Page 43 of Murder Most Haunted

Extract from They Do It With Strings podcast

‘The Tin House’: Episode Three

[Spooky intro music fades in and then out]

Noah: Was Beth a servant? Destined to be as invisible in death as she had been in life?

We know that the fashion for disguising the service wings led to feats of architectural engineering.

Even the doors linking to the connecting corridors were covered by screens, sometimes disguised as bookcases, or covered in the same wallpaper as that with which the room was decorated.

All because the existence of servants was not to be acknowledged.

So why bury her in this family cemetery?

Could it be that she is the same Beth referred to in an entry in Dr Rawlings’ diary, regarding an accident suffered by William Atherton, eldest son of Charles, in 1871?

Dr Rawlings writes:

‘I was called to the mines after Lord William Atherton had taken a fall. Injuries to his legs were minor. However, the cause appeared more troubling. His staff reported that their master had not slept a full night for several days. According to his valet, he spent hours walking the hallways, looking for “the woman in white”, whom he called “Beth”. Like his father before him, he suffered night fevers and terrors, and at my time of treating him in the mine, he had a headache and nausea that could not be accounted for by the fall. Prescription: laudanum, to ease pain and aid rest.’

If this is one and the same Beth, what befell her? And had her sudden appearance foretold the doom of a second Atherton?

A further entry in the doctor’s journal, dated a few weeks later, reveals it may have.

‘And so, I followed the housekeeper around the garden to the croquet lawn, where to my horror in the snow lay the body of Lord William Atherton, dead at his own hand by a gunshot wound to the head.’