"Witch Wants To Dig, Let Her Dig Straight To Hell," They Said
The woman who was buried head first, upside down in a vertical grave.
She ran with a pronounced limp, clutching her thin cloak as she fled to her cottage as fast as her bad foot could hobble. Cuckoo Hall, villagers called it, but it was neither a hall nor a cottage. It was a hovel. A dirt floor shack.
The men she learned to avoid long ago, but that girl fooled her. Sweet young farmer’s daughter, tempting her with kindness, offering food by a warm fireplace.
So she went. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She should have known better.
They pinned her to a chair, the girl and her papa. Shoved her in front of the fire. Shouting at her to remove the spell. Pushing her closer to the fire. Hot. So hot. Remove the spell, they yelled. So scared.
She’d screamed and screamed as it got hotter and hotter but they wouldn’t let her go until she undid the spell they said she put on the cow. So she muttered the words they wanted to hear just so they’d let her go and then ran, shaken and scared.
Meg Shelton, they called her, nevermind that it wasn’t her name. Mostly, they just called her the hag. The witch. Fylde hag and witch of the Fylde. She knew what they were calling her. She was hungry and poor, not deaf or stupid.
Later, after she was gone, they’d call her The Woodplumpton Witch and the last of the Lancashire Witches.
They thought she was cursing them but she was the one that was cursed. Lived every day under the curse of poverty. Everything that happened to her. It was all because she was poor. And old.
And alone in the world.
That’s how it was in the late 1600s if you were an old woman alone in the world with no family and especially no children to take care of you. Wasn’t normal for a woman not to have children. Something wrong with that one. That’s what they whispered.
Women who live alone like her? Almost always witches.
It was decades after the worst of the witch hunts, but the fear of witches and witchcraft still lived hale and hearty in tiny villages where accusations were whispered among neighbors. They fueled each other’s fears.
For anyone on the receiving end of the gossip, life was harsh and brutal. That’s how it was for Meg. They didn’t want her around. Not in their yard, and not in their village.
Everything that went wrong in that tiny village, they blamed on her. Cow not giving milk? She must have cursed it. Milk went sour? She cursed it. Bad crops, sickness, accidents, death. She caused them all. That’s what they said.
So she lived alone in that hovel and avoided them all.
Her self isolation just fueled the whispering. They whispered about her avoiding people. Just another sign she’s a witch. If she went among them, they whispered she was only there to curse them. Or steal from them.
Couldn’t do anything right in their eyes, and she knew it.
So she avoided them as much as she could. Existed on haggis mostly, made with boiled groats and the entrails no one wanted. Maybe the pigs. Sometimes, she stole. An freshly laid egg once in a while or a little corn from a farmer’s barn if he had enough that a handful wouldn’t be missed.
They told stories about that, too. Said she shapeshifted to steal.
Like the farmer who said she turned herself into a sack of corn. Went into his barn one morning, he said, and noticed one sack of corn too many. So he started stabbing them sacks with his pitchfork. Sure enough, one of the sacks of corn screamed and next thing he knew, the hag run shrieking out of his barn. Shapeshifter, he said. Turned herself into a sack of corn to steal from him. Outsmarted her, he did.
That’s how she got her limp too, they said. Shape shifting.
It went back to the day the squire set his black hound chasing a rabbit. The hound bit the rabbit on the back foot but it got away and ran in her old shack. Ever since then, she limped. Clearly, that rabbit was her. They mocked her for her limp. That’ll teach the witch a lesson about shape shifting.
Never occurred to them it might have been the beatings.
Disturbing the witch, they called it. They believed if you beat up a witch, it prevents her from casting spells. So if a cow wasn’t giving milk? Gotta go disturb the witch. Someone got sick? Hens not laying? Go disturb the witch.
A beaten or injured witch can’t cast spells. That was the common belief.
So, that was her existence. Running from the men come to beat her and trying to scrounge enough food to keep her belly from devouring itself. Sometimes they caught her. Didn’t matter what she screamed, begged or pleaded once they had her, the beatings were going to happen. Best just get it over with.
