Bealings Bells

0:01 Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy B. Wilson. It's a haunting! Or is it? And if it's not a haunting, was it a hoax? And if it is a hoax, whose hoax is it? We cannot answer those questions conclusively about today's episode, but we can examine them. On February 2nd of 1834, a very strange thing happened at Beelings House in the village of Great Beelings in the county of Suffolk, England. The servants' bells of the house rang, the bells that would ring to call a servant. That would not be particularly odd if it weren't for the fact that they were ringing on their own with no one apparently initiating it. This

0:55 is a series of events that is touted by believers as a documented poltergeist. I'm just going to tell you now, if the word poltergeist scares you or haunting stories scare you, don't even worry about it. This is pretty benign. It's very silly. This is like a ding-dong ditch poltergeist. Yeah, it really is. It's not an especially scary one, but it's kind of a fun, goofy way to send off the Halloween season. Also, although there are some people who still want to say that this was clearly a poltergeist at play, That has also been very heavily criticized as a position in the nearly 200 years since it happened.

1:36 So today we are going to talk about the Beelings Bells. The site of the Beelings House has its own history, and that goes back centuries. We talked about the Doomsday Book in July of 2024. That was written in the 11th century, and it mentions a structure on the side of the house. It is listed as a Saxon hall that had a dedicated priest. That hall passed through the hands of several families for more than 700 years before it was torn down in 1775. Some of the materials from the original hall were salvaged and used for a new construction on the site, and that was Beeling's House.

2:15 In 1806, a man named Major Edward Moore became the owner of Beeling's House. Moore was born in 1771, and when he was just 11, he became a cadet of the East India Company, and he was sent to India by ship the following year. Neither he nor any of the others aboard that voyage made it to their intended destination of Bombay. Due to weather difficulties, the ship landed at Madras, that today is known as Chennai, on the eastern coast of India, and Moore and the others were simply assigned there instead of trying to continue on. Moore's account of what happened at Buehling's house is the primary work that we have on it, so it's worth talking about who he was for some more context. Edward Moore's entire career was with the East India Company, and by

3:04 the time he was 17, he had been living in India for more than five years, and he'd been promoted several times. He was on track for a continued rise when, in 1794, the third of a series of four conflicts known as the Mysore Wars began. So Mysore is known today as Mysuru, and it is a city in the Karnataka state in southern India. And in the most simple terms, in 1766, the East India Company got involved in India's political landscape when it backed the ruler of the princely state of Hyderabad in a territory dispute with Mysuru. But then Hyderabad pulled out of this conflict. They kind of were done with it. And the fighting continued. But at that point, it was just between the East India Company

3:53 and Mysuru. And that initial conflict ran from 1767 to 1769. A second conflict played out from 1780 to 1784. And the third, as we just mentioned, started in 1790. And at that point, Edward Moore took up arms and served on behalf of the East India Company. And during that conflict, he was injured when he took a bullet to the shoulder.

4:19 But just a few months after sitting things out and recovering, he was back on active duty and right back in the mix. He was wounded again, and this time he was sent home to England to recuperate. And while he was in England, he wrote his first book, which was an account of his battle experience, titled A Narrative of the Operations of Captain Little's Detachment and of the Maratha Army Commanded by Prasurambo during the late Confederacy in India against the Nawab-to-Pu Sultan Bahadur. In 1794, Edward Moore married a woman named Elizabeth Lynn. We don't have a lot of information about Elizabeth other than that her father was a surgeon. Moore returned to India in 1796. This time, he went to Bombay, where he continued to work for

5:05 the East India Company. He was promoted to management of the commissary. He also wrote his second book, Digest of the Military Orders and Regulations of the Bombay Army, which was a work assignment and which was published in 1800. That same year, Edward and Elizabeth had a son, also named Edward James. The couple also had a daughter named Charlotte.

