Spooky Season: The Hammersmith Ghost

0:00Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love crimes of Reddit. A new crime house original with Sabrina, Diana, Roge, and Alexis Linklenter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swab. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a Reddit 2am that starts with, you have to see this. Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit pod on YouTube. This is Crimes House. A village gripped by ghost panic. A man shot dead on his way home, and a courtroom asked a question that English law had never had to answer before.

1:00Could you be guilty of murder for killing something you believed was already dead? Welcome to Crimes House 24-7. I'm Vanessa Richardson. Twice a day every day we bring you the best, most timely and gripping cases from across the entire Crimes House network, all in one place right here. Sundays are reserved for our special limited series. Right now, that's spooky season. A Crimes House 24-7 exclusive, just in time for the weather to turn, as we dig into some of the most infamous true crimes with a supernatural element. Today, we're opening spooky season with the hammer-smith ghost murder of 1803. In this case, still refuses to stay buried. The legal question at its heart, whether a sincere but mistaken belief can excuse a killing, has resurfaced in modern self-defense debates on both sides of the Atlantic, and legal scholars are citing the 1804 hammer-smith verdict again, as courts wrestle with expanded

2:02stand-your-ground statutes. Two centuries on, the verdict reached in that London courtroom is more contested than ever. Crimes House exists because of listeners like you. Want even more? Join Crimes House Plus for every episode of Crimes House 24-7 ad-free. Not only that, but you'll get complete access to an exclusive limited series every month. At Early Ad Free Access to All Crimes House Shows and Bonus Episodes, go to Crimes House Plus dot com. Or on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Crimes House 24-7 page. Now, I take you to the winter lanes of hammer-smith, where I dig into one of the strangest, most unsettling legal cases the English-speaking world has ever produced, and ask what it still means for us today. Trying to lose weight on a GLP1? Getting the nutrients you need doesn't have to be complicated. That's where Grooons comes in.

3:03One convenient daily pack gives you greens plus 20 plus vitamins and minerals in a low-carb gummy that's easy to take wherever you go. No guesswork, no hassle. Just a little bear that tastes great. Save up to 52% off with Code Podcasts at Grooons.co. That's Code Podcasts at gruns.co. In 1803, hammer-smith wasn't the busy corner of London it is today. It was a village on the western edge of the city, a place of narrow lanes, market gardens, taverns, and dark church yards, slowly being swallowed up as the big city crept outward. People knew their neighbors. They walked everywhere, and after sundown without any gaslight, the whole place went completely dark. But for the people of hammer-smith, it wasn't really a concern. They didn't even have their own police force. Nobody did. The organized, uniformed police force we'd recognize today didn't exist yet.

4:07There were a handful of so-called Bo street runners operating out of central London, but they were a tiny band of thief takers, not a patrol force, and certainly not something of village on the outskirts could rely on. What they had were Night Watchmen. Other men who walked set routes and called out the hour so you'd know all was well. But once the sun went down in hammer-smith, the people who lived there were essentially on their own. There was no one to file a report with. No one to send out to investigate. No way to sort a real threat from a rumor. If enough of your neighbors said they'd seen something in the dark, then as far as the village was concerned, it was real. In the last weeks of 1803, more and more of them were saying exactly that. Because late that year, in all that darkness, something began to move through the lanes. People started reporting a figure that only came out at night. It was tall and white, a pale glowing shape that would appear where nothing should be,

5:11then melt back into the black. Some said they'd only caught a glimpse of it from a distance. Others swore it had come right up to them. There were stories of the thing lunging at people, grabbing at women as they walked home, throwing its arms around them out of nowhere. One account described a woman so badly shaken by an encounter that she got sick and took to her bed. Whatever this figure was, it seemed to want an audience to make the whole village afraid. And it got its wish, fast, because the people of hammer-smith didn't think they were dealing with a burglar in disguise or a cruel neighbor playing a trick. They thought they were dealing with the dead. The sightings had started small, back in November of 1803. A strange figure here and there that most people were happy to laugh off. But they didn't stop. Through December, they came faster and stranger, and the laughing stopped. By the time the figure was reportedly grabbing people in the lanes, no one in hammer-smith

