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A woman paranoid about being buried alive after witnessing her living brother’s near-internment, an eccentric local doctor, and a mummy that would haunt Manchester (literally and figuratively) for centuries – let’s about about Hannah Beswick, the Mummy of Manchester.

In the middle of the 18th century, Hannah Beswick was in mourning.

Her older half-brother John had just passed away, and, as family and friends gathered for his funeral. Mourners approached the open coffin to pay their respects to the deceased man, Hannah amongst them. Just as the lid was about to be placed on the coffin, one of the mourners noticed something – something, to be specific, moving. John’s eyelid, they insisted, had flickered as the lid had descended towards him – the man was still alive.

The family’s physician, Dr Charles White, was called upon to confirm the status of the would-be deceased, and soon ascertained that John was, in fact, alive, if not entirely well. John was rescued from the coffin and, after he awoke for his unexplained delirium, went on to live for another few decades, mere moments from being buried alive with no chance of escape.

Not unreasonably, this close call with premature burial had a profound impact on Hannah Beswick – though she was far from the only one during this period wracked with fear about being returned to the earth too soon. Cultural anxieties around being buried alive abounded in the 18th and 19th centuries in both the USA and UK (as anyone who has encountered the work of Edgar Allan Poe can attest to). Due to limited medical resources, contemporary doctors were forced to rely on undeniable signs of death (such as decay) rather than the more accurate measures used today, and, as a result, it was not unheard of for people to be interred before their actual passing. With the devastating cholera outbreak in the early 19th century in the UK stretching the medical profession to breaking point, more mistakes on the matter of life and death were made than ever, and the fear of being buried alive became a genuine matter of consideration – and terror – for residents across the UK.

Taphophobia is the official name given to this fear of being prematurely laid to rest, and it was this phobia that served as a matter of much panic across the country – British newspapers began reporting and repeating stories of people who had been interred before their time. From Alice Blunden, a Basingstoke woman who had been buried in a hurry to avoid her corpse succumbing to the elements only for local children to hear a voice calling out from her grave and discover her in a torn funeral robe and self-inflicted scratch marks, to Lavrinia Merli, a woman who had given birth to a child in her coffin only for both mother and infant to be discovered post-mortem weeks later, this grotesque possibility inspired much anxiety in the public at large. The actual numbers of those who suffered this fate in the UK during this period is hard to quantify, given that many of the victims likely didn’t survive to report their experiences, with per-annum estimations ranging between 800 and 1400 premature burials per year.

Despite the relatively low occurrences of these incidents, avoiding a premature burial became a matter of great importance to many – The London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial, started in the late 19th century, published pamphlets detailing grisly stories of those unfortunate enough to be buried alive, along with potential methods to limit the re-occurrence of such a horror. Some put measures in place to ensure that they would not suffer such a fate, from purchasing elaborate coffins rigged with bells they could ring if they were wrongly interred, to requesting that aggressive tests, such as a hot poker being inserted into the rectum, be carried out to ensure they were truly dead before they were laid to rest.

After witnessing her brother’s near-miss, Hannah Beswick was amongst those who decided to take precautions to make certain that she would not be victim to a similar fate. Beswick, born in 1688 in Oldham, Manchester, had the means to fund this thanks to her father, from whom she had inherited a hefty portion of money and property in the early 1700s. Beswick did not marry nor did she have children, residing for most of her life in her home of Birchin Bower in Greater Manchester, where she was attended to by Dr Charles White, the man who had saved her brother from his premature burial, for the last few decades of her life.

White had been born in 1728 in Manchester, joining the practice of his surgeon father when he was just fourteen before moving to London to study medicine formally at the age of twenty. He returned to Manchester to work with his father, and soon earned recognition as a respected surgeon in his own right, particularly in the field of obstetrics, an innovative medical professional who served as a crucial agitator in favour of the establishment of the Manchester Royal Infirmary.

But White, like many of his fellow medics at the time, had a penchant for hunting out objects of professional interest as part of a personal collection. According to those who visited him over the years, he kept around 300 anatomical specimens and curiosities in his home in Sale, Greater Manchester, which he would often show off to guests – perhaps the most notable amongst this collection, at least before he added Hannah to it, was the skeleton of the hanged highwayman Thomas Higgins. White worked closely with Beswick in the decades before her death and, by all accounts, took excellent care of her till her eventual passing in early 1758, where the matter of what do to with her corpse took centre stage.

