Ep. 41 - The Ghosts of the Executed

(Suggested by: Boyd Wright)

Many a murder case has been won in court on just circumstantial evidence. This is true of present day cases and it was true back in the 1840s when a man named David Sheely lost his life at the end of a hangman's rope. Many believe he was an innocent man. And perhaps that is why his ghost haunted people for decades after his hanging. Sheely certainly isn't unique. Through the centuries, many wrongly convicted people have been put to death. It's one of the reasons why many people don't support the death penalty. There are many stories of murder victims coming back as spirits to find justice. Is it possible that wrongfully executed people have ghosts that return as well? And what of the truly guilty? Do they not make the transition out of fear? Do their spirits stay as they seek penance? Or were they just so evil, even Hell won't have them?

The city of Cynthiana is slightly northeast of Lexington in the state of Kentucky. It was here that David Sheely would come to his end. At least for his mortal body. His spirit would return. David Sheely was a man who liked his drink. If not for the whisky, he would have just been known as a kind-hearted man. He was born to William and Lydia Sheely in 1822. David married a woman named Nancy Ann Maynor and the couple built themselves a two-room cabin on a farm along Crooked Creek. They had three sons together, William, Jonathan and Warren. David liked to fish and on the afternoon of June 5, 1847, he joined a group of friends on a fishing party to Beaver Creek. The men had success with catching fish and decided to celebrate with whisky, which obviously pleased David very much since he enjoyed drinking. The men drank until late into the night and David decided to invite the group of men back to his house. He told them that his wife would be happy to clean the fish and cook them for everyone for breakfast. David added that she made great cornbread too. The drunken group stumbled their way to the Sheely cabin and arrived at two in the morning. One can only imagine the reaction of Nancy as her husband burst into the house, drunk as a skunk, with a group of men who were also intoxicated and demanded that she start cooking. Nancy refused to get up and cook and David's friends all laughed and ridiculed him because he couldn't control his wife. The shenanigans were short lived as all the men were very tired. Everybody decided to go to bed with David joining his wife in bed and the rest of the men crashing on the floor of the cabin or outside in the yard. 

The next morning, David probably awakened with a horrendous hangover. One can only imagine what it must have been like for him to peer over to the other side of the bed and see his young wife Nancy, dead. All of his friends were gone. What David did next is a matter of conjecture, but he ended up hiding in the chimney of the old stone fireplace. That's where a neighbor found him after discovering Nancy dead. Authorities arrested David and the official courthouse documents read, "At a justice of the peace hearing, dated Monday, June 7, 1847, Wm. Williams swore that, '...he was at D. Sheely's house yesterday evening and Sheely and his wife were quarreling. Sheely was drinking. Thinks he heard him threaten to kill his wife.' In a sworn statement at same hearing, Eliza Johnson said that on Sunday afternoon, after sundown, she saw Sheely 'seize his wife by the throat and choke her down, swearing that he would have her harts [sic] blood before morning.' Bryan Marshall swore '...went to Sheely's house this Morning, 7th June. The door was partly open. Saw no person stirring. Witness went in the house. Saw Mrs. Sheely on the bed. Witness asked Mrs. Sheely if she was asleep this time of day. Mrs. Sheely made no answer. Witness went to the bed side, discovered that Mrs. Sheely was dead. Saw marks of violence on her neck and face. Witness left immediately and gave the alarm to the neighbors.'"

A Harrison County grand jury indicted David Sheely on murder charges. Bail was impossible for David to make, so he sat in jail until the next term of the circuit court. The trial started and ended with Sheely being found guilty on September 25, 1847, despite his claims that he was innocent. David said, "If I killed Nancy Sheely, I don't know it. I never had nothing' agin her." He was sentenced to be hanged on October 30, 1847. The hanging was delayed until the morning of November 19, 1847. He again proclaimed, "If I killed Nancy Sheely , I don’t know it , I had nuthin’ agin ‘er." David Sheely's body was then given to science for medical study as was the practice at that time. His skeleton was preserved, but eventually parts of it were loaned out and a few pieces were lost. Two of the Sheely children, Warren and Edward, went to Calhoun County, Texas to live with David's brother and sister. Eventually, the brother, William W. Sheely, got guardianship of two of the boys and they appear in the 1850 census together. William came later to Texas. Many years after the hanging of David Sheely, a former friend of his made a deathbed confession. He claimed that he had killed Nancy, not David. The man gave no reason as to why he murdered Nancy. The confession was written down, sworn to and notarized. So it would seem that David was an innocent man when he was hanged from the Hanging Oak that is located in the Grandview Subdivision about a hundred yards from the Oddville Pike.  

