-skaters, not trapeze artists, Frick and Frack.
The officer was driving it. Between the other two men in the back was Bella. Suddenly, as the car was descending Mucklow Hill, Halesowen, something happened. The girl seemed to have collapsed. The officers stopped the car. The two men then told him to drive on. “She’s dead” they told him curtly.
The car was driven through the blacked-out town of Halesowen, then Hasbury. Finally, after several tentative halts, he was told to turn right off the main Bromsgrove road. He found himself in Hagley Wood. Here the body of the girl now known as Bella, was carried out and the officer was called on to help stuff it into the hollow trunk of the Wych Elm.
Quaestor claimed to have been present at the mysterious rendezvous with DI Williams and Anna, yet this is so far removed from the statement she made to that same police officer as to defy belief. The anonymous ‘officer’ was her own husband, Jack Mossop. There was only one man in the back seat, not two and nobody there was a trapeze artist. Bella was in the front passenger seat, not the back and she did not die; she passed out. If Anna was lying to DI Williams when she made her statement, why, how and when did she give Quaestor the ‘real’ version?
But by now the journalist was in full flight. The terrified officer returned to Hagley Wood the next night and told Anna ‘There’s no mistake. The body is there all right, just as we left it.’ And it was Anna who told her husband this story ‘long ago’.
Concerned that such a murder remained motiveless, Quaestor then came up, via Anna of course, with the idea that the Dutchman in the car was a German spy, often dripping with cash, who asked questions about aircraft factories in the area. Bella ‘or “Lubella” had entered the country illegally “after Dunkirk”’ and was a spy who had fallen foul of her fellow agents and was killed by them. The officer was so unnerved that he had a nervous breakdown and was ‘taken to a mental home’ where he died.
All of this brings us back to the vicious circle concocted by Donald McCormick; it has virtually no bearing on Una Mossop/Hainsworth’s statement to the police. In true journalistic style, Quaestor concludes that MI5 were brought into the case and the trapeze artist was probably never discovered. Because, of course, he did not exist.
Quaestor saves his best piece of nonsense for the end of his article, supposedly quoting ‘the pathologist’ (presumably Webster) on ITV as saying ‘But after extensive inquiries by the superintendent [Williams] he was able to identify [Bella]. It was a classic piece of detection.’
And the Quaestor article is a classic piece of misinformation. There are a number of items in the police Archive which seem out of place, but they clearly all had relevance at the time of the investigation and had to be followed up. There is a black and white snapshot of a woman who may be Ethel Prosser, standing with two men. She is wearing a bright summer frock and is squinting into the sun. she is clearly not Bella – her teeth are too regular and she is too tall. The Archive contents give us her name, but no other information and her significance is now lost.
Then there is the letter from Lieutenant Colonel O. Gibson of GHQ (India), New Delhi, dated 24 January 1943. This was written to a Leonard Hughes, c/o Stewarts and Lloyds Coombs Wood Tube Works of Halesowen. This is simply a ‘hello’ letter, reminiscing on rabbit-hunting in Britain and lamenting the fact that Gibson does not have time to take pot shots (actually, with a tommy-gun!) at the Indian wildlife. There is no reference to Bella or Hagley Wood, largely because it was written four months before the body was found!
This India connection may have links with another photograph in the Archive, that of Billy Gibson. Despite the spelling of the Christian name, Billy was a woman. The photograph shows an attractive girl, with blonde hair and shorts, standing between two men. A separate sheet tells us that she was the wife of Gerald Gibson and they lived at the Manor House, Hagley. However, since the couple moved to India in 1938, neither the photograph nor the letter can have any relevance to the Hagley Wood murder at all.
Among several letters offering solutions to the Hagley Wood murder in the Express and Star, some point to gypsies, others claim that local foxhounds would have smelt the decomposing body long before it was found. Then there was this one of 23 November 1953:
Is it not possible that the adherents of the cult of witchcraft, who, it would appear, were responsible for the death of Bella, adopt some form of commemoration of the date of her death which would be of significance to members of the group, but to no one else? By coincidence, there appeared in the Express and Star on the day [Quaestor’s] second article was published, an “In Memoriam” notice referring to a woman named Bella. Obviously, this notice did not refer to the woman in the wych elm, but might not a study of “In Memoriam” notices possibly provide a slender clue?
And was there anybody out there who could carry out such a study into cults and the occult? In fact, there was. Her name was Dr Margaret Murray.