5:29 Moore retired in 1806. He was entitled to half pay as a pension, but then he got an additional pension for distinguished service. He was only 35 at the time. that he returned once more to England and became the owner of Beelings House. And that same year, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society. So he rejoined life back in Britain with a pretty good setup. Yeah, retirement at 35 with, like, plenty of money coming in for the rest of your life. Yeah. Sounds amazing. In his first years living in Great Beelings, Moore worked on another book. This was Hindu Pantheon. was published in 1810.

6:09 And this project was the culmination of his collecting and study while he had lived in India. One of the reasons that he got promoted so frequently when he was there was because he had become fluent in local languages and he could interact with the people of the country, something that was very valuable to the East India Company.

6:28 So that is why he moved up the ranks so quickly. This also made him the foremost white expert in Indian culture in the eyes of many Englishmen when he returned. The Preface to Hindu Pantheon offers Moore's point of view on this expertise, stating, it having fallen to my lot to visit, in very early life, the extraordinary people whose mythology I here endeavor to explain. and to remain among them in situations frequently favorable to the acquisition of information until lately, I take the liberty of offering to the public this work, the result of my observations and inquiries.

7:06 He goes on to explain that over his years in India, he would sometimes feel really lost in conversations where people were referencing various spiritual terms or topics, So he started collecting pictures and images of everything that he could related to these things to study them for himself. And those pictures and his understanding of them and the religious beliefs of India formed the basis for this writing. The Dictionary of National Biography entry on Moore says of this work, quote, though prolix and heavy in style and overweighted with classical parallels and irrelevancies, its intrinsic value carried the book through several editions. This was the only English language book that offered this information for decades. Yeah, that book is actually

7:52 still studied by a lot of scholars and kind of examined in terms of like how his perception of India's spirituality is in some ways shockingly insightful and in other ways, obviously stunted and wrong. It's a fascinating book and it has a lot of great imagery in it if you're into it. He followed that book up in 1811 with Hindu Infanticide, an account of the measures adopted for suppressing the practice of the systemic murder by their parents of female infants, which is pretty self-explanatory. But this writing explains how this practice became common and then examines the way that both the Indian government and the British colonial government sought to suppress it. He explains in the opening of

8:36 the book that it spun off of the research and work that he was doing when he was writing Hindu Pantheon, and that he felt that it was, quote, sufficiently curious and interesting to warrant its separate publication. Thirteen years later, just before the events we're talking about today began, Moore published a book titled Suffolk Words and Phrases, or An Attempt to Collect the Lingual Localisms of That County. This is a pretty charming book. It is easy to find online if you want to read it, and here's an example of how he explains the common workings of the local speech. Quote, I will take this early occasion to notice one of the most common peculiarities of the Suffolk dialect, which is the substitution of the plural of a verb

9:20 for the singular in the third person. Of this, several instances have already occurred. There ago, for there he goes, and many others will be noticed in this in future articles. One is often surprised to hear this localism from the lips even of educated and traveled people. But a very different type of writing by Edward Moore was published by a local paper in 1834. And we will get to that and the alleged haunting that it's related to after we pause for a sponsor break. So On March 1st, 1834, the Ipswich Journal published a letter to the editor that had been written by Edward Moore. It opened, quote, Sir, a circumstance of an unaccountable nature has recently occurred in my house, and I shall be obliged by your giving

10:17 insertion to this, my account of it. So Moore continues by saying that there have been unusual bell ringings at his home and that he wrote a full account of everything that was going on, but he realized that that detailed version was far too much for the paper to print, so he tells the editor he has put together an abridged version. Even this abridged version is quite lengthy, but it outlines the following. On February 2nd, when Moore returned home from Sunday service, he was told by the only two servants left in the house that the dining room bell, quote, had been rung three times at intervals between 2 and 5 o'clock. This was odd, but it seemed to have ended, so these members of the household staff went about their

11:00 business for the day. But then the following day, the bell rang several more times, and Edward Moore said that he heard the last one, which was just before 5 p.m., But the bells continued, and they also became more intense. On the third day, Moore went out, and when he returned, he was told that, quote, all the bells in the kitchen had been ringing violently. Moore describes the arrangement of these kitchen bells and what happened after he returned home as follows, quote, there are nine bells in a row about a foot apart, 10 feet from the floor and 12 from the fire, not over it. So it seems here that he's trying to establish that steam or heat rising from the fire could not have been what caused