6:12was treating it as a joke anymore. There was even a backstory attached to it. The year before, a local man had died by suicide and he'd been buried in the hammer-smith churchyard. And in 1803, a lot of people believed that someone who took their own life couldn't simply be laid to rest in consecrated ground and left in peace. The belief was that such a soul was caught between worlds, restless, unable to move on, and that it might come back to the place it had known in life. So when a white figure started turning up in the lanes near that same churchyard, the villagers connected the dots. The dead man couldn't rest, and now he was tormenting the living he'd left behind. To us, sitting here with electric lights and locked doors, it may sound silly or maybe a little charming, nothing more than a quaint old ghost story. Put yourself in their shoes. There were no streetlights, no police, just long, freezing winter nights in a superstitious

7:17village where every single person knew the story of the man in the churchyard. Once the village believed a ghost was loose, every ordinary sound after dark, a footsteps, a cough, a shape at the far end of the lane got lumped into the same terrifying explanation, and the harder people looked for the ghost, the more certain they became that they were about to find it. In the dark, every pale shape became him. Parents kept their children indoors, grown men and women were afraid to walk home from work, and the terror fed on itself as each new sighting made the next one feel more real. One of the people who came face to face with the ghost was a night watchman named William Gurdler. He spotted the figure in the lanes, and he did what a watchman was trained to do. He gave chase. But the ghost was fast, and as Gurdler ran after it, he watched the thing reach up, pull a white sheet off of itself so it could move faster and vanish into the

8:20night. It was the kind of detail that should have broken the spell over the whole village. A restless spirit doesn't need to throw off a bedsheet to outrun a middle-aged watchman, a living, breathing person does. The proof that this was a human being playing a vicious game was right there, weeks before anyone got hurt. But fear doesn't listen to that kind of logic. The people of Hammer Smith had already decided what was waiting in the dark, and a fleeing figure in a shroud only made them more certain of it. By the first days of January 1804, the village had reached its breaking point. If no one was going to come and save them, they would save themselves. Groups of men armed themselves and patrolled the lanes at night, hunting the ghost, determined to corner it, unmask it, or destroy it, and end the nightmare once and for all. On its face, that might sound almost noble, frightened people banding together to protect their own streets. But look at the

9:24actual ingredients they were mixed together. Exhausted, keyed up, frightened men, loaded guns, hitched black lanes with almost no visibility, and underneath all of it a shared absolute conviction that something not human was out there, and that it had to be stopped by any means necessary. Before long, they got their chance. One of the men out hunting the ghost was a 29-year-old excise officer named Francis Smith. An excise officer was a kind of government tax collector. He worked for the crown, collecting the duties charged on everyday goods like liquor. It was a steady, respectable, official job, and by every account, Francis Smith had the right temperament for it. He wasn't a fighter or a hothead, and didn't have a history of violence. But on the night of January 3rd, 1804, Smith was frightened and fed up, the same as everyone else in town. By some

10:25accounts he'd stopped in for a drink or two that evening, maybe to steady himself before heading out on patrol, and somewhere along the way he'd made himself a promise. He was going to be the one who finally caught this thing. It's easy to understand the pull of that. Weeks of constant fear, and here was a chance to be the man who ended it, a hero so Francis Smith loaded his gun and he walked out into the darkened lanes to hunt a ghost. What he found instead would destroy two families and leave an English courtroom wrestling with his case for the next 200 years. What if you can see what's happening inside your body? Pre-novos, whole body scans screens for hundreds of conditions, including many solid tumors as early as stage 1, all and under an hour. And now, you can go beyond imaging, with 80 plus blood biomarkers that