Chapter 14
Lord of the Gallows
Something very odd happened soon after the end of the Second World War. Today we have seen another outbreak of it in response to the Covid pandemic. In the recent case, the mass stupidity of whole nations has been manifest by a panic, a blind belief in ‘the science’, all of it fanned by the hysteria of social media. The result has been serious damage to economies, children’s education and increasing mental health problems. It has brought the oddballs out from under their rocks, giving ammunition to Quanon, for example, a group that believes that the pandemic was yet another example of the American government’s cabal of cannibalistic child-killers intent on ruling the world. Anti-vaxxers appeared from nowhere, stepping back into a Medieval hell where there was no science that actually worked. A definitive book on all this has yet to appear, but the responses are not unique. Wherever there is upheaval to the normal, the routine, elements of society go haywire and this is certainly true of the immediate post-war period.
On 24 June 1947, experienced pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. He was looking for the wreckage of a plane that had crashed there earlier, when he saw nine objects flying in formation. He estimated their air speed at over 1,000 miles an hour, faster than any known aircraft at the time. ‘They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water,’ he told reporters, and the concept of the flying saucer was born. Governments across the world have invested millions into projects to prove or disprove the existence of alien life on other planets and in other galaxies. In 1952, even a realist like Winston Churchill could write to the Air Ministry, ‘What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?’
We have all been lulled into a broad acceptance that there must be something else ‘out there’, not just mankind on planet earth – the whole existence of a ‘science fiction’ genre in literature and the media is proof of that. But the same question, slightly adapted, can be raised in connection with the body in Hagley Wood – what is the truth?
It was not flying saucers that provided a potential answer, but an older, more fundamental bogeyman – witchcraft. It is difficult to find the beginnings of this in connection with the murder of Bella, but certainly even by the end of the 1940s, sporadic letters to local newspapers hinted that witchcraft may be involved. According to Quaestor, Anna of Claverley’s letter to him said, ‘The affair is now closed and involves no witches, black magic or moon night rites.’ But who had said it did? In the public mind, witches lived in woods. They cavorted under the moon in woodland clearings at their sabbats, having sex with the Devil. The very name – Hagley – had a sinister sound and although the Saxon word wych had nothing to do with a devil’s disciple (as we have seen, it meant pliant or bendable), it sounded as if it did. From such ignorant and simplistic beginnings, a whole industry can spring up – witness Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers.
The only ‘evidence’ that witchcraft was involved came from Bella’s hand, which was found by police thirteen paces from the wych elm. According to Professor Webster, these were a disarticulated jumble of bones, just like others found in the bole of the tree itself, but to the journalists of the sensation-seeking Fifties, it became a whole hand. Indeed, one of them refers to it as an entire arm. This became equated with the main de gloire, the French term for the hand of glory, from which the magic (and poisonous) plant Mandragora (mandrake) may take its name. In certain witchcraft traditions, the severed hand of a corpse had supernatural powers, especially if it was removed from a victim dangling on the gallows; the phrase ‘Lord of the Gallows’ was synonymous, some said, with the Devil. It had to be preserved carefully, using certain herbs and could then be used to open locks, discover buried treasure and render enemies powerless. If the fingers were set alight, anyone in the vicinity would fall into a trance-like sleep. So far, so much nonsense. In one of the worst examples of anti-witch hysteria, in 1591, a number of women were put on trial for the attempted murder (by spells) of James VI of Scotland, who believed in witches to the point of obsession. During the trial, one of the accused, John Fane, admitted to breaking into a church at night by using a hand of glory to force the locks. This ignores the fact that churches were supposed to be open night and day for the Godly to pray and the fact that Fane, along with his fellow accusees, had been tortured for days before they made their confessions, which was often the case in trials during the ‘witch-craze’ of the time.
The disarticulated hand found in the leaf mould of Hagley Wood belonged to Bella. She was not a felon hanged on the gallows and the hand had almost certainly been bitten off by an animal, probably a badger, before the body was dumped into the wych elm. Badgers are omnivorous and have powerful jaws. The only other woodland predator, a fox, would have been agile enough to climb the elm if it had to, but its jaws would not be strong enough to dissect a human arm in this way. In another example of a woman’s body found hidden in the wild, Joan Wolfe in Houndown Wood, her fingers had been gnawed away by rats. It is a common situation.
But the lunatic lobby would not accept the natural. Bella’s fate had to involve the supernatural. Why? To begin with, witchcraft was still a crime in Britain during the war, one of the many examples of obsolete legislation then still on the statute books. And there was still, for all the advent of science, technology and cold reason, a fascination with the macabre that was centuries old and still grips us today. Recent research, carried out by psychologists at the University of Hertfordshire, suggests that a third of us have brains that are hard-wired to accept the supernatural as natural; to them, ghosts, for example, are real. The case of Helen Duncan is one in point. The woman already had two convictions against her for obtaining money for fortune-telling and in 1944 she was charged with fraud. The case was actually tricky legally because Helen asked for payment for claiming to be able to contact the dead, as spiritualists have done for decades. In the end, how could this work if her client believed in her powers? The solution, unsatisfactory as it was, was to charge her and two others under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. This was not repealed until 1951. The queues at the Old Bailey stretched around the block and Hannen Swaffer, one of the most revered journalists of the day, spoke in her defence. She was found guilty, however, and gaoled for nine months. Nor was she alone. In July 1944, as the Allies were fighting their way towards the Rhine, 72-year-old Jane Yorke of Forest Gate, London was tried at the Old Bailey on four charges of ‘pretending to exercise or use a kind of conjuration contrary to the Witchcraft Act’. As was more usual in such cases, Yorke was fined without gaol time.
