12. The Pendle Witches, Part 2: The Finger of God

Content note: this episode includes executions, the deaths of adults and children, and a child used as a witness against her own family. How could a few pins on a muddy Lancashire road lead to ten people being hanged? In March 1612, a pedlar called John Law refused to give some pins to a poor young woman called Alizon Device near Colne. Moments later, he collapsed in the road. By the end of the summer, the families who lived in the shadow of Pendle Hill would be accused of witchcraft, and an old blind woman known as Demdike would die in a cell beneath Lancaster Castle. In Part One, we meet two feuding families, a magistrate with something to prove, and a king who had written his own book on witches. We also meet Thomas Potts, the court clerk whose account is almost all we have, and who wasn’t anywhere near as neutral as he’d like us to think. We follow the case from the Colne road to a secret gathering at Malkin Tower on Good Friday, and to the arrest of Alice Nutter, a wealthy woman whose respectability couldn’t save her. And back in Pendle there’s Jennet Device, aged nine, who is about to become the most important witness in Lancashire. Part Two follows the trials at Lancaster.

The Halifax Gibbet was a beheading machine used in Halifax, West Yorkshire, from 1286 until 1650. Under the town’s ancient Gibbet Law, anyone caught stealing goods worth thirteen and a half pennies or more could be tried by their neighbours and beheaded on the next market day, more than a century before the French guillotine. So how did a Yorkshire market town of weavers and sheep end up cutting off its own neighbours’ heads in front of the Saturday market? Why did travellers pray to be delivered “from Hell, Hull and Halifax”? And why, when workmen dug up a forgotten stone platform in 1839, were two skeletons found nearby with their skulls lying two feet from their bodies? In this episode: The Gibbet Law, and why stealing cloth from the tenter frames could cost you your life A trial with no judge and no lawyers, just sixteen local men The machine itself, where the whole crowd pulled the rope so that nobody was the executioner, and a stolen sheep could pull the pin The prisoners who escaped by dodging the blade and running for the Hebble Brook, and the man who came back A father and daughter beheaded together The last two men executed on Saturday 30 April 1650 The Scottish earl said to have copied the machine, and then been beheaded by it Content note: this episode describes executions by beheading and includes human remains. Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the darker stories of the north of England, hosted by Lucy Sheridan. If you enjoyed this episode, please hit Follow. It’s like a tip that costs nothing, and it helps these northern stories reach new listeners. Website: www.badandmad.com Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email [email protected]

Bram Stoker went home from Whitby with the bones of a monster. So how did they become the most famous vampire in the world? In Part Two here, we follow the seven years it took Stoker to write Dracula, and the disastrous stage reading at the Lyceum Theatre in 1897. We look at what the novel was really saying about Victorian Britain: its fear of the “New Woman”, who was independent, outspoken and sexual, and its terror of syphilis, the disease that passed through the blood and haunted the age. Then we follow the Count’s strange afterlife: Florence Stoker’s court battle against Nosferatu, Bela Lugosi being buried in his cape, Christopher Lee’s years with Hammer, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning film. We finish back where it all started, in Whitby, where the Goth Weekend has brought thousands of people in black to the town since 1994. Missed Part One? Start there for the holiday that started it all. Huge thanks to my researcher, Lauren, for her invaluable input: Website: laurenburles.com IG: yogabylauren Substack: laurenburles.subtack.com

Why did a man on holiday in Whitby go home with a monster in his pocket? In the summer of 1890, Bram Stoker, a Dublin civil servant turned manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre, took a break in Whitby. He arrived with a few pages of notes and a villain called Count Wampyr. He went home with the bones of a novel. In Part One of this two-part story, we follow Stoker from a sickly childhood in Clontarf to his life-changing dinner with the actor Henry Irving, and then on to Whitby itself, from the founding of its abbey in 657 to the town he found in 1890. We visit the library where he came across the word Dracula, hear about the 1885 wreck of the Russian ship Dmitry that became the Demeter in the novel, and climb the 199 steps to St Mary’s churchyard, where he copied names from the headstones. Part Two follows what he did with it all, and the unhinged making of the legend! Huge thanks to my researcher, Lauren, for her invaluable input: Website: laurenburles.com IG: yogabylauren Substack: laurenburles.subtack.com **** Follow Bad Mad and Northern on your podcast app now, so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show. Thanks lads!

What would you do if you were told your village had to disappear so a city could have water? (Content note: this episode includes a fatal explosion and the exhumation of graves.) In the first half of the twentieth century, three northern valleys were flooded to make reservoirs. This episode tells the story of each of them. Mardale Green in the Lake District was drowned beneath Haweswater to supply Manchester. Fernilee in the Goyt Valley, near Buxton, was home to a gunpowder works that lost three men in the 1909 explosion before the water came. At Derwent in Derbyshire, the graves were dug up and moved before Ladybower filled, and the church spire was left standing above the water until it was dynamited in 1947. This is a gripping story about loss, progress, and who pays the price for both. In a dry summer, all three places still come back. Please follow Bad Mad and Northern so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show. Thanks lads! Lucy x