11:27help complete the picture. This Labor Day, save $300 off your scan when you book at pre-novo.com. That's PRE and you VO.com. Save $300 now through September 8th at pre-novo.com. Terms and conditions apply. Some mysteries have haunted us for centuries. Others are unfolding right now. How does a modern airliner with 239 people on board disappear from the sky without a trace? This is History's greatest mysteries, a history channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios. Adapted from the hit TV show, every episode dives into one of the world's greatest enigmas, the vanishings, the myths, the lost relics, and the unexplained. With contributions from top historians, authors, scientists, and researchers, we separate fact from folklore and evidence from rumor, from unsolved crimes to buried treasure, to the deaths and disappearances of famous figures. These are the stories we think we know,

12:32but dig beneath a legend and the truth gets far stranger. Follow History's greatest mysteries, available now wherever you listen to podcasts. By early January 1804, the village of Hammer Smith had spent weeks in the grip of a ghost story, and now armed men were prowling the lanes at night looking for something to shoot. On the evening of January 3rd, one of those men, the ex-size officer Francis Smith, went out with a loaded gun, determined to end it. At almost exactly the same time, on the other side of the village, a young man was leaving his parents' house. His name was Thomas Millwood, and he was a plasterer. Day in and day out, he coated the walls and ceilings of London buildings in wet plaster and smoothed them flat by hand. It was hard, messy, skilled work. The kind of trade a young man could build a whole life around. He had a wife, he had parents

13:32and a sister living close by. He was by every indication and ordinary, decent working man with people who loved him. And his trade came with a kind of uniform, like a lot of men in the building crafts at the time, Millwood worked in all white, white linen trousers, a white flannel waistcoat, and a white apron tied around him. By the end of a shift, every inch of it would be coated in a fine, pale dust of dried plaster from his boots to his shoulders. In daylight, it was nothing, just the ordinary clothes of a man who worked with his hands. But in Hammersmith, in the winter of 1803 and 1804, a figure dressed head to toe in white, outwalking the lanes after dark, was about the most dangerous thing a person could be. Picture it, you're a frightened resident of Hammersmith. You've heard for weeks that a white ghost walks the lanes, and suddenly, at the end of your street, a pale figure appears in the dark, glowing faintly, moving toward you,

14:36saying nothing. Through no fault of his own, Thomas Millwood looked exactly like the monster the whole village was watching for. And no one understood that danger better than Millwood himself, because it had already happened to him. On more than one occasion, people had spotted him in the dark, glowing pale in his plasterer's whites, and mistaken him for the ghost. It had frightened them, and it had frightened him too. One account has him confronted directly, not long before that final night, someone catching sight of the white figure, sounding the alarm, and Thomas having to prove he was a flesh and blood plasterer, and not the terror of Hammersmith. His family was sick with worry about it, his wife had pleaded with him more than once to stop going out in the white clothes after dark, or at the very least, throw a dark great coat over the top so no one would take him for a phantom, and God forbid do something rash. By some accounts, his wife wasn't the only one

15:41who was worried. The people Thomas lived among had all watched the panic build, and they understood what a man in glowing white was risking every time he stepped out after dark. He didn't heed their warnings. On the evening of January 3rd, 1804, Thomas had gone to visit his mother and father, who lived on black lion lane. His wife was working nearby, ironing late at a neighbor's house, and his sister Anne was close at hand as well. It was a completely ordinary family evening, and when it was over, Thomas set out to walk home. He was still in his blinding white work clothes, no dark coat thrown over the top. We'll never really know why. Maybe he was tired, maybe after weeks of the same warnings he'd stop taking them seriously. Maybe he'd just wanted to get home and didn't think it through. Whatever the reason, Thomas Mill would stepped out onto black lion lane, glowing faintly in the dark on the very night that a frightened man

16:43with a loaded shotgun was out hunting a ghost. Not long before, Francis Smith had crossed paths with William Gurdler, the same night watchman who'd chased the figure back in December. Gurdler still had his rounds to walk and the hour to call, and they agreed to join forces a little later, once Gurdler had called out 11 o'clock. Then they split up, and Smith went on patrolling alone. Just after 11, on black lion lane, Francis Smith saw it. A pale figure moving toward him through the dark. In that instant, there was no doubt in his mind about what he was looking at, weeks of terror, a head full of the churchyard and the restless dead. Maybe a drink or two still in him, and now at last the thing itself right in front of him, white and silent and coming closer. Thomas's sister Anne was near enough to hear what happened next. She heard Smith call out into

