Wrong About Molly? Update on the Pyt House Skeleton

I’ve told you all about the legend of Black Molly of Pyt House before as she is a bit of a local famous legend in the area where I live. If you haven’t come across the blog before it’s worth reading it here.

If you know all about Molly already from my earlier blog, you will already be aware that this story is not all it seems. The macabre skeleton, housed in a coffin-like box, in the cellars of Pyt House in Tisbury, is real. But who this set of bones belongs to remains a mystery, likely never to be solved.

David Aneurin Morgan returns with a Black Molly update. Whilst this is one legend that sadly, ends in disappointment if you are a ghost story lover, but the reality is itself rather weird. Pyt House seems to have attracted some very eccentric artistocratic owners over the years with rather warped senses of humour.

I’ll leave him to tell you more about his latest bit of research.

Update on the Pyt House Skeleton

In an earlier piece for Weird Wiltshire, Black Molly and the Haunting of Pyt House, I debunked the legend and explained it as a prank by ‘Mad Jack’ Benett-Stanford, the squire of Pyt House, Tisbury. I described how there IS a coffin-shaped box in the cellar there but it’s almost certainly an C18th ‘cabinet of curiosities’. Through a small glass window you can see part of a rib cage, so it definitely contains a skeleton, and through my experience at art school of drawing skeletons, I can confirm it’s a real one.

The legend recapped and how It all pointed to a prank by Mad Jack Bennett

Before coming up with the new info I’ve discovered, here’s the legend again. It claims that in the early 1800s a nursemaid at Pyt House called Molly Peart was made pregnant by a fellow servant or by one of the Benetts and murdered her newborn child. She was executed at Oxford as the ‘last woman to be publicly hanged in England’ and before she died she asked for her body to be returned to Pyt, adding the threat that disasters would happen if she was removed. She was duly installed there and an extra touch is that her ghost haunts the Pink Room where she killed the baby.

The more I checked it, the more the story fell apart. Peart was a Scottish surname almost unknown in Wiltshire in the early 1800s. No woman called Peart was hanged at Oxford Castle prison although I had to admit that the snipping of three of her ribs suggested she’d been ‘given for dissection’. But this faint glimmer that the story could be true faded when I realised it was copying the plot of three folk tales – ‘maid seduced by master kills baby’ – ‘remove me and disasters will follow’ and ‘murderer haunts the site of their crime’. It even sounded like a direct copy of the story of Wild Will Darrell of Littlecote Manor in North Wilts who burned a baby in a bedroom fireplace in the 1600s.

I looked deeper into the Benetts, particularly ‘Mad Jack’, the eccentric squire of Pyt House in the 1930s, who was notorious for playing pranks in the neighbourhood and I began to wonder if Molly might be somehow mixed up with Jack. But his pranks tended to be schoolboyish like giving people a lift in his Rolls then dropping them miles from anywhere. He didn’t sound smart enough to have invented the legend. His papers are held at the Wilts and Swindon History Centre and although he never admits that he had anything to do with it, there is a paper included with them by a visitor to Pyt who says that in the 1930s Jack showed him a set-up in the cellar consisting of a gallows with a skeleton suspended from it.

The skeleton was clearly Molly and with this her whole tale fell apart. She was a ghoulish parlour trick Jack played on his friends and guests. But had he really gone to the trouble of buying an anatomical specimen from a curio shop, building a gallows and stringing her up and inventing the story just as a stunt? Was there more to it? And there was. Jack had always been a difficult son at loggerheads with his mother. Determined to stop him from inheriting, she put Pyt into a trust and charged him rent to live there until she died. It took him six years and a lot of money to get the estate in his own name. Strapped for cash, he tried to attract paying guests for shooting week-ends and giving his house a ghost story was the perfect gimmick. As for inventing the story itself, he may have been a Colonel Blimp figure but he had a keen interest in Wiltshire legends.

The diaries of a Victorian cartoonist reveal the real culprit.

So – legend debunked. Far from being a ghost story handed down through generations, it was a C20th invention done half as a prank and half as an advert for Pyt. That was, until a week ago when I stumbled on the diary of a Victorian cartoonist called Linley Sambourne. There – in black and white was a reference to the Pyt House Skeleton, and it was dated 1898, thirty plus years before Jack’s so-called prank in the 1930s.

Linley Sambourne is famous as a cartoonist for the satirical magazine Punch but also because his house in London, now called Sambourne House, is one of those houses kept unchanged from another era and opened to the public. Sambourne House doesn’t just preserve Arts and Craft style furniture and china and a collection of the diaries written by Sambourne and his wife Marion but all their correspondence – letters, telegrams and post-cards written by them and their two grown-up children. Many of them — wait for it — were sent from Pyt House and aren’t just a record of odd week-ends but show they rented the house from the Benetts for whole summers between 1890 and 1905 .

