PRETERNATURAL

1854 Heytesbury Exorcism

Exorcism in Victorian England in 1854. Heytesbury, Wiltshire. Reported that a revenant, the restless soul of a local landowner returned every year to torment his wife.

Clergymen from several parishes gathered at Heytesbury for the exorcism, but “almost all of them were mastered by the ghost’s power.” Only one cleric stood his ground and invoking the Lamb of God vanquished the demon:

“(which could) easily tear a living man to pieces, had no power to harm a lamb’s skin.”

The clergyman then began the formula to banish the ghost to the Red Sea, but the spirit pleaded so earnestly not to be sent there, that some other place of confinement was chosen, although what this was is not said.

///culling.awaiting.senders

The Devil’s Well

The Devil’s well is located on the road to the ghost village of Imber, on Salisbury Plain. Local lore has it that children born ‘imperfectly’ on the Plain were taken to the summit of this steep fall and cast into its depths.

When walking the Plain, when a shroud of fog gathers in the depth of night, you can still hear the cries of these forsaken children. Apparently.

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“The Warminster Thing”

Warminster, Wiltshire, local town to Heytesbury was the global epicentre of UFO activity from Christmas Day 1964 until the mid-1970s.

The first ‘sighting’ was an overwhelming but ‘unknown’ sound disturbance at Knook army camp, Heytesbury. Christmas Day, 1964. “Soldiers reported hearing an intense sound described as a massive chimney being ripped apart and scattered; a droning sound accompanied the noise.”

“That same morning, five miles away in Warminster, a local woman was woken by the sound of giant hailstones battering her roof. The noise transitioned into a loud hum before fading to a faint whisper.”

Various ‘visits’ continued with the local vicar and family reporting this sighting in Heytesbury in 1965. Ai expanded from original image retrieved from archive.

“little men in balaclava helmets and glistening trousers”

For reasons unknown, the ‘skew’ railway bridge at Heytesbury has featured repeatedly in alien sightings. In October 1965, midnight, not only did a local woman run over a figure in a black bodysuit on the bridge, who disappeared, but she then almost hit two more on her way back. And saw their mothership. As also, separately seen over the bridge complete with the now iconic car engines cutting out and blinding white light.

///otherwise.intruders.nearly

It’s a Heytesbury Thing

June 1965: Cigarshaped metallic object remained stationary for half hour over Heytesbury, near Warminster. Witnessed by vicar, wife and 3 children. Featured in book The Warminster Mystery by local reporter Arthur Shuttlewood.

The Devil Rides Out

Speak of the devil, and he shall appear. Dennis Wheatley’s best-selling novel from 1934 ‘The Devil Rides Out’ and the movie of the same name by Hammer Horror as released in 1968 located at:

Heytesbury House. The Angel of Death is summoned along with Goat of Mendes by an occult sect operating at Heytesbury House, also with much drama on Salisbury Plain. Coincidentally, there was indeed, an occult sect operating at Heytesbury with accompanying ritualistic activity, nearby on Salisbury Plain including ‘naked’ levitation as reported locally.

///complies.sends.daredevil

Speak of the Devil

The author was billeted at Heytesbury House in the summer of 1916, and later used it and the surrounding countryside as the backdrop for part of ‘The Devil Rides Out’. Heytesbury is substituted for Chilbury.

The movie stills that follow are to illustrate the cast of The Devil Rides Out on location in Heytesbury.  These images are simulations and do not claim to represent original footage from the movie based on Heytesbury House.

Heytesbury 1950s

Crop circles in Wiltshire were reported from the 1940s with the first recorded in the 1950s at Heytesbury, Wiltshire. From CERES and BUFORA archive.

Singles and a quintuplet crop circle formation in the pattern of a ‘five of dice’. Appeared at Devil’s Well, Heytesbury ///resources.remarked.selection

This very early report was significantly before crop circle phenomena commenced in earnest in Wiltshire in the late 1970s.

“(1966) Along the road between Sutton Common, Norton Bavant and Heytesbury,…a number of obvious landing spots have been brought to my notice. In every case, reeds and grass have been curiously flattened in what invariably seems to be clockwise fashion, blades swept smoothly inert in shallow depressions. Yet there were no signs of tripod legs having gouged the soil beneath: simply these circles.” The Warminster Mystery.

In 1966 we had alien landings creating clockwise circles. 15 years later they were ‘crop circles’.

///square.shunning.circling

Latest crop

Records of the organisations CERES and BUFORA (see Crop Watcher issue 14). It included the following: “1950s, Heytesbury, Wiltshire, singles and quintuplet”.

The formation known as a Five of Dice, first appeared at Heytesbury but has since been repeated at multiple locations in Wiltshire. The layout seems, coincidentally, identical to an occult Circle of Protection?

1776 Heytesbury Murder

1776, a turbulent year in the American colonies but also for Heytesbury murder and attempted murder. Sir William Pierce Ashe à Court’s first wife, Catherine, was murdered with poison by her servant, Joseph Armstrong. She was away in Cheltenham with her husband when, after eleven days of suffering a sudden illness, she ‘expired in a fit’. The day after her death, Sir William discharged Armstrong for ‘insolent and brutal behaviour’ towards his late wife.

Suspicions were raised as to the manner of her passing, not least that Armstrong had made repeated purchases of arsenic at the local apothecary. During one visit, asked as to the welfare of his mistress, he had replied ‘Rot her, she is getting better. We shall carry her away alive after all’. Armstrong was convicted of wilful murder despite claiming that his mistress had requested to be poisoned with arsenic. He was hanged at Gloucester gaol.

Sir William had himself narrowly avoided being poisoned by Armstrong and promptly remarried the next year.

///rooms.paintings.solving

Rotten to the Core

Sir William Pierce Ashe à Court went on to be the MP for Heytesbury (twice) joining his uncle Pierce A’Court Ashe in Parliament. For exactly the same constituency. Until the Reform Act (1832) finally ended the electoral abuse of Rotten Boroughs, Heytesbury in 1831 having two MPs elected from a total population, as a borough, of 81 people and despite the village burning to the ground in 1765.

Luckily for the noble family, Sir William Ashe A’Court, was moved up to the House of Lords just in time for the Reform Act. There had been no openly contested elections in Heytesbury for more than half a century.