Demonic County Durham: The Vengeful Spirit of Lumley and Willington near Durham, 1630

“I am the spirit of such a woman who lived with Walker…” 21 December 1630. Midnight. An old miller prepares to finish his work in a corn mill in the hamlet of Lumley, in the County of Durham. Suddenly he hears movement on the floor below him, and as he takes a flaming candle and descends the stairs, he is shocked to discover “… a woman standing upon the midst of the floor with her hair about her head hanging down and all bloody, with five large wounds on her head...” This was the scene for Northern England’s most singular and legendary Christmas ghost story. Then another tale, set in the 19th Century, was told in the press of a mysterious haunting that was occurring in the old mill house at Willington Quay, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The two narratives, seemingly dissimilar to each other, had captured the imagination of many historians and ghost hunters for years, and still do to this very day. Now it is time that the two are threaded together, in one of the most true and horrifying experience of a ghostly encounter, related through the miller and the apparition of the murdered woman, like never before…