Murder and Courage at Kingsbridge Hospital

 Not every story I stumble across is about ghosts, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dark history. This one I found while idly browsing the British Newspaper Archive, and I was floored. I grew up in Kingsbridge and yet I had never heard a whisper of it. In 1932 that quiet little town was the centre of one of the most shocking murder cases in Devon.

It began at South Hams Cottage Hospital, not long after it first opened. A farmer named William Jarvis Yeoman, of Lower Sigdon Farm in Buckland-tout-Saints, came to visit his son who was recovering there. Hidden under his coat he carried a shotgun. Witnesses said he sat by the bedside, spoke softly, then raised the gun and fired. He struck the victim several times more, snarling and sobbing as nurses ran to intervene.

One of the visitors that day was Emma José Townsend of East Portlemouth. Hearing the screams, she rushed in and grappled with Yeoman, dragging at the gun and trying to pull him away. He struck her on the head, leaving her bleeding, but she went in again. The judge later told her she had acted with “great courage”.

Yeoman fled the hospital. By the time police caught him in an orchard near Malborough, he had already returned home and killed his wife and two other children. The son in the hospital lingered for two days before dying of his injuries.

The trial at the Devon Assizes in Exeter was packed. Yeoman wept when the victim’s names were spoken but otherwise sat staring ahead, arms folded. The defence argued he was of “arrested mental development” and did not know right from wrong. The jury found him guilty of murder but insane, and he was ordered to be detained during His Majesty’s pleasure. I intend to look more into this at a later date to see if I can find out where he was detained!

Emma Townsend was later awarded the Empire Gallantry Medal, one of the rarest decorations for civilian bravery. When the George Cross replaced the medal a few years later, hers was exchanged. She went back to her life in East Portlemouth, quietly insisting she had only done her best.

It is not folklore, there is no ghost in this story. Yet it is still part of Kingsbridge’s darker history, one that deserves to be remembered. 

A Skeleton in the Closet or a Victorian Story: Chamberton Manor, Ilfracombe

 Chambercombe Manor, near Ilfracombe, is the sort of place that feels like it ought to come with a ghost story. It is a medieval house with Tudor connections through the Champernowne family, whose most famous daughter, Kat Ashley, was governess to Elizabeth I. The building itself, with its thick stone walls and shadowed corners, looks every inch the backdrop for a gothic tale. Over time, it has earned a reputation as one of Devon’s most haunted houses. Visitors talk of cold spots, shadowy figures, and most famously of a skeleton discovered in a bricked-up chamber.

The story is everywhere. Ghost tours repeat it, blogs relish it, television shows have crept through the corridors with night-vision cameras to whisper about it. The version most often told is simple: in the course of roof repairs, a tenant noticed the outline of a blocked window. The wall was opened, and behind it lay a sealed chamber containing a bed, a woman’s dress, and the skeleton of a lady. From there, however, the details splinter.

Some writers say the skeleton was discovered in 1738. Others fix it firmly in the 1860s. One strand even claims that the woman was deliberately sealed in during the eighteenth century by the Oatway family, tenants of the manor at the time. Local folklore gave her a name, Kate Oatway, and spun stories of smuggling and wrecking, the grim reputation for luring ships onto rocks along the North Devon coast. In other tellings, she is a stranger washed ashore in a storm, carried into the house and quietly disposed of.

So what can we really say? The earliest references I can find are not from the 1730s at all, but from the 1860s. In 1869, the story appears in newspapers and in a Horticultural Journal (of all places!), complete with stormy seas and melodrama: a Bristol-bound ship dashed against the rocks, a mysterious woman rescued and brought into Chambercombe, and years later a hidden chamber revealed with a bed, a dress, and a skeleton. The article even insists the tale came from confessional papers among her father’s effects, a very Victorian flourish. The hidden manuscript device was a common trope in gothic literature, giving atmosphere but not evidence. It is noteworthy, however, that for a tale so close to the alleged time of occurrence, these articles read more like a romantic tale than a factual account: no coroner's reports or contemporary recording! 

