Whilst researching a Wakefield-based family for a local client – who ordered our Everyone Package – our astute genealogist noticed an interesting piece of information on a marriage entry from a parish register dated 1784. 28-year-old William Cooling was marrying his sweetheart, Rose Atkinson, in the beautiful Wakefield Parish Church, now Wakefield Cathedral. A witness to the marriage was one Peter Priestley, the noted Wakefield Parish Clerk of All Saints Church. A little-known story exists about Priestley, which can be found in a quaint book about Wakefield life, Memories of Merry Wakefield by Henry Clarkson, (1st ed. 1887).
Clarkson explained that Priestley lived in one of the small houses opening into the north side of the All Saints churchyard.
‘He was a square built man, of very sombre look; and he wore a bob-wig, as it was called.’
As well as giving out hymns and leading the responses at church, Priestley was also responsible for ‘gravestone cutting’, which he carried out in the church, ‘on the ground floor of the tower.’
One evening, working by candle light and whistling one of his favourite psalms, he heard a ‘sharp and spiteful noise’. Feeling somewhat shaken, Priestley looked around in the darkness hoping to make out some shape or other so he might identify an intruder. But he could see nothing and nobody. Dismissing the incident, he continued with his work, singing the One Hundredth Psalm as he did so. But only moments later he heard the same noise again. ‘A sort of Sh-h-h-h prolonged with an ominous rustle, sounding most unearthly in the silent church.’
Priestley was too disturbed to continue, so he extinguished the flame of his candle, downed his tools and ran the short distance home to his wife, where he collapsed in his chair and demanded, in a ‘tragic voice’, that she bring him his pipe. When Mrs. Priestley saw the state of her spooked husband she enquired as to whether he had soon a ghost.
‘Nay, lass, but I’ve heard one,’ came the fretful reply.
It didn’t take long for the unconvinced wife to discover that, in fact, her careless husband’s bob-wig had been half burnt off by the flame of his candle, the effect of the singeing causing the mournful hum that was neither ghostly nor other worldly after all!
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