The Cutprice Guignol

In November, 1803, residents of Hammersmith had been plagued by an unwelcome visitor – not one from another London borough, but, it was believed, from the afterlife.

This figure – a man, clad in white (occasionally noted to be wearing calf’s skin), with large eyes of glass and horns on his head had begun assaulting various residents on the small community from early November onward. Anyone unfortunate enough to pass by a local graveyard, where the ghost’s body was said to be buried, faced a potential attack, of which a few records remain. Thomas Groom, who worked for a local brewer, claimed to have been grabbed by the throat from behind when passing through the graveyard – by the time he cried out for help from his companion, the figure had vanished behind a gravestone. Contemporary newspaper reports described a woman who had been pulled into the arms of the apparition, promptly fainted, and, after being found by neighbours and taken home, took to bed, where she later died of shock. A night watchman spotted the ghost on the 29th December, and, upon giving chase, the ghost thew off its shroud and vanished into the night.

Furore and fear over the ghost soon grew; locals suspected that it was the ghost of a victim of suicide, who had been buried in the graveyard a year previously. At the time, common belief held that a person who died by suicide could not be buried on consecrated ground if they were to be able to reach peace in the afterlife and that the ghost was wandering the streets and generally causing trouble due to the uneasy lodgings of his corporeal form.

One Hammersmith local, however, was less than convinced by the stories surrounding this ghost. Twenty-three-year-old Thomas Millbrook, a bricklayer who lived nearby with his wife, had been mistaken for the ghost by several people since the attacks had begun. Due to the clothes of his trade – white linen trousers, a white apron, and a white flannel waistcoat – a man passing by in a carriage had identified Millbrook as the ghost to his two lady companions. Millbrook, for his part, declared that he was no more a ghost than his accuser, and threatened him with a punch in the head for his assumption. When Millbrook arrived home that evening and recounted the story to his mother-in-law, she pleaded with him to wear a coat over his usual clothes, to avoid further misunderstandings, but he dismissed it, apparently unconcerned.

However, other residents had taken it upon themselves to put a stop to the spectral reign of terror, once and for all. Several locals armed themselves and took to the streets in early January, 1804, to either capture the ghost or put an end to the person who was impersonating it. Amongst these was Francis Smith, an excise officer (customs official) who was determined to put the ghost to rest at last. While the patrols had failed to turn up anything particularly compelling, on January 3rd, 1804, Smith would encounter the ghost – or at least, what he thought to be the ghost.

Thomas Millbrook was visiting his sister and parents on Black Lion Lane on that fateful night – at around eleven, he said goodbye to his sister, and stepped into the pitch-black of the path beyond their house. Framed by hedges on either side, it was virtually impossible to see anything in the lane, especially near midnight on a winter’s evening. Millbrook, dressed in the clothes of his trade, was confronted just a few yards from the house by Francis Smith – Smith, wielding a shotgun, took the white-clad figure for the ghost he had been searching for. Millbrook’s sister, still standing in the doorway, later recounted what she heard of their confrontation. Smith called out “Damn you; who are you and what are you? Damn you, I’ll shoot you!”, and, a moment later, before Millbrook had a chance to respond, he fired his shotgun. The shot, which hit Millbrook in the jaw, killed him instantly.

The shot attracted the attention of several people nearby, who swiftly attended the scene and discovered Smith in a state of agitation over Millbrook’s body. Smith, apparently realising the mistake he’d made, asked for his companions to call someone to take him into custody – by the end of the night, a constable had arrested him, and he was put on trial barely a week later for the murder of Thomas Millbrook.

While Smith acknowledged that he had fired the shot that had killed Millbrook, he entered a plea of “not guilty”, on the grounds that he had been acting in self-defence against what he thought was a ghost. “…speaking to the deceased twice, and he not answering, I was so much agitated, I did not know what I did,” claimed Smith, in his defence. “I solemnly declare my innocence, and that I had no intention to take away the life of the unfortunate deceased, or any other man whatever.”

Despite his pleas for mercy, however, and several witnesses who attested to his mildness of character and gentle nature, the results of the trial were not good for Smith. The jury, after an hour and a half of deliberation, initially returned a verdict of manslaughter, due to the fact of the local panic around the ghost. However, the Lord Chief Baron warned them that they were not at liberty to return such a verdict, and that they must find Smith either guilty or not guilty of murder; he stressed that, regardless of his intentions or beliefs when he had shot Millbrook, he had still ended another man’s life, and that had to be taken into account – “in cases of some involuntary acts, or some sufficiently violent provocation, it becomes manslaughter. Not one of these circumstances occur here.”

The second deliberation lasted only a few minutes, before the jury delivered a second verdict: guilty of murder. Smith was sentenced to death less than a week later, followed by delivery of his body to local medics for dissection and study. He nearly fainted in the stand when he heard his fate.

