In a new weekly series exploring the Tyne Valley Line, University of Sunderland student Eleanor Tait uncovers the best attractions, rich history and hidden gems along the route. As we enter the spooky season, this week Eleanor follows the haunting footsteps of a 17th-century teenage witchfinder.
In 1673, The Wellington pub in Riding Mill – or The Riding House as it was then known - became the centre of a supernatural scandal when Anne Armstrong, a young servant girl from Stocksfield, began accusing her female neighbours of practicing witchcraft there.
Among the eerie accusations, Anne claimed her spirit was turned into a horse by her neighbour Anne Forster, which was ridden into the village to The Riding House, where they joined a coven of witches who danced, sang, and feasted with the Devil on food conjured by pulling on a rope attached to the pub’s ceiling.
Anne – thought to be around 14 at the time – accused approximately 31 women of witchcraft, claiming they had transformed into cats, bees, and greyhounds before her, among many other fantastical accusations.
Yet her claims were never brought to trial, and instead, it’s thought Anne came to a grisly end herself.
So what made a young girl put forward such strange and serious accusations when witchcraft was a crime punishable by remorseless torture and execution in 17th-century England and she risked social alienation herself?
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Dr Katie Liddane, an expert on the North East witch trials, casts some light on the possibilities of the case.
“Lots of people have speculated over Anne’s motives - some say she was a teenage girl doing it for attention, that she found a sort of power in accusing her neighbours,” she says.
“But that ignores the three adult men who also backed up her claims and even gave their own stories of experiences they thought of as witchcraft – you get dramatic accounts of thunderstorms happening inside John March’s house and him seeing figures in the shape of cats climbing up his walls.
“There’s also the option that she was using the language of witchcraft to articulate experiences that some people still have now.
“She describes experiences similar to sleep paralysis – Anne says she was ‘in a manner dead’ when the witches appeared to her.
“People who have experienced sleep paralysis have described feeling as though their body was frozen but seeing figures around them - it’s possible that she’s been taught to believe these symptoms were witchcraft,” Katie explained.
While we’ll never know precisely what Anne experienced, which led to these unnerving accusations, Professor Michael Cawood Green - who conducted extensive research at the National Archives for his fictionalised account of the case in The Ghosting of Anne Armstrong - emphasises just how wholeheartedly Anne believed her own stories.
“I’m convinced she was very bright,” he notes, “and that she had a real reason for what she was doing.
“I really would battle anybody who read those depositions – particularly when you’re holding the very same documents she signed – to dismiss her as just hysterical.
“The earnestness of her voice – she’s not just a silly young girl trying to make money because she’s poor – she’s committed. This is not a light thing that she’s doing.”
But suddenly, after months of telling her story to anyone who would listen, the trail goes chillingly cold.
“The last record just says, ‘and further sayeth not’; she stops speaking,” Katie said.
“We’re not sure what happened to Anne afterwards, but if I was to speculate, I would say she’s very likely to have moved far away – I don’t think she’d want to show her face to neighbours she’d accused or their family or friends.”
Neither Katie nor Michael have managed to trace Anne’s life or death after 1673, but folklore states that Anne was found hanged in the cellar of The Riding House shortly after the accusations ended.
Whether fact or fiction, by her own hand or others’, it remains unknown, but The Wellington has long been the site of unnerving paranormal reports and unsettling experiences.
Visitors have reported feeling watched, hearing unexpected footsteps, and being afraid to enter the Little Back Room where Anne is said to have been found, alone.
A downright liar or a vulnerable young girl desperate to be understood? The jury remains out on what really motivated Anne Armstrong to make such serious and strange accusations.
But the real question is – do you dare to walk in the witchfinder’s footsteps this Halloween?
To learn more about the spine-tingling trail of Anne Armstrong visit The Wellington in Riding Mill or discover Michael Cawood Green’s celebrated novel, The Ghosting of Anne Armstrong, available at Goldsmiths Press here.
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