And it wasn't long after his execution that David Sheely's spirit started making appearances. People claimed that on chilly and foggy nights, David's spirit searched the hollows of Harrison County. Some wondered if he was looking for some of his missing bones. Others thought he was at unrest for a couple of reasons, the main one being that he was innocent. The other being that he wasn't given a proper Christian burial. Stories claimed that David Sheely's ghost haunted the residents near Cynthiana for 40 years. David Sheely is hardly the only wrongly executed man or guilty executed man to have his spirit return from the grave. We hear more stories of murder victims returning from beyond the Veil, but there are quite a few with executed criminals at the center of them. For centuries, different cultures have had their own ways to deal with the spirits of executed criminals. They feared these spirits coming back to terrorize them as a monster, a vampire or a ghost.  

Despite the removal of public gallows and possibly even the physical buildings where executions may have occurred, spirits of the executed seem to linger in these places. Sometimes these ghost stories are created in a community seeking a way to memorialize a crime and the execution that followed. An example of this comes out of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. This was a revolt against British rule in Ireland and was led by a group named the Society of United Irishmen. The British set up gallows to execute the Irish rebels and now many of these sites have stories of ghosts and faeries. One of these is near the Marine Terrace in Aberystwyth (a burr is twuhth) and it had stories of disreputable ghosts. A man was hanged in 1866 at a Chicago jail and inmates in 1868 started reporting that they saw a ghost. Guards would hear cries of distress at night coming from the cells. A black inmate named William Jones claimed to see the apparition of a man in his cell and that the figure had some kind of noose or strap around its neck. 

John Avery was a criminal who was hanged at the Bergen County Jail in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1872. Avery had killed Jacob Erbe, who was a fellow servant at a home that both men served at in Creskill, New Jersey. Avery told the New York Times before he was executed that "he was perfectly satisfied with his fate. He seems to be a fatalist, saying that the execution was unavoidable, as he was born to be hanged." Prisoners and guards claimed to see a strange blue light near Avery's old cell. Cold rushes of air accompanied by a shadowy figure were felt and seen. The New York Times and other papers reported in 1875 about Avery's ghost. Prisoners claimed to see and hear a ghost enter the cellblock from an outside window and this specter ran around one tier of the cellblock and then stopped at Avery's cell. Inside the cell was a German prisoner and his bedclothes were pulled off and dropped to the floor by something he couldn't see. The Weekly Item reported, "Through the window came the shadowy form of a man, all plainly visible except the legs, which appeared to be lost in mist." The story continued that after the spirit went after the German inmate "it seemed to float down through the air to the wash room, where he turned the water on and allowed it to run for a full five minutes. After shutting the water off, the ghost reportedly stuck around for at least another half hour before leaving through his original access point and closing the window behind him."