11:44 these bells to move. He continues, quote, While I was intently looking at the bells and listening to the relation that the ringings had occurred at intervals of about a quarter of an hour, the same five bells rang violently. So violent was it that I should not have been surprised if they had been shaken from their fastenings. And his son, Edward James, was with him at this point and also saw the whole thing. So just in case people have never watched, like, any kind of upstairs-downstairs kind of drama, we're talking about bells where somebody in one part of the house could press a button or hit a lever or whatever. Wires strung through the house connected to the bells. And for a long time, the wire

12:27 was a physical thing that was, like, pulling on the bells. eventually this was upgraded with electricity. So just in case you're like, what are these bells that we're talking about? Because this becomes important to his discussions of what could be going on. So much bell talk. Moore relates the history of these bells in the house. He states that they've been in use for 28 years. They have never required any repair except for one breakfast room bell that needed its wire replaced twice. four to six weeks before all of this ringing began. Moore asks of the editor, quote, Now, sir, is this not a strange relation? At first, the gentle, single tinkling, I was disposed to think I could account for it. But the boisterous clang and agitation of my

13:13 first witnessed peal of five at once showed its fallacy. You and your readers may be assured that there is no hoax in the matter. I do not mean by me, but by anyone. I am thoroughly convinced that the ringing is by no human agency. How, then, is it? I cannot say. A satisfactory solution is beyond the reach of my philosophy. Moore relays more details of additional ringings and notes that he has checked all of the wires and examined the mechanisms of the bells to no avail. he concludes the letter to the editor by saying, quote, I think, sir, this strange relation will amuse you and your readers, and if you or any of them can give satisfactory explanation of it, I farther think it will be instructive to many,

14:00 and among them your very obedient servant, Edward Moore. There is also a postscript to this letter, which was also published in the paper, in which Moore states that he read this account as he has written it, and as it appears in the paper, quote, to six or eight intelligent gentlemen at Woodbridge, and that some questions came up from them, and he's going to go ahead and answer those questions in this postscript before readers of the Ipswich Journal can ask them, including, quote, that I keep no monkey, that my house is not infested with rats, and he says that the wires of all the bells involved are visible along their entire lengths, with the exception of where they pass through solid walls. He notes that the men

14:42 he read the account to suggested it was a trick, to which his response was, it is possible. He writes that he is going to try some experiments, presumably to try to replicate the phenomenon. When I was reading through this outline, my first thought was, this sounds like mice, man. It did not occur to me that a monkey maybe could be the culprit here. That kind of makes sense since he served in South Asia. I can imagine a scenario where he might have brought a monkey home, but boy, did I not think of monkeys. I thought of mice.

15:15 After this letter with the postscript was printed, the Ipswich Journal received replies about it, most notably one that appeared one week after Moore's letter. And it opens with, quote, Sir, I do not flatter myself that I am able to elucidate the mystery of the bell ringing at Mr. Moore's at Beelings. but I beg to offer a suggestion to that gentleman. The writer of this letter, who signs that only a constant reader, says that he will wager that if Moore does as he suggests, he will either discover the cause or he will find that the bells do not ring at all. And so this is the course of action that he recommends that Moore take. Quote, When Mr.

15:54 Moore is favored with a repetition of the mysterious peel, instead of watching for monkeys or cats or making philosophical experiments to send for a few respectable neighbors, seat his entire establishment in one room and leave a friend with them. Lock all the outer doors of the house and take the keys, station a friend on each staircase, and with another friend make a thorough search of the house, locking every door and and taking out the key as the search proceeds. He reiterates that if Moore does this, he will either find an explanation or he will find someone doing it. He notes that, quote, in my own house, which compared to Mr. Moore's is of a limited extent, a person may, in a second, set three bells ringing

16:39 violently by touching the wires, which all pass along a passage and through a hole in the wall. and in less than two seconds may get out of the passage at any one of the five doors, and may almost instantaneously set other bells ringing within two seconds, and within two seconds may enter the kitchen in a different direction from that of the passage where the three bells were set ringing. The writer of this also relays a story of another person in the area who similarly had mysterious bell ringing at the home and conducted a similar thorough investigation and discovered that it was one of their recently hired house staff. I like how people are like, oh yeah, this happens all the time. It's just bad, bad employees.