What precisely Hannah Beswick requested from White in the event of her death is unclear, and has been subject to much historical debate in the centuries since. Her will makes no mention of her desire to be embalmed or preserved in any way, leaving £400 for her funeral expenses and requesting that the remaining money be shared “discretionally amongst her Father’s relations”. However, White claimed that she had requested for him to ensure that she did not suffer the same fate her brother nearly succumbed to, and that she left him a considerable sum to cover the expenses of such an endeavour, asking that she be kept above ground for no less than one hundred years to make certain she was really dead. Whatever she might have intended for her body post-mortem, though, what we do know for sure is that White decided the best way to ensure that she did not enter her grave while still alive was to embalm her. And the additional specimen in his collection would surely be nothing more than a bonus, presumably.

While White did not make note of the specific tools and techniques he used to embalm Beswick’s body, but it was likely similar to the one recounted in a pamphlet from the Royal Society of Surgeons in 1775. The process took place in three parts – first, the blood would be removed and the veins pumped with a mixture of turpentine and vermillion, “til the face and all the flesh swell”, after which the organs in the torso were removed and subject to a similar process of restoration. Once the body had been thoroughly emptied and cleaned (including the bladder and rectum), the now-preserved organs would be returned to the body and the gaps filled with a mixture of resin and camphor. After the body had been stitched shut, it would be washed again and liberally doused in oils and perfumes to disguise any potential odour, before being placed in a box filled about halfway with plaster of Paris to absorb any excess moisture that may leak from the corpse following its embalming.

Beswick’s embalmed corpse was initially stored in Ancoats Hall, a home belonging to another member of the Beswick family, but it was swiftly relocated to White’s personal collection. He chose to store Beswick’s corpse in the case of an old grandfather clock, with her head appearing behind the glass where the clock’s face would have been located. It didn’t take long for news of White’s unusual new acquisition to spread through Manchester and beyond, and his house soon became a point of great interest for those fascinated with the macabre – White seemed happy to entertain such interest, allegedly draping the clock face in a drape only to whip away the fabric at a crucial moment to reveal the withered face of Hannah Beswick to his stunned guests. Though no pictures of Beswick’s embalmed corpse remain, Philip Wentworth, a local Manchester historian, included a description of the mummy’s “well-preserved body”, despite the “shrivelled and black” face.

After White’s death in 1813, several pieces of his collection, including Beswick’s mummy, ended up in the Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society. Beswick took pride of place at the entrance of the museum – positioned between a Peruvian mummy and an Egyptian mummy, she served as a bit of sinister local flavour in the museum’s eclectic archives, with author Edith Sitwell writing that “the cold dark shadow of her mummy hung over Manchester in the middle of the eighteenth century”.

But, regardless of whether Beswick had truly requested for White to embalm her, the issue of the body of an otherwise-normal and respected Christian woman being on display in a public museums decades after her death did not sit right with some members of Mancunian society. When the museum changed hands in 1867, coming under the ownership of the Owens College, whose members had to contend with the continuing display of Beswick’s mummy. More than a hundred years after her death, it was decided that any doubts about the status of Beswick’s mortality had been well and truly laid to rest, and that her embalmed body should follow in short order.

Only one problem remained – in the time between her death and the eventual decision to bury her, legislation had been brought into practice in the UK that required a death certificate before a body could be legally interred. But no certificate had been issued when Beswick had died more than a century before, so, despite the fact she had been mummified and on display for more than a hundred years, the proprietors of the museum had to reach out to the Secretary of State for permission to bury Beswick at last. In July 1868, she was finally laid to rest in Harpurhey Cemetery in Northern Manchester. Due to public interest in the mummy, she was buried in an unmarked grave to deter would-be graverobbers, and, to this day, the specifics of her final resting place remain unknown, though at least she can rest easy knowing that she was not put to rest before her time.

Though, according to some locals, Beswick hasn’t exactly rested easily in the centuries since her death. Birchin Bower was converted into a residence for workers a century or so after her passing, and several residents reported encountering apparitions of a woman in a long dress, who would glide through the house before coming to a halt on a specific floor tile. One worker claimed to overturn the tile and discover gold that had been stashed there, allegedly by Beswick before her death, so the veracity of that claim could not be verified. After the house was demolished and turned into a Ferranti factory, rumours of Beswick’s apparition continued.

Beswick may have gone to great lengths to ensure that she did not survive after she was laid to rest, but, in many ways, she has – as a lingering reminder of a cultural panic that swept the nation, as a piece of Manchester’s medical history, and, perhaps most significantly, as the legendary Mummy of Manchester.

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Sources:

Charles White: How the Royal Infirmary’s founder became the guardian of The Manchester Mummy – The Manc

Unburied: The True Story of Hannah Beswick, the Manchester Mummy by Hannah Priest

A history of the ancient town and manor of Basingstoke in the county of Southampton; with a brief account of the siege of Basing House, A. D. 1643-1645

Some Eighteenth Century Experiments in Embalming by Jessie Dobson

The Manchester Mummy by David Castleton

(header image via Burials and Beyond)