No ghost story is more celebrated than that of Old Jeffrey, the spirit so named by Emily Wesley, which…
- Date of account
- Published 1897
- Source
- The Book of Dreams and Ghosts
- Reference
- The Book of Dreams and Ghosts · selected passage 182
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
No ghost story is more celebrated than that of Old Jeffrey, the spirit so named by Emily Wesley, which disturbed the Rectory at Epworth, chiefly in the December of 1716 and the spring of 1717
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyNo ghost story is more celebrated than that of Old Jeffrey, the spirit so named by Emily Wesley, which disturbed the Rectory at Epworth, chiefly in the December of 1716 and the spring of 1717. Yet the vagueness of the human mind has led many people, especially journalists, to suppose that the haunted house was that, not of Samuel Wesley, but of his son John Wesley, the founder of the Wesleyan Methodists. For the better intelligence of the tale, we must know who the inmates of the Epworth Rectory were, and the nature of their characters and pursuits. The rector was the Rev. Samuel Wesley, born in 1662, the son of a clergyman banished from his living on "Black Bartholomew Day," 1666. Though educated among Dissenters, Samuel Wesley converted himself to the truth as it is in the Church of England, became a "poor scholar" of Exeter College in Oxford, supported himself mainly by hack-work in literature (he was one of the editors of a penny paper called The Athenian Mercury, a sort of Answers), married Miss Susanna Annesley, a lady of good family, in 1690-91, and in 1693 was presented to the Rectory of Epworth in Lincolnshire by Mary, wife of William of Orange, to whom he had dedicated a poem on the life of Christ.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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