17:47the dark. Damn you, who are you and what are you? And then almost in the same breath before the figure could get out a single word, damn you, I'll shoot you. He leveled the shotgun and fired. The blast caught Thomas Millwood in the lower left side of his face. It tore through his jaw and down into his spine, and it killed him instantly, right where he stood. There was no struggle, no fight, no moment to throw up his hands and shout that he was no ghost. Just Thomas, the plasterer, walking home from his mum and dad's, just a single shot and a young man lying dead in the lane. But Francis Smith didn't realize that yet. He went straight to find William Gurdler, and he told the watchman what he'd done. He'd shot the ghost. Gurdler rushed to the scene, and when he got there, the truth was lying face-up in the lane. Thomas's sister Anne had heard the shot

18:51too and came running, calling her brother's name into the dark. She was among the first to reach him. The men lifted Thomas's body and carried it to a nearby inn called the Black Lion. It was exactly the kind of place where the whole neighborhood had probably huddled and traded ghost stories all went her long. Now it held the body of that ghost, and it turned out to be a local boy that plenty of them had known for years. A surgeon examined Thomas Millwood's body and confirmed what everyone in that room could already see. He died from the gunshot wound to his head, the blast to the lower jaw and spine. It had been instant and total. Then came the inquest, the official inquiry into how he died, held right there at the Black Lion. A coroner's jury heard the whole story laid out, the ghost panic, the armed patrols, the young man in white, the shouted challenge, the single shot in the dark, and they reached a conclusion that must have

19:55landed like a slap on a village that had spent all winter terrified of a spirit. This was not a haunting. This was a killing. The jury ruled that Thomas Millwood had been willfully murdered, and they named Francis Smith as the man who did it. Smith was arrested and sent to Newgate, London's notoriously grim, overcrowded prison, to sit and wait for his trial. And that trial was going to be strange because on the surface, the facts couldn't have been simpler. Francis Smith had shot and killed an unarmed, innocent man. Nobody disputed it. Smith admitted it himself, but he hadn't gone out that night meaning to hurt Thomas Millwood. He'd gone out to protect his neighbors from a monster he believed was terrorizing them all. In his own mind, he was no murderer. He was a frightened man who'd made a horrible mistake. So which was he, a killer,

20:59or a casualty of the same panic that had swallowed his entire village whole? That was the question waiting for him in the courtroom. And the answer would echo through English law for the next two centuries. Francis Smith sat in Newgate prison, charged with willful murder, all for shooting a man he'd been certain was a ghost. And in January 1804, his case came before London's most famous criminal court, the Old Bailey. The Old Bailey had seen just about every kind of crime imaginable past through its doors, from petty theft to high treason. But the case of the hammer Smith ghost was something genuinely new. The judge presiding over it carried an imposing title, the Lord Chief Baron Sir Archibald McDonald. And he was about to confront one of the strangest legal puzzles of

21:59his career. What do you do with a man who killed someone he sincerely believed was already dead? The case drew enormous public attention, a ghost, a killing, a respectable officer in the prisoner's dock. It had everything the London public of 1804 could want and they followed every turn of it closely. But underneath the spectacle sat a real and difficult legal problem and it fell to McDonald to solve it. Smith pleaded not guilty. His defense came down to something close to self-defense. He'd challenged the figure in the lame. He'd called out, demanded to know who or what it was. And when it didn't answer, he'd fired, convinced he was facing the ghost that had been terrorizing Hammer Smith for weeks. And he had real sympathy on his side. Witness after witness came forward to speak to his character and the picture they painted was of a good, honest, level-headed man.