Martha Alden was an inmate at the prison on Castle Hill in Norwich who was executed on July 31, 1807 for murdering her husband, Samuel Alden, in a cottage near Attleborough (a tuhl bro), Norfolk. Samuel Alden had been drinking with his friend Edmund Draper at a local public house. Martha had been there with them early on and had their child with her. She left after a while and Samuel proceeded to get pretty inebriated. His friend Edmund walks him home and tells authorities that the Alden's house was only a kitchen and bedroom and that he only saw Martha and a little boy about seven years old in the house. Around three in the morning, a man named Charles Hill saw the door of the Alden house wide open and Martha standing outside. He asked her, "Martha, what the devil are you up to at this time of the morning?" She answered that she had been down to the pit in her garden for some water. The following day, Martha borrowed a shovel from her neighbor Sarah Leeder. This same neighbor went looking for some of her ducks a couple days later that led her to this pit where see discovered the two hands of a man slightly sticking up from the soil. She called the authorities and the body proved to be Samuel Alden. His head had nearly been cut off. A bill-hook was found in the Alden house with blood on it. A friend of Martha's named Mary Orvice would testify at the trial that Martha had confessed to her that she had killed her husband and showed her the body in the bedroom. She then helped Martha get the body in a corn sack and she watched her drag it across the road. She saw her move it again the next day to the pit where it was eventually found. Mary helped Martha clean the crime scene. It didn't take long for the jury to find Martha guilty and she was sentenced to hang. Martha confessed the crime and said Mary had only helped at her insistence. And a couple days later, Martha was hanged. Stories circulated that her ghost walked the corridors of the jail and to this day, there are claims that she wanders through the museum galleries at Norfolk Castle, where the jail had once been. Her spirit was seen on the mound soon after her death as well. She has been referred to as the Black Lady.

The Bodmin Jail in the United Kingdom was the host to at least 50 public hangings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. William Hampton was the last man hanged there in 1909. He had been convicted of the murder of Emily Tredrea, who was his fiancée at the time. Some people thought he was actually innocent and a petition was signed to alter his death sentence. That may be why his ghost haunts the jail. There was footage in the jail caught on camera in 2017 that people claim shows the spirit of Hampton. It looks like the figure of a man walking in the distance. But it isn't a full form, so it isn't a real person who was in the jail. The footage is very interesting.

George Williams killed a fellow convict at a Birmingham, Alabama jail in 1888 and so he was hanged in the yard. The gallows he was hanged upon was left to stand as a warning to the other prisoners. Inmates claimed to see the spirit of Williams ascending the scaffold and that it would continue to go through this act of being hanged. This had a positive affect on the prisoners as they all had a spiritual awakening and Bible readings and praying became a daily thing. Antonio Cilizza was a really bad criminal in the town of  Terravecchia in Italy. He was executed in 1747 and it was said that after his execution, his blood gushed off the platform. Superstition caused the locals to believe that this would prevent his soul from moving on and they claimed that his spirit prowled the streets and frightened townspeople for more than a century. He would keep muskets from firing and would slam doors and make strange noises. Inmates signed a petition  at a county jail in Asheville, North Carolina in 1908 after another inmate was hanged and returned from the afterlife. They claimed to hear the loud crashing of the scaffold trap every night and they occasionally saw the man's ghost swinging from the gallows. The petition demanded that they be moved to another jail.

Amos Lunt was known as the Hangman of San Quentin Prison. The San Francisco Call reported in October 1899 about Amos Lunt with the headline "Haunted by Ghosts of Men He Hanged." The article reported, "Amos Lunt, the hangman, has become insane. The steady hand that adjusted the noose around the neck of William Henry Theodore Durrant and gave the signal that sent the soul of the "Criminal of the Century" into eternity now trembles like an aspen leaf. The eye once so keen and piercing wears the hunted, appealing look of a man who realizes that he is being hounded to his doom. His diseased imagination has conjured up the specters of those whom he has executed, the gibbering, mocking ghosts of twenty-one blood-stained wretches, who flit about him and try to toss over his head the nooses that ended their existence in the flesh. The terrible mental suffering of the famous executioner is something pitiful to witness, and his fellow-guards shake their heads sadly as he clubs his rifle and strikes at an imaginary foe, saying softly, 'Poor old Amos. Too bad. Too bad.' Five days ago Lunt first began to manifest signs of insanity, and his condition has steadily grown worse until now the man is a complete mental wreck. To-day it was found necessary to relieve him of the post to which he has been assigned and place Frank Arbogast in his place. 'They are after me, Frank,' whispered the demented hangman. 'There are several under the bed now. A convict is assisting them, and it's only a matter of time until they get me.'" He eventually ended up in an asylum. Had he really been haunted by the ghosts of those he executed? A German-born American hangman named George Maledon seemed to suffer the same fate. He retired in 1894 and five years later he started having trouble sleeping and he claimed the spirits of those he executed were tormenting him. He would keep his oil lamps burning all night to keep the ghosts away. 

