Wartime Witchcraft Rumours

From the collection of

MACE is the strategic lead organisation for screen heritage for the East and West Midlands regions. An independent charity based at University of Lincoln, MACE preserves and makes accessible a collection of more than 100,000 historic moving images representative of the diverse cultures and histories of communities throughout the heart of England from the Lincolnshire coast to the Welsh border.

Wartime Witchcraft Rumours (Heart of the Country)

Media Archive for Central England
Lower Quinton
1994-02-15
Sound

A tale of black dogs, witchcraft and ancient customs that inspired Shakespeare and baffled Fabian of the Yard.

Meon Hill in Warwickshire has long been an inspiration for tales of spooky goings on. In fact, local lad William Shakespeare is said to have been inspired by this windswept, bleak landscape to write Macbeth, a story filled with death and magic. It was Valentine's Day 1945 that Meon Hill had its darkest day, with the brutal murder of farm worker Charles Walton. Was it a simple story of rural rivalries or something even more chilling involving witchcraft? Could Walton have been the young farm boy who witnessed a black dog take on the form of a witch 60 years earlier?

It was a case that fascinated a wartime nation and baffled the legendary Fabian of the Yard, who was brought in by Warwickshire CID to help solve the case. Tony Francis investigates in this feature made for Heart of the Country, nearly 50 years on from that tragic incident.

Witchcraft blamed for 1945 murder at Meon Hill in Warwickshire.

Enter the Unknown Zone: Journeys into the Paranormal Midlands

Time to enter the world of the unexplained?

Television has long brought the real world into our living rooms, but occasionally it turns its eye to matters that aren't easily explained. As interest in the paranormal grows - look at the popularity of spooky podcasts and tv shows that claim to have captured all manner of ghostliness on camera - it's a good time to look back on how these phenomena were once reported on television. These genuine 'tales of the unexpected' contain many tropes familiar to fans of the genre. Malevolent spirits, white witches, alien beings - they're all here, ready to fascinate new generations. And of course there's the added bonus of hearing these stories directly from the people affected - their first-hand accounts making a compelling case for the supernatural. Why the Midlands though? Well, one of the UK's most popular places for UFO sightings is Stoke-on-Trent, so it appears the Midlands are very much on the minds of alien beings up there, somewhere...

10 videos in this collection

Haunted House in Lincolnshire

Birchwood
1983-10-13

Newstead Spiritualist Church

Newstead
1986-07-22