23:01The furthest thing from a cold-blooded killer, ordinary people felt for him too. In their eyes, Francis Smith hadn't gone hunting for trouble. He'd gone out to protect his community from a genuine terror. And if anyone was to blame, it was the whole panicked village that had worked itself into a frenzy in the first place. A lot of people thought Smith was simply the unlucky man who'd ended up holding the gun. He hadn't lured anyone anywhere. He hadn't robbed a soul. He'd volunteered to walk cold black lanes to protect his neighbors from something the entire village swore was real. If the law was going to hang a man for that, plenty of people simply couldn't see the justice in it. But the law and public sympathy are two very different things. And Sir Archibald McDonald was about to make that painfully, unforgettably clear. When the jury retired to consider their verdict, they came back with manslaughter. In plain English, they were saying, yes, Smith killed him,

24:06but it was a tragic, terrible accident, born out of fear. Manslaughter carried a far lighter punishment than murder, and the verdict reflected the way most people felt about Francis Smith and his awful mistake. McDonald refused to accept it. He told the jury that manslaughter was not a verdict the court could receive. Their only two options were murder or a complete acquittal. There was no soft landing in between. McDonald said that in the eyes of the law, Smith's belief he was shooting a ghost was completely beside the point. It didn't matter what Smith thought was standing in front of him in that lane. What mattered was that he had deliberately raised a loaded gun at a human being and pulled the trigger. That intent was all the law required. Murder didn't demand that Smith hate Thomas Millwood, or that he'd planned it, or even that he knew the man, it only demanded the intent to kill whoever was in front of him. Smith plainly had that. McDonald continued that it

25:13wasn't self-defense either. For a simple reason, Smith had never actually been in any danger. There was no attacker. There was no threat of any kind. There was only a frightened man and an innocent one, and a single fatal mistake in the dark. Then the judge shut the last door. He told the court that even if the figure in the lane had been the real culprit, some living person deliberately dressing up in a sheet to terrify the neighborhood, it still wouldn't have been lawful to shoot him. Because pretending to be a ghost was a petty offense at most, a misdemeanor, and you cannot lawfully kill a person over a misdemeanor. There was no version of that night in which pulling that trigger was justified. It was a brutally clear piece of legal reasoning, and it left the jury nowhere to go. They couldn't reward Smith's good intentions, or put the blame on the village's hysteria. Under the law, as McDonald laid it out, either Smith had unlawfully killed a man, or he hadn't,

26:18and everyone in that courtroom knew that he had. Faced with that instruction, the jury went back out, and this time they came back with the verdict McDonald said the law left them no choice but to make. Guilty of murder. And the punishment for murder was death. Francis Smith was sentenced to hang. But almost no one was comfortable with that outcome, and that seems to have included the judge who'd forced it. Rather than let the execution go ahead, McDonald announced that he would refer the entire case directly to the king George III, who had the power to step in and change the sentence. And the king did exactly that. George commuted Francis Smith's death sentence all the way down to a single year of hard labor. So the law ended up with its answer, at least on paper, a sincere,

27:19honest, mistaken belief was no excuse for taking an innocent life. And by the letter of the law, Smith was guilty of murder. But the mercy the jury had tried to give, and that the public so badly wanted, came right back in through the side door, straight from the crown itself. Francis Smith would not hang. He'd serve his year, and he'd walk out the other side alive. For most people following the case, that came as a relief. The thought of watching a decent man hang from a mistake that half the panicked village might have made had sat badly with the public from the very start. The crown's mercy let everyone breathe. The law could stay strict on paper, and Francis Smith could still keep his life. And then, at last, came the twist the whole village had been waiting for, because through all of it, one enormous question still hung in the air. If the ghost hadn't been Thomas Millwood, and it obviously hadn't been a real spirit risen from the churchyard, then who or what had actually

28:25been haunting Hammersmith all winter? The blaze of publicity around the trial finally smoked him out. An elderly local shoemaker named John Graham came forward and confessed. He was the ghost. He'd been the one dressing up in a white sheet and stalking the lanes at night, scaring an entire village nearly out of its mind. And his motive was almost insultingly small. As the story goes, Graham had an apprentice who'd been telling ghost stories to Graham's children and giving them nightmares. So he decided to teach the young man a lesson by doing a little haunting of his own, dressing up as a ghost to frighten his apprentice right back. Graham was arrested, but he was never really punished for any of it. The authorities couldn't even settle on what to charge him with, because as horrifying as the consequences had turned out to be, frightening people simply wasn't much of a crime. So the man whose prank set everything in motion

