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.