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What this episode is about
Wiltshire, 1662: a justice of the peace takes a traveling drummer’s drum away from him, and for the next two years there is drumming in his house. The Drummer of Tedworth is considered England’s first documented poltergeist. In this episode I first tell the legend and then ask who had an interest in it being told exactly this way.
A country gentleman and a beggar
John Mompesson was a landowner and justice of the peace in Tedworth, today’s Tidworth. William Drury traveled the countryside as a drummer and collected money with a forged pass. Mompesson had the drum taken from him, and of all places it ended up in his own house. From April 1662 there were noises there, soon mostly in the children’s room. The young Christopher Wren noted, in a matter-of-fact way, how thin the walls were and that the knocking only happened when a certain girl was nearby.
The language of the drum
The spirit beat out military signals. In England shortly after the Civil War and the Restoration, that was not a harmless sound. Some historians suspect that Drury had fought on the losing side in the war.
The man who needed the ghost
The case was made famous by Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman and member of the Royal Society. He wanted to prove, against the rising materialism of his day, that spirits exist, and with them the soul and God. In A Blow at Modern Sadducism (1668) and Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), Tedworth became his piece of evidence, and Drury was rewritten as a sorcerer.
The story contradicts itself
In front of a royal commission, the house stayed quiet. Samuel Pepys noted that the spirit had failed at a difficult tune. John Webster challenged Glanvill’s argument in 1677. In 2005 Michael Hunter showed that Glanvill reshaped Mompesson’s early reports, which were anxious and full of self-doubt, to suit his own purposes.
The afterlife
Through Increase Mather the case reached New England, Joseph Addison turned it into a comedy in 1716, and Charles Mackay counted it among the frauds in 1841. Later researchers suspected the children of the house. Only one voice is missing from all of this: the drummer’s own.
Frequently asked questions
Was the Drummer of Tedworth a real haunting?
There’s no way to prove it. The sources contradict each other, and every narrator had reasons of his own. A lot of the evidence points to people in the house being behind it.
Who was Joseph Glanvill?
An English clergyman and scholar who published the case as proof against the unbelief of his time.
More in the lexicon: Poltergeist.
About this episode
Wiltshire, 1662: a magistrate takes a travelling beggar’s drum away — and afterwards his house drums for two years. Out of nowhere. The “Drummer of Tedworth” is remembered as the first documented poltergeist in England. But behind the haunting lies a far bigger fight: over God, over the soul, and over who gets to decide what really happened.
In this episode we dig beneath the ghost story and ask the question that holds this whole series together: who tells a story — and why?
Sources & further reading (selection)
- Joseph Glanvill, A Blow at Modern Sadducism (1668) and Saducismus Triumphatus (posthumous, 1681, ed. Henry More) – the central contemporary accounts that made the case famous in the first place.
- John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677) – the sceptical rebuttal to Glanvill.
- Samuel Pepys, Diary, entry for 25 December 1667 – contemporary reception of the case.
- Increase Mather, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (1684) and George Sinclair, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (1685) – the onward spread of the case, as far as New England.
- Joseph Addison, The Drummer; or, The Haunted House (1716) – the comic, rationalising stage version.
- Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) – the reading of the case as fraud.
- Michael Hunter, “New light on the ‘Drummer of Tedworth’: conflicting narratives of witchcraft in Restoration England,” Historical Research 78 (2005), pp. 311–353 – the definitive modern study, uncovering the early, partly unprinted versions of the case.
- Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (2007) – historical context for the poltergeist tradition.