29:28essentially walked away clean. Francis Smith, the man that prank had turned into a killer, served a year of hard labor, and Thomas Millwood, the only person in the entire story who done absolutely nothing wrong, was dead and buried. So what do you think? Was Francis Smith a murderer, plain and simple, or was he a terrified man who made a terrible human mistake? As much a victim of the panic as anyone else in Hammersmith? Head to the comments wherever you're listening, and let me know. There's one last piece to the story, and it plays out over the next 200 years. The Hammersmith ghost case left English law staring at a genuinely hard question. One, it couldn't quite answer back in 1804. If you do something terrible because you honestly, sincerely believe something that later turns out to be completely false, how responsible are you

30:34for what you've done? McDonald's answer had been blunt and unforgiving. Your mistaken belief doesn't matter, and you are guilty. But that never sat entirely right with people, and the same question kept resurfacing in English courts for generations. It wasn't truly put to rest for about 180 years. It took until the 1980s, and a completely different case. This one involving a man who stepped in to stop what he wrongly believed was an assault in progress for the appeals courts to finally settle on a clearer answer. They decided that an honest but mistaken belief could in fact serve as a defense, even when that belief was unreasonable. And in time, that principle was written directly into law. The details are dry, full of courtrooms and appeals and statutes. But the human core of it is exactly the thing Francis Smith's jury felt in their gut back in 1804. There's a difference between a person who kills out of malice,

31:37and a person who kills out of terror and misguided judgment. It took the law nearly 200 years to say so out loud, which means that after two full centuries, English law slowly circled back to the very mercy the king had shown Francis Smith on the first day. The courts finally caught up to the simple human instinct that a sincere, terrified mistake and a cold-blooded murder are not the same thing. Francis Smith served his year of hard labor and then slipped out of the record, an ordinary man who did one catastrophic thing on one dark night. But the question his case raised outlived him by two centuries. Since then, every time a court has had to ask whether a person should be punished for acting on a fear that turned out to be false, the ghost of Hammersmith has been somewhere in the room. What stays with me about the Hammersmith ghost is this. There was no ghost, there was never a ghost,

32:43there was a bored old shoemaker and a bedsheet, a village frightened out of its senses, and a young plasterer in his work clothes who only wanted to get home to bed. The thing that killed Thomas Millwood wasn't a spirit that couldn't rest, it was fear. Ordinary human fear loaded into a gun and pointed into the dark. And that's the part of this that isn't quaint at all, because the fear that turned a decent, respectable man into a killer isn't some 200 year old superstition we've all safely outgrown, it's the same leap we still make in the dark. The instant the shape and the shadows becomes whatever it is we're most afraid of. Hammersmith just happened to be most afraid of a ghost. The mistake itself is timeless. That's the strange sad heart of this case, and it's exactly where I wanted to begin spooky season. Because next Sunday we cross into a mystery that was never solved

33:44at all. A woman's skeleton hidden inside the hollow trunk of a tree in an English wood. A haunting question, scrolled on walls for years afterward that nobody has ever been able to answer, and the long shadow of witchcraft hanging over the whole thing. Thanks for listening to this episode of Spooky Season, here on Crime House 247. Four true crimes wrapped in the supernatural. One each Sunday. Join me next week for the next case. Be sure to come back tomorrow for Killer of the Week, where I take you inside the mind and motives of one of the world's most notorious murderers. And to enhance your listening experience, join Crime House Plus and get every episode of Crime House 247 completely ad-free, along with early, ad-free access to all Crime House shows, plus monthly bonus episodes. To join, go to CrimeHousePlus.com.

34:47Or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Crime House 247 page. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina, Deanna, Roge, and Alexis Linklenter. Every week, One Host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swab. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2am that starts with, you have to see this. Except, Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crime's of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe at Crime's of Reddit pod on YouTube.