Joseph Glanvill

Because had it stayed a local haunting, no one would ever have heard of Tedworth.

What made the case immortal was a single man, and he came with an agenda.

His name was Joseph Glanville, born in 1636, a clergyman, rector of Bath Abbey, chaplain to the king, and crucially, a fellow of the newly formed Royal Society, the very body that was bringing England its new testing experimental science.

Glenwell came to Tadworth himself in 1663.

He spent a night in the house and he reported hearing beneath the children's bed a scratching for which he could find no explanation.

That is the unresolved core, and I don't want to take it from you, but the real story of Tedworth isn't the question of whether it was a ghost.

The real story is that everyone who told it remade the drummer in their own image.

For Joseph Glanville, he had to be a real spirit, because a real spirit was the weapon against atheism, the proof of the soul of God.

This is one of the earliest first-hand sources we have that describes a witch's bottle.

It's from Suffolk, England, and it appears in 1861 in Joseph Glanvill's Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions.

Quote, "For an old man that traveled up and down the country and had some acquaintance at that house, calling in and asking the man of the house how he did and his wife.

He told him that himself was well, but his wife had been a long time in a languishing condition, and that she was haunted with a thing in the shape of a bird that would fleur near her face."