17:25 I like how his suggested course of action reads like something that would happen in a murder mystery novel where you have found a body in the living room and you've got to figure out who did it. Nobody gets out or in. Later, Moore shared a much longer version of his own story, and in it, he not only went into exhaustive detail of the ways in which the bells in the house are wired. I had to tap out of the wire bell talk. But he also elaborated on his first thought regarding the cause, which was pretty benign.

17:57 He explained that, quote, all over the exterior western end of the house... a full-wooded old pear tree is trained and nailed. It struck me as possible that two or three or more blackbirds in which we abound might have got among the boughs of the pear tree, and if fighting or struggling or cooing, might have tightened or shaken the wires sufficiently to tinkle a bell. But he comments that he only thought this before he had witnessed the ringing himself and before it grew more intense and violent, which he thought could in no way be attributed to birds in the pear tree. He also stated that he, in his experiments, had found a way to ring five bells at once, but it required a rope affixed to cranks,

18:40 and he couldn't get them to ring vigorously in this method. It was pretty gentle. He also was able at one point to get six bells to ring at once by yanking on multiple wires simultaneously with a garden hoe, but that too only produced a light ringing. He states that if he worked at these experiments for a full year, he would still be unable to replicate the ringing that he and his house staff had witnessed. Moore does offer up a possible scientific explanation sort of, quote, it may be no advance to say that possibly some hitherto undiscovered law of electricity or galvanism, latent, brought into activity only by certain combinations of metallic alloys in certain concurring or varied degrees of tension in connection with certain conditions of

19:31 atmospheric influences acted upon by agencies subtle and occult, etc., etc., These possibilities, whose combined eventualities may or may not ever be developed, may be only another link in the amazing chain of results that recent researchers into the mysterious operations of science and galvanics have brought under the wandering eye and contemplation of chemical philosophy. Who can say or imagine where they are to end? I want to diagram these sentences to see if that will allow me to figure out what he is saying, because none of this makes any sense. And the first sentence just kind of dwindles into nothingness with no verb where there needs to be one.

20:22 It really, like, I will date myself with this reference. It just sounds like Jim Ignatowski from Taxi, essentially boiling down to, like, Calvinism. It doesn't make any sense at all. Coming up, we are going to talk about some other letters that Moore received from people who had similar stories of unexplained events in their experiences. We are going to get into those after we hear from the sponsors that keep Stuff You Missed in History class going. Music Moore received another letter, this one from a woman he chose not to name, although he did publish her correspondence in part with a note that he had edited out personal information and details that were not germane to the bell ringing.

21:15 His reason for this is that he can't get a hold of her, and he is not sure if she's still alive when he published this letter some years later, and he just didn't want to publish her personal information without her permission. So In this letter, she shared her own experience of bells violently ringing in her house when she was a young girl. Her father, she said, had carefully examined the home to see if the ringing was the result of a mouse or another creature, but found nothing.

21:41 She came to believe that the ringing was supernatural. That same woman also wrote more a second letter relaying additional stories from people that were close to her about candles going out, stoves only lighting on one side, etc., to support the idea that there had been unexplained things happening in the area for quite a while. He got letters from other people as well. A.W. Felkin wrote him twice.