But Helen Duncan and Jane Yorke were only the tip of the ‘diabolical’ iceberg. The war poet Rupert Brooke was only one of the Edwardian literati who referred to themselves as neo-Pagans. Jehovah’s Witnesses, fortune-tellers, clairvoyants and spiritualists all came to the fore during the Second World War, sometimes because they ‘doorstepped’ people, or because what they did was to profit by the war; spiritualists like Helen Duncan were preying on a country gripped by grief and fear. As one magistrate put it – ‘to pretend to conjure up [the spirits of the dead] when it is false and a hollow lie is nothing less than a public mischief’. There was nothing like the round-up engendered in Germany by the Aktion Hess simply because no one in the corridors of British power was obsessed by the occult. As a young man before the First World War, Winston Churchill apparently visited fortune-tellers, but he had long outgrown all that by 1940.
In the public mind, there was a blurred distinction, if there was one at all, between the worlds of spiritualism and witchcraft. Between the wars, characters like Montague Summers were writing a plethora of books on witches, vampires, Satanism and black magic. Summers was a Catholic priest with an unlikely list of Christian names – Alfonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague – and he earned his living as a theatre critic, especially knowledgeable on Restoration drama. He revelled in the gory and his works on witchcraft in 1926 and 1927, were not well researched, but read brilliantly and he captured the dark world of Bohemian London where hundreds of bored socialites flocked to buy his books. The bibliography for his History of Witchcraft and Demonology runs to thirty pages and looks very scholarly. He neglects to tell us, however, that most of his sources were unprovable nonsense. ‘There were some unbridled imaginations,’ Summers wrote about these sources, ‘there was deception; there was legerdemain [sleight of hand]; there was phantasy; there was fraud.’ But his readership either ignored this line or could not distinguish which was which.
In fact, Summers was backed up from an unlikely source: the hard-bitten detective Robert Fabian. He has a chapter in his London After Dark (1954) called ‘And so to the Devil …’. It is unfortunate that he believed that witches used to be burned on Tower Hill. Burning as a punishment for witchcraft was confined to Scotland and Europe; in England, witches were hanged, but Fabian was in no doubt that in London at any rate, diabolical rites were being practised as never before. He knew of pagan temples in South Kensington, Paddington and Bloomsbury where naked ceremonies were held on a regular basis. What worried Fabian was the use of narcotics at these ceremonies, especially the influence of the newly arrived West Indian communities with their drums and voodoo.
‘The door to black magic,’ Fabian wrote, ‘is through the back offices of two or three dusty little London bookshops that specialise in volumes on the occult, diabolism, alchemy.’ There was a house in Lancaster Gate that the Met knew well, because beyond the dingy little flats at the front was a temple to Satan, complete with high altar, black candles and magical symbols painted on the walls and ceiling. Pan, Abramelin, Saint Sécaire – these were the deities worshipped during the ceremonies which involved sex (often with minors) and flagellation. All this sounds like a film set from the Hammer studios, the physical reality of one of Dennis Wheatley’s novels, but it was real and it was happening in London in the middle of the twentieth century.
Enter Dr Margaret Murray. More than anyone else, this brilliant but eccentric academic gave credence to links between the occult and Bella. An anthropologist and archaeologist, Margaret had had a long and colourful career by the time the body was found in the wych elm and she was by then 80 years old. She had worked under the archaeologist William Flinders Petrie on digs in Syria and the Valley of the Kings in Egypt years before Howard Carter put Egyptology centre stage by finding the fabulous tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. She lectured at University College London and was a tireless defender of women’s rights, immersed as she was in what was almost entirely a man’s world. A Suffragette, she had volunteered as a nurse in the First World War and suffered a minor breakdown as a result.
In the world of academe, however, she was never fully accepted. The degrees she had were acquired later, almost in a pseudo-honorary capacity, and her views were always outside the conventional. As well as works on ancient Egyptian linguistics, which had little interest for the general public, she wrote a definitive book on witchcraft, The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921), at the same time that Montague Summers was putting pen to paper and writing articles for The Bystander on black magic in fashionable London. The God of the Witches followed ten years later and the quite bizarre The Divine King in England in 1954 when interest in Bella was being revived. In contrast with Summers’ slavering accounts of sabbats and orgies, Murray concentrated on the sociological and anthropological origins of the witch cult. She claimed, in a theory still held to be likely, that witchcraft was simply the Old Religion before the arrival of Christianity. The gods of prehistory, she argued, were linked to fertility and survival – the weather, the harvest, even the phases of the moon. Central to survival and fertility was the male animal – the horned god (which ran a little counter to her espousal of the feminist cause). Paintings in the Lascaux caves in France show such animals, with stags’ horns, standing upright on their hind legs. In the Roman period, such a figure is often called Cernunnos, depicted in mosaics and murals all over Europe. In time, he would metamorphose into the legendary Herne the Hunter, riding with his spectral hounds in Windsor Great Park. He was last reported as a ‘genuine’ sighting in 1962.
