Old Rectory, Epworth

The Old Rectory at Epworth is the brick house Samuel Wesley built in 1709, after fire destroyed the thatched rectory his family had occupied since 1697, and the childhood home of his sons John and Charles Wesley. From 2 December 1716 to the end of January 1717 the household reported groans, knocking that answered back when knocked to, footsteps on empty stairs and a bed lifted with a girl sitting on it. Emily Wesley named the thing Jeffrey. The case is unusual because the paperwork survives: letters written while the noises were still going on, the rector's own diary, statements John Wesley took from his mother and five of his sisters in 1726, and the narrative he printed himself in 1784. Joseph Priestley published the family papers in 1791, called them the best-authenticated story of the kind extant, and concluded that the servants had done it. The house is Grade I listed and has been a Methodist museum since the 1950s. Its guides tell the Wesleys, and Old Jeffrey appears nowhere in the museum's own published material.

Samuel Wesley was presented to the living of Epworth in 1697 and moved his family into a rectory of timber and thatch, described in a survey the museum quotes from G. J. Stevenson's Memorials of the Wesley Family as "five baies, built all of timber and plaister, and covered with straw thatche". Fire took two thirds of the house in 1702 and the whole of it on 9 February 1709, the night his five-year-old son John was lifted out of an upper window. Samuel rebuilt in brick, spent £400 of his own money on it and stayed in debt afterwards. The building still stands on Rectory Street and holds list entry 1068805 on the National Heritage List for England, Grade I since 27 September 1951, described there as "Rectory, now house and museum. 1709 with later minor alterations; renovations of 1956-7", with a pantile roof, the south front in Flemish bond and the west garden front in English garden wall bond. The noises ran, in John Wesley's own summary of 1784, "from the second of December to the end of January". The first to hear anything was the maid Nanny Marshall, who came into the dining room with a bowl of butter in her hand and reported groans "as of a dying man" — in the hall, in Molly Wesley's account of 1726; at the dining-room door, in their mother's letter of January 1717. The household took them for Mr Turpine, a neighbour who had the stone and used to groan so. Susanna Wesley wrote to her eldest son on 12 January 1716-7 that they had tried to laugh the girl out of her fears, and that two or three nights later "several of the family heard a strange knocking in divers places, usually three or four knocks at a time, and then stayed a little". She settled on rats, and sent for a horn because a neighbour called John Maw had driven rats out of his own house by blowing one. Her verdict on that experiment is the sharpest sentence in her letter: "from that night they began to blow, the noises were more loud, and distinct, both day and night, than before". The rector heard nothing for a fortnight and treated the whole thing as a fright the girls were giving each other. His diary entry for Friday 21 December records the change in a line — "Knocking I heard first, I think, this night" — and he was woken a little before one by "nine distinct very loud knocks" with a pause at every third stroke. On the 26th he went down and knocked with his stick against the kitchen joists; the answer came back as often and as loud, until he tried the irregular seven-stroke knock he always used at his own gate, "but this puzzled it, and it did not answer, or not in the same method". He walked the house by day and by night, with lights and without, spoke to the noise and got "only once or twice two or three feeble squeaks, a little louder than the chirping of a bird, but not like the noise of rats, which I have often heard". Clergymen advised him to leave. His son printed the refusal: "No: let the devil flee from me: I will never flee from the devil." The knocking kept time with the liturgy. His daughter Susannah wrote that it began when her father reached "Our most gracious Sovereign Lord", and the rector's own journal notes that "some of the family called it a Jacobite". He ran a test on it. On mornings when he shortened family prayers and left out the confession, the absolution and the petitions for King George and the Prince, nothing knocked, so "I therefore used them one morning for a trial; at the name of king George, it began to knock, and did the same when I prayed for the prince" — and ten people in the room said afterwards that they had heard it. Emily Wesley read the affair as witchcraft, on two grounds she set out herself: there had been a disturbance at a town nearby "that was undoubtedly witches", and her father had spent several Sundays preaching against consulting cunning men. Her sisters grew casual. "Jeffrey is coming: it is time to go to sleep", they told each other; and when it sounded by day they called the youngest child, "Hark, Kezzy, Jeffrey is knocking above", and she "would run up stairs, and pursue it from room to room, saying she desired no better diversion". The case survives because Samuel Wesley junior, then teaching at Westminster, kept asking for detail and kept what came back. He put the questions a hostile lawyer would put — "Was there never a new maid, or man, in the house, that might play tricks? ... Could not cats, or rats, or dogs, be the sprights?" — and his mother answered them one at a time. His father promised him the full account and joked that "It would make a glorious penny book for Jack Dunton; but while I live I am not ambitious for any thing of that nature". In August and September 1726 John Wesley went to Epworth and took statements from his mother, from Emily, Molly, Sukey, Nancy and Kezzy, from the manservant Robert Brown and from Mr Hoole, the rector of Haxey who had sat up in the house. The heading on the manuscript reads "My Father's Journal, or Diary, transcribed by my Brother Jack, August 27. 1726, and from him by me, February 7. 1730-1". The papers stayed with Samuel junior's daughter and granddaughter, who would not hand them to John Wesley, "being offended at his conduct", on the assumption "that he would have suppressed them", and reached Joseph Priestley through the Rev. Samuel Badcock. Priestley printed them at Birmingham in 1791, the year John Wesley died.

The Old Rectory stands at 1 Rectory Street, Epworth, North Lincolnshire DN9 1HX, a short walk from the market place on the Isle of Axholme. The museum states its season as "open from April 2nd to 31st October in 2026 on Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays 10.30am to 3.30pm (last admissions at 3pm)", with guided tours on Thursdays and Fridays and on Saturdays for pre-booked groups only. It shuts for five months a year: "The Old Rectory is closed November, December, January, February and March for essential maintenance works." Admission on 7 September 2026 was £4.00 for a self-guided visit for anyone aged five or over; a guided tour, which includes the self-guided visit, cost £8.00 for an adult, £7.00 for a student, £4.00 for a child of seventeen or under and £22.00 for a family of six, with under-fives free. The gardens cost nothing at all and are open when the house is not: the museum describes them as "open all year round and free for everyone to enjoy". They are also what the photograph on this page shows, from the west garden front of 1709. A ramp reaches the front door and the ground floor is accessible with some small changes of level, though the site states that "Unfortunately the first floor of the house is not wheelchair accessible"; there are two accessible toilets, parking can be arranged close to the house and guide dogs are welcome. The telephone number is 01427 872268 and the museum is registered charity 1165387. Old Jeffrey appears nowhere in the museum's published material, so the whole documentary record has to be read elsewhere — free, in Priestley's edition of 1791 and in volume 7 of the Arminian Magazine, both digitised on archive.org.