An obvious question is where were the Bennetts while the Sambourns were taking over their house?

Pyt in fact was empty.  A young Jack was away with the army in India and his mother had remarried and moved to Brighton. When Jack returned he lived in Hatch House next door and Pyt was rented out.

So who were the Sambournes?  The Benetts were landed gentry while the Sambournes were an early Edwardian middle-class family living in London who liked to pretend they belonged to the upper class by renting shooting holidays in stately homes. But they were also up-to-date enough to go in for hobbies like photography and cycling. Linley describes how they wobbled on their early bikes round the Tisbury lanes and how he set up play-acting scenes at Pyt to photograph using servants. There is even a trick photo he took of himself dematerialising on the terrace there.

He was a known practical joker who delighted in shocking family and friends and his humour could take a macabre twist. He liked to set up mannequins as if they were spying on visitors and the objects still lying round his studio show he collected anatomical models, casts and occasionally skeleton props to help the accuracy of his drawing. In his work for Punch he produced many cartoons where skeletons or skeletal figures are used as satire (see illustration Death as a skeleton figure wielding a scythe,1898). He actually describes dressing a ‘metal skeleton’ in robes in his studio and drawing it. Inspired by the spooky atmosphere at Pyt House, he may well have fancied the challenge of stringing one together from real bones.

The two entries of 1898 that rule out Jack as the creator of Molly

The diary entries for 1898 rule out Molly as a prank created by Jack in the 1930s and the more one learns about Sambourne the more it points to her being a prank created by him in 1898. I’m the first to admit that neither of the entries says straight out that he made her — they only hintand you could say they do it a bit vaguely. Butit’s impossible to get away from the fact that they are dated entries in a diary

talking about a skeleton at Pyt, written over a quarter of a century before Jack is supposed to have installed one there.

Here they are and you can check them out yourself on the Sambourne House website which has published the diaries as online flipbooks:

Entry for Feb 2nd, 1898

‘Last dinner in the old room. Twelve people present. Good dinner and long discussion afterwards. I said a skeleton could be found walled up.’

Entry for May 29, 1898, Pyt House.

‘8 a.m. Out to church. After breakfast went down and put up the camera and occupied myself the whole morning taking photographs of the skeleton.’

In the first entry he is referring to one of the Punch dinners he went to in London with fellow humourists. where they discussed future content for the magazine. There was a schoolboyish streak in Punch and its creators, even a taste for the macabre, and Sambourne may have been sounding them out about the satirical possibilities of a country-house horror-story using a skeleton — probably one walled up.

In the second entry the word ‘down’ suggests he went down to the cellar rather than just downstairs after having breakfast upstairs. If it took him a whole morning to photograph the skeleton, he must also have been creating a set-up to photograph her in – a bit like Jack did 30 years later with his gallows.

The extreme weirdness of Jack and Sambourne both using  Molly in their pranks

Why didn’t Sambourne take the skeleton with him when he stopped going to Pyt in 1905?

Probably because by then he had had his fun with her and wowed his London circle although the magazine never took the idea up. A hunt through his huge archive of 30,000 photographs in Kensington might well reveal the twelve he took in the cellar at Pyt.

What happened when Jack moved back into Pyt House and found the skeleton?

This is where it gets really interesting and very, very weird and we have to speculate a bit. Jack didn’t  create Molly  – that was Sambourne in 1898 –  but he was guilty of exploiting her and spreading her legend 30 years later to give his house a spook.  We can only conclude that when he moved back into Pyt House he found her, left behind by Sambourne, and put her to work in his own pranks. Adding his bizarre imagination to Sambourne’s, he created the hanging set-up in the cellar to spook people and it was almost certainly he, not Sambourne who made up the legend to go with it, based on ideas he got from local folklore.

Could they have been in cahoots? – two pranksters cooking the whole thing up between them? Sambourne’s diaries mention Jack but only as a distant figure on shooting parties. There is nothing to suggest a deeper connection and after 1905 they never met. They did have a lot in common – both larger than life figures who enjoyed shocking people and showing off.  But they came at Molly from different directions – Sambourne as a professional joker, Mad Jack more seriously, as somebody with a pathological need to fool his neighbours. Brought together by an extraordinary coincidence, each would use the poor girl’s bones in his own way.

.                                                                                                                            David Aneurin Morgan

Once again I am honoured to have had the chance to publish this research on behalf of David and I hope you have enjoyed the solving of the Molly mystery, even if, I must admit, I am a little sad it isn’t true. However, as I have said before, there is still some Wiltshire weirdness going on there. Which poor soul do the bones in the cellar belong to and what was their story?

Stay spooky everyone!

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