Because Christianity wanted to oust the Old Religion, the horned god became the Devil, complete with cloven hoofs and tail, the epitome of evil. And witchcraft, originally a mix of folklore, superstition and early attempts at medicine, became inextricably linked with the occult. Later writers had to differentiate between black magic (evil, once referred to as malifici) and white magic (good). They even invented the middle ground of grey magic, obviously a mixture of the two.
In English social history, the white witch or ‘cunning woman’ was a real character, not a Disney nightmare to scare small children watching Snow White in a spookily darkened cinema. Such people were midwives and nurses in their local village communities (perhaps, even, a village like Hagley) and they invariably helped to lay out the dead for burial. There were still white witches dotted around the country in the 1930s because real medicine was expensive before the creation of the National Health Service. Older inhabitants of Bubbenhall in Warwickshire, for example, remember ‘Friday’ Watts (actually a man) who acted in this capacity between the wars.
Margaret Murray’s The Divine King went further, claiming that all the kings of England who died bloody deaths, from William Rufus in the New Forest in 1100 to Richard III at Bosworth in 1485, were all acts of ritual sacrifice in which the king in question was murdered to appease the vengeful gods of the Old Religion.
It was the murder of the labourer Charles Walton in February 1945 that intrigued Dr Murray. She gave her opinion that this was ‘probably’ to do with witchcraft and that of Bella ‘possibly’ so. The Walton murder, in the Warwickshire village of Lower Quinton, has been linked with Bella and Hagley Wood ever since and it has effectively stifled any serious investigation of either crime. The pernicious effects of Walton’s death will be dealt with in another chapter, but to understand the way in which Margaret Murray’s views were distorted, we have to discuss the involvement of another man with a chapter to himself, Donald McCormick.
‘[Dr Murray] was no crank,’ McCormick wrote, ‘no credulous romanticist, but a sober, even sceptical analyst of the occult.’ As he says, she went on to write much more after the Hagley Wood case (which she typed herself) including her autobiography in 1963, My First Hundred Years. Despite handling a number of ancient bodies, she had never had the sense of being haunted by any of them. She relates the story of a fellow-archaeologist, Arthur Mace, who woke up in his tent in Egypt one morning with a mummy’s hand around his throat. His terrified screams brought the rest of the team running, only to discover that a recently exposed mummy had been left on a shelf over Mace’s bed and had crumbled in the night, the entire arm landing on his chest with the fingers under his chin. The younger members of the team, not to mention the general public, had been brought up with Boris Karloff’s The Mummy (1931) and various spinoffs. They almost expected something of the kind to happen.
Margaret Murray dismissed the story of the curse on the tomb of Tutankhamen (although she does not specify the pharaoh) as mass hysteria, which is precisely what it was. What McCormick does not tell us about the Egyptologist is that she had a wicked sense of humour, implying that a particular ‘haunted’ mummy caused both the sinking of the Titanic and the Empress of Ireland and, when sold to the Kaiser, caused the First World War! Was she, a little cynically perhaps, mocking the hysteria surrounding Bella’s corpse?
In discussing ghosts, Dr Murray makes an observation which fits the Hagley case perfectly. ‘It has long been the fashion to deride what you cannot understand, or to misinterpret the evidence, or even to believe evidence which is clearly false.’
According to McCormick, Dr Murray believed that witches still existed in England in the 1940s and 1950s. ‘I wouldn’t say that some of my best friends are witches, but, on the other hand, some of my casual acquaintances are.’1 In November 1951, she wrote an article on witchcraft for the Sunday Dispatch. ‘That [by having others believe in them] is how witches are made and maybe always have been made, though with the growth of motor travel and the steady penetration of remote rural areas by the outside world, there are fewer with each decade.’
McCormick claims that Dr Murray visited Hagley (when is not recorded) and got a hostile reaction from locals concerning witchcraft links with Bella. One newspaper had suggested that Hagley was ‘a village of devil worshippers’ even though Margaret had made no such claim. McCormick claimed that the occultist had compiled a detailed account of both the Hagley Wood and Meon Hill murders, but if she did, they have not survived. She died in 1963, so any comments on Hagley Wood come through the prism of McCormick; not, as we have seen, the most impeccable source.