Those who prefer the 1738 date will argue that this was instead a 1700s occurrence, which is why I cannot find contemporary evidence in 1865. It is true that fewer newspapers survive from the early eighteenth century, which makes it harder to check. However, Ilfracombe itself was being reported on in the archives by the 1730s, covering shipping, petty crime and wrecks, and a discovery of a body inside a manor house wall would have been the sort of sensational piece that spread nationally. The silence tells its own tale.

By the 1890s, the story is entrenched. It appears in guidebooks and county histories, retold as part of North Devon’s folklore package. Each retelling adds new twists, new names, and new details, until the story has the patina of age even though its earliest written form is unmistakably Victorian. Here, more often than not, the tale is told that it was, in fact, an "unhappy Frenchman" who became the skeleton!

So, did anyone really find a skeleton in a hidden chamber at Chambercombe? The evidence suggests not (to me at least). What we have instead is a story that arrived already dressed as legend, dressed up with storms, shipwrecks, secret papers, and all the trappings of gothic romance. It is less a Tudor mystery or Georgian scandal than a Victorian invention that has proved too good to let go.

And that is why, more than 150 years later, the tale is still told. Chambercombe may not hold a skeleton in its walls, but it does hold a perfect example of how a good ghost story is built.

Holy Trinity, Buckfastleigh

 Hello all!

I hadn’t heard of Holy Trinity Church in Buckfastleigh until a couple of years ago. I was scouting around for book promo shoot locations when someone said to me, “What about the ruined church in Buckfastleigh? You know, the one with the cage over the grave.” I didn’t know what they meant but, of course, I was intrigued. They gave me directions and I told my partner, Jay, to pack his camera!

So, off we went. We were doing the shots for one of my books and also a promo shoot for my business Alter Ego. The place is exactly the sort of backdrop you’d expect for gothic photos: scorched stone, roofless walls, and the tower still standing watch over the graves. It was spooky, yes, but also surprisingly quiet. We pranced around the churchyard with our props, snapping photos among the headstones, and every now and then I’d catch myself looking over at the famous tomb in the corner. It is one thing to read about a caged grave and quite another to stand next to it.

Me and Tabs - the bestie - at the church

So, the history. Holy Trinity was Buckfastleigh’s parish church from the fifteenth century right through into the twentieth. Over time the town grew down in the valley and a new church was built closer to the people, leaving Holy Trinity less and less used. Then in 1992 vandals set it on fire, destroying the roof and gutting the inside. Over the years locals have embroidered the story, some say it was Satanists, others whisper about occult rituals. It fits the pattern: once a place already has a “dark” reputation, people pile on extra layers of myth to explain any later misfortune. Either way, the fire was real and today the church stands as a hollow ruin, open to the sky.

And then there is Richard Cabell. Cabell was the local squire of nearby Brook Manor in the seventeenth century, remembered less for any great deeds than for being cruel, corrupt, and generally despised by his neighbours. He died in 1677 with a reputation so black that locals built him a chest tomb of heavy stone and caged it with iron rails. Cabell was said to be violent, corrupt and irreligious, a man people feared enough to try to pin down even in death. The legends followed quickly. Stories of phantom hounds circling the tomb on stormy nights, of Cabell’s spirit roaming Dartmoor, of how Arthur Conan Doyle supposedly borrowed the tale for The Hound of the Baskervilles. Whether or not Doyle ever did hardly matters now, because the link has stuck.

What I found interesting, posing there amongst the ruins with my bestie, is how much of the story comes not from words but from sight. The tomb (which we didn't actually photograph, would you believe!) looks like a stage set. You don’t have to be told Cabell was wicked; the iron cage tells you. Other squires have been forgotten, their names on fading stones, but Cabell’s story clings because there is something to see, something to point at. Even with the church gutted, the legend feels louder than the history.

So, Holy Trinity isn’t just a ruin, it is folklore made solid. A ruined church, a caged grave, and centuries of stories still circling. We went there for photos, but what I came away with was a sense of how a place can hold a story long after everything else has burned away.