It will be observed that the Oelsen and the Barbadoes tales are precisely similar in every respect, including the supposed cause of trouble, the presence of the corpse of a suicide. Despite the variations between A. and O., I suppose nobody will deny that the odd events did occur at Barbadoes (1812-1820).
The puzzle is to account for the story of their recurrence at Ahrensburg in 1844.
I now give the story as located in England. Sir James Gierke (1833), already cited, says:
"In England there was a parallel occurrence to this some years ago at Staunton, in Suffolk. It is stated that on opening a vault there, several leaden coffins, with wooden cases, which had been fixed on biers, were found displaced, to the great consternation of the villagers. The coffins were again placed as before, and the vault properly closed, when again another of the family dying, they were a second time found displaced; and two years after that they were not only found all off their biers, but one coffin (so heavy as to require eight men to raise it) was found on the fourth step which led down to the vaults, and it seemed perfectly certain that no human hand had done this. As yet no one has satisfactorily accounted for the Barbadian or the Staunton wonder."
Does any one know a village named Staunton in Suffolk?[1]
From the date of Sir James's Staunton case, it appears not to be a copy of my next case, which Mr. F. A. Paley, the well-known scholar, dates some twenty years before 1867. Allowing a margin of seven years that brings us to 1840, seven years after Sir James's narrative of 1833.
Mr. Paley writes (Notes and Queries, 3rd series, vol. xii., Nov. 9, 1867, p. 371):
- ↑ [Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of England (1831) gives no Staunton in Suffolk, but two united parishes of Stanton All Saints and Stanton St. John, situated about eight miles north-east of Bury St. Edmunds.—Ed.]