Several followers of Spiritualism became fascinated with the souls of the executed. One such group wanted to capture the moment that the spirit separated from the body. They sent a young female medium to observe the moment and she apparently got more than she bargained for. The man set to be executed was Albert Baham who helped kill a German peddler named Nathan Adler in 1849. The young medium fainted when Baham went through the trap door and after that, she started communicating regularly with his spirit. The medium told people that Baham wanted to kill several people and cursed his enemies. Eventually, the executed man's spirit took control of the medium and she started beating her arms against furniture until her arms were bruised. She would awaken screaming that it felt like there was a rope around her neck. Another medium was called upon to free her from the influence of Baham and soon Spiritualists were warning against communicating with the spirits of criminals. At least some of them were. There were others who were still seeking to help executed ghosts specifically. American clairvoyant and medium Sarah Danskin was one such medium and she described herself as an afterlife missionary. She wanted to help these dark and undeveloped spirits to atone for their wrongs. 

Spiritualist medium John G.H. Brown wrote a book in 1857 about his encounters with the ghosts of a couple of murderers. Brown used a crystal ball to contact angels on the other side. One of the murderers he asked about was William Palmer who was known as the Rugeley Poisoner or Prince of Poisoners. Charles Dickens referred to Palmer as the "greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey." Palmer was found guilty and hanged in the murder by strychnine of his friend John Cook. It was believed he poisoned several other people as well, including four of his children. Brown claimed that he was told by the angel Gabriel that Palmer would appear and give him an accounting as to whether he was guilty. Brown wrote of the appearance, "When the darkness of the vision cleared off, to my surprise the figure of a man appeared … exhibiting no signs whatever of a spiritual appearance, which greatly astonished me. He held no scroll nor showed any symptoms of communication for some short time; till at length, another figure appeared, adorned with loose bright robes. This divine figure gave the spirit of Palmer (for it was he!), a scroll, which was then opened and displayed in the ball. It began, ‘I am the spirit of William Palmer …’ and went on to confess to the murder of J.P. Cook and five other people by poisoning: On passing from life to immortality, in the manner publicly described, I experienced those pangs which I have since learnt others have described. I have also heard the yells, groans, and shrieks, beyond the darkness; suffered the taunts and reproaches of my murdered victims; and am now dwelling in the atmosphere, around and near the scenes of my worldly existence; experiencing the bitter reproaches from the thoughts of those who are living … Oh horrible! Horrible! Wretched misery! And terrible but mysterious immortality! I must now leave you. My victims haunt me!"  

Many Spiritualists came to an understanding that capital punishment was a bad idea. Owen Davies and Francesca Matteoni write in Executing Magic in the Modern Era: Criminal Bodies and the Gallows in Popular Medicine, "In spiritualist terms, execution did not act as a punishment, in the sense that it extinguished sentient life. Indeed, it prematurely transferred the dark souls of criminals to a more advanced state of being. In pragmatic terms, this also meant that the gallows, unnecessarily and perniciously, let loose a host of very bad spirits. Writing in 1856, Newton Crosland, husband of spiritualist writer and novelist, Camilla Dufour Crosland, stated, for instance, that ‘a believer in Spirit-manifestations cannot consistently approve of capital punishments’, for the wicked souls of executed murderers could wreak woe and destruction more fatally than their former bodies could perpetrate if they were still alive."

We hear plenty of stories of murder victims haunting locations. There are not as many about the actual murderers coming back. One can imagine that moving onto what is next would be pretty terrifying for a guilty person. We can't blame for staying. And if they weren't guilty, they have even more reason to feel as though they have unfinished business. Have the ghosts of these executed people remained here? That is for you to decide!