However, it would not stand for long; on account of the bizarre extenuating circumstances surrounding the case, Smith’s apparent good character, and the jury’s initial reluctance to convict him for murder, the verdict was brought before the King. By seven the same evening, Smith had been granted an extension before his execution, and, by February that year, his sentence was commuted to a year’s hard labour.

As for the ghost itself, just two days after the shooting of Millbrook, John Graham, a local shoemaker, sheepishly came forward to admit to his involvement in the panic. He had begun dressing himself in a white sheet to frighten his apprentice, who had been tormenting Graham’s children with scratching at the walls and stories of ghosts. Graham was mortified that his plan had led to the death of a man, and, by way of penance, sang at Millbrook’s funeral; there is no record as to whether he received punishment for his ghostly impersonations. Stories of the figure bearing horns and large, glass eyes seemed to be nothing more than an invention of the press.

The case – and the verdict – raised some interesting questions regarding the validity of a genuinely-held belief in cases of assault and murder. While ghosts would later be recognised as “nonsense” in British law (after the 1868 Lyon vs Home case, wherein a self-proclaimed medium told a recently-widowed woman that her late husband wanted her to gift him somewhere in the realm of £3 million), the status of a sincerely-held belief acting as a defence was harder to parse. Smith, after all, seemed to truly believe that the man he was confronted with in Black Lion Lane was the Hammersmith ghost, but whether or not that should have a bearing on his eventual fate raised some difficult questions about the status of belief in British law. Could someone be reasonably held responsible for a crime they committed while operating under a genuinely-held, though mistaken, belief – as barrister Alan Murdie put it, “”I did kill him, but I honestly thought he was a ghost”? In the case of Smith, it was “yes, with a but” – he had avoided the harsh punishment he might have faced in a more traditional case of wilful murder, but had nonetheless not been granted full relief from the weight of the law

The question was answered – from a legal perspective, at least – once and for all, more than 180 years later.

On 9th March, 1983, Gladstone Williams appeared in court in London, accused of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Williams had, while passing on a bus, witnessed a man knocking a younger man to the ground and pinning him with his arm behind his back while the youth called for help – Williams, believing that the younger man was being assaulted, leapt off the bus and attempted to intervene. The apparent attacker explained that the younger man was a thief, and he was in the process of detaining him for trying to mug an older woman – however, when he was unable to produce documents to prove his claims, Williams punched the man in the face. He was charged with assault, and faced twelve months of conditional discharge and a fine. However, he appealed the decision, and the issue of a matter of belief influencing a court’s ruling came under scrutiny once more.

Williams had assaulted the other man based on belief – the belief that, based on what he had seen, the youth was being unlawfully attacked. After reviewing the evidence, and making reference to the century-plus of historical debate on this issue, that led back to the case of the Hammersmith ghost, Williams’ conviction was quashed, and the appeal accepted. Lord Lane Justice Skinner delivered a definitive answer, at last, to whether belief could serve as a defence in criminal acts:

“…the jury should be directed first of all that the prosecution have the burden or duty of proving the unlawfulness of the defendant’s actions; secondly, if the defendant may have been labouring under a mistake as to the facts, he must be judged according to his mistaken view of the facts; thirdly, that is so whether the mistake was, on an objective view, a reasonable mistake or not… Even if the jury come to the conclusion that the mistake was an unreasonable one, if the defendant may genuinely have been labouring under it, he is entitled to rely upon it.”

And so, the case of the Hammersmith ghost, and the precedent it set regarding belief in British law, was finally laid to rest.

Despite the admittance of the false nature of the haunting, some still believe the Hammersmith ghost is real – in 1824, reports of the ghost began to re-emerge, this time noting its ability to breathe fire, though interest in the story dropped off in the 1830s when Spring-Heeled Jack caught Londoners’ imaginations as the supernatural terror du jour. Contemporary belief in the ghost is limited, though some claim that it appears at the graveyard every fifty years (the last apparent visitation from this spirit, according to this, should have been 2005, though no reports were made that corroborated this).

Though, according to some, the victim of the crime has not yet been put to rest – staff at the Black Lion Inn, on the lane where Millbrook was shot, have claimed “strange goings-on”, including hearing voices speaking their names – only to find nobody there. And, while these reports may well be nothing more than superstition, there’s no argument that the death of Millbrook has cast a long shadow – if not of a supernatural nature, then in the annals of the British legal system.

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Sources and Further Reading

The Hammersmith Ghost by Alan Murdie

Trial Transcript

Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum: Volume 2

The Haunted Jurisprudence of “Ghost Law” by William Holmes

The Case of a Ghost Haunted England for Over Two Hundred Years by Kelly Buchanan

Cotemporary Newgate Calendar article

(header image via British Museum)