What a surprisingly wonderful read! With this work, Peter Marshall has written one of the best narratives on seventeenth-century English history, bringing together the small world of a Somerset fishing village with the larger worlds of Sir Thomas Wentworth, Archbishop Laud, and even Charles I.

On Halloween 1636, ghost sightings begin to surface in the small coastal town of Minehead in Somerset. The ghost is that of an old woman, Mother Leakey, who died a few years before but has come back, quite literally, to haunt members of her family. The sightings initially seem to suggest that the ghost is haunting her son, Alexander, and daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, who are eventually scrutinized by a royal commission on the subject. Others too fall victim to the ghost of Mother Leakey, including her grandson, who dies in suspicious circumstances, supposedly at the hands of the specter. Two servants of the Leakeys' as well as a local apprentice also claimed to receive messages from the ghost.

A seemingly unconnected event took place a few years later across the Irish Sea. In December 1640, John Atherton, Anglican Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, was hanged in Dublin for the “detestable and abominable sin, amongst Christians not to be named, committed by carnal knowledge against the ordinance of the creator,” as Sir Edward Coke described the crime of sodomy. This was an unusual conviction in more ways than one. Across the British Isles, only a very few people were ever convicted of sodomy in the early modern period, and Atherton was the only bishop among them. The reasons for the low conviction rate are due to the difficulty of securing reliable testimony. Because sodomy was a consensual sexual act, both the accuser and accused would be considered felons, and both would be subject to capital punishment. As such, most instances of homosexual acts never made it anywhere near the courts. In this case, John Atherton had been accused of sodomy by his servant, John Child, and both were eventually hanged for this crime. That in itself makes this part of the story particularly interesting. What would make someone accuse another of sodomy when the accusation was self-incriminating?

The sightings of and message carried by the ghost of Mother Leakey may very well have held the answer to this complex question. Back in England, Mother Leakey's ghost may have appeared at first to be a typical haunting, if such a thing exists. As Marshall shows, it was not her son and daughter-in-law who were the ghost's real targets. The scope of Mother Leakey's large and far-flung family included none other than the infamous Lord Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, John Atherton. In 1620 John Atherton had married Joan Leakey, the eldest daughter of Mother Leakey. Though initially nothing appears unusual about this fact, to add to the scandalous nature of this story, one of Joan's younger sisters had become pregnant out of wedlock. As was the custom, the young mother-to-be was sent away to prevent further shame from being attached to her and her family. Word began to surface, at the instigation of the Leakey ghost, that John Atherton was responsible for the young girl's pregnancy. The specter did not stop there; it continued with the shocking accusation that Atherton, to relieve himself of responsibility, was also responsible for the murder of the newborn. Atherton's sudden move to Ireland, initially to take up a position that paid far less than the one he left in England, may have been connected to this scandal. In Ireland he earned a professional reputation as an overzealous prosecutor for the Church who successfully regained lands once lost to local nobles. His success promoted him up the hierarchy in the Protestant Church in Ireland but did not endear him to the local Catholic landowners, a position that may have aided Atherton's downfall. Finally, as the narrative progresses and further accusations come to light, it seems that John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, may have been a sexual predator who eventually committed the “unspeakable” crime of sodomy. The result was that either the old woman and her ghost were intent on bringing this matter to light or someone who was privy to the dark secrets and no friend of Atherton's was intent on doing so.

Peter Marshall deftly uncovers the threads of this historical mystery, which is at once both local and national, to reveal that the real object or focus of Mother Leakey's haunting is someone with a darker and, according to contemporaries, far more sinister past than any specter from either heaven, hell, or purgatory. Sodomy, adultery, and infanticide are just a few of the dark family secrets that the ghost of Mother Leakey reveals.