It’s probably how she met her end, though no one knows for sure.
One day, the people of the village noticed Meg hadn’t been hobbling around for a few days. So a bunch of village men got together and went to check on the witch. Broke the cottage door open and found her dead inside.
She died brutally, they said. Crushed to death between the wall of her shack and a barrel. She was still pinned against the wall when they found her. Just an old woman who died alone, knowing nothing but hunger and hate.
Killed by her own witchery, villagers said. No earthly way she could have moved that barrel herself, they muttered. Spell musta gone wrong, they said and chuckled.
Witch did herself in.
Ding dong, the witch is dead.
The story of her life is achingly sad. But after her death, her story gets strange.
In some act of pious charity, the villagers decided to give her a proper burial in the village cemetery beside the church.
On the eve of May 2, 1705 Meg Shelton was buried by torchlight. Why they buried her after dark, no one really knows. Perhaps the eerie torchlight ceremony seemed fitting for the woman they saw as a witch.
Maybe it was just end of the work day, sun gone down. No one knows.
Anyway, a few days later, they found the grave dug up and Meg’s body laying on the ground beside the grave. They didn’t rightly know what to make of it.
So they called the grave diggers back. Dug the hole again, put the old hag back in her grave and covered her up again.
The next morning, it happened again.
Once again, the grave had been dug up and Meg’s body was laying on the ground beside the grave. By then, her body was looking a little worse for wear. The sight of her body laying there on the ground again scared the daylights out of them.
If you think they were afraid of her while she was alive, that fear paled by comparison to the terror they felt seeing her outside the grave a second time.
The witch won’t stay buried, they whispered.
That’s when they decided she didn’t belong on hallowed ground.
They called a priest to exorcise her body and lay her spirit to rest. Then they went just off church property to unhallowed ground. Dug a hole the way you’d dig a fencepost. Deep and narrow. They dropped her in the hole, head first.
“Witch wants to dig, let her dig straight to Hell,” they said.
They filled the grave with dirt. And then, just to be on the safe side, they put a large boulder over her grave. It measures roughly 3 feet by 2 feet. Good and heavy.
It’s still there today.
Murder, they wrote…
Historians believe she was likely murdered by a disgruntled farmer who she’d stolen food from or by local villagers who came to “disturb” the witch.
Over the years, the church expanded their property and her grave is once again on hallowed ground just outside the path to the church.
It’s become a tourist attraction.
They say if you stand on the rock and turn around three times without falling off and say you don’t believe in witches three times, once with each turn, she’ll grant you a wish. But if you fall off? Be careful. She just might come for you.
According to the records found in St. Anne’s Church her name was not Meg Shelton, it was Margery Hilton. She was a poor, illiterate peasant woman who lost all her family. Crushed to death by a barrel. Vigilante justice.
Very likely, she’d been a midwife or healer in her younger years. Most probably until a stillbirth or someone she couldn’t heal. Witch whispers usually started with a death.
Most historians don’t quite know what to make of her story, but the consensus is that she wouldn’t have been in church records if she wasn’t accepted in the church and the village at some point. Until she wasn’t. Until they decided she was a witch.
More than 300 years later, people still leave flowers at her grave.
References:
—The Woodplumpton Witch
—The Witch Buried Upside Down
—Last of the Lancashire Witches
—Buried Under A Boulder
—Meg Shelton’s Grave
—Find A Grave: Meg Shelton
It's interesting - if you could freeze the moment when all the villagers gathered round old Meg and see inside them - see and hear what they were thinking, I bet you it would sound just like what you hear today at a Trump rally. Not trying to be political at the moment, just looking at the mechanics of irrational behavior. As they shout "witch witch witch" while stomping their feet or raising their fists, their minds detaching themselves from reality - not noticing how stupid and senseless their words really sound like. Yeah, very little difference. Just the clothing and the means of transportation. Pickups in the parking lot instead of wagons. In some ways little has changed.
Oh, this is so so so so so so sad. Because I love witches. My inner witch.