22:06 Moore had replied to the first and got a second letter after it. Felkin's first letter asked, quote, I am induced to take the liberty of inquiring whether you have heard of the particulars of long and repeated bell ringing in a house near Chesterfield. As the other letters Moore received, this shares a story similar to what was happening at Beeling's house and similarly unexplained. Moore began correspondences with other people as well. He collected stories that echoed the one he had shared in the Ipswich Journal. Moore was in London during some of this correspondence, but the bells were still ringing back home. and he got the full report when he returned. His son had also been sending him letters while he was away, keeping him apprised of the

22:52 latest connections that were being made with other residents of the area who also had random bell ringing in their homes at some point in time. It seemed that Moore was assembling quite a network of friends all united through this curious phenomenon. Moore also received an anonymous note postmarked from Colchester which read, quote, Sir, understanding that you have lately been favored with periodic concerts from your bells, and that it has consequently occasioned no small amusement amongst our neighbors, etc., I cannot help recommending you, as I have great respect for your name and character, to silence their tongues as well as your noisy inmates by the speedy application of toe and twine. With my knowledge of human nature, I

23:41 will venture to say the witch will soon cease her diabolical agency, and the circumstance, at least, be a quiet wonder. So it sounds like this piece of advice is telling Mort to just physically restrain the bells from ringing, and so whatever spirit that's ringing of them will leave them alone. leaving him, of course, without the use of his bells. Yeah, I'm like, this is a chicken or the egg situation. Like, the bells stopped ringing. Right, because you tied them up.

24:09 That doesn't mean the thing stopped trying to ring them. I just found myself going round and round in circles on that one. But in any case, he didn't need to physically restrain the bells because March 27th, so just a little shy of two months after they started, was the last time that the bells at Beelink's house rang without any explanation. Moore made a note of this on March 29th, which read, quote, Thursday last, March 27, bells rung again. Four bells at 20 minutes after four, five bells at 20 minutes before five. And the activity just stopped after that. In the months that followed, there was a similar incident in Greenwich Hospital at the apartments of a man named Lieutenant Rivers. Moore included accounts about the

24:55 Greenwich Bells and a strange malfunction of the bell at Christchurch, Oxford, known as Great Tom around the same time in his book, Feelings Bells, which he wrote in the years following his own home's bell events. He included other strange bell events as well, including an account of the village chimes at Presbury ringing for three hours straight for no apparent reason in early 1841. There are a lot of other oddball stories in this book as well. They are all unexplained. Yeah, everybody was having bell problems in the 1830s and early 1840s.

25:33 That book concludes with the following, quote, to these very extraordinary and mysterious communications, I can add nothing. Having arrived at the middle of August 1841, it has become necessary to in reference to the object of this little book, to bring it to its end. Here I bid the reader farewell, repeating that I shall hear with much interest of any promising attempts to develop the cause of the strange events herein related, and of any farther mysterious bell-ringing, and shall thankfully receive any authenticated communication of other phenomena of a like nature. Edward Moore died on February 26, 1848, at the age of 77. His son, Edward James, had become rector of Great Beelings and continued to live there

26:21 for the rest of his life. The home remained in the family, although the Moores rented it out and they didn't live there themselves. No tenants ever reported any paranormal activity that we know of, In the years between the publication of Beeling's Bells and Moore's Death, the book and its accounts had already become very popular with readers, spiritualists, and skeptics, but debate over the bells continued for decades after Moore's Death. In 1899, the Journal for Psychical Research ran a letter from spiritual investigator Frank Podmore, who is absolutely on my short list, that he wrote in response to a larger discussion of paranormal events and poltergeists specifically.

27:03 And in it, he references the Beelings Bell's incidents. Quote, the evidence is firsthand. It is practically contemporaneous, being based on notes made at the time and written out in full within a day or two at most. The witness is a fellow of the Royal Society who records with scrupulous care the atmospheric conditions, the readings of barometer and thermometer, and points out with justice that the phenomena cannot be explained by the known laws of the electric theory. or the expansion of metals by rise of temperature. And yet, as a witness, Major Moore shows himself on a level with the servant girl who has her fortune told by the cards. On February 5th, 1834, that is three days after the bell ringing began, he writes, I am thoroughly

27:49 convinced that the ringing is by no human agency. No reason is given for this conviction. On February 27th, he writes, it is possible that it is all due to trickery. No reason is given for this change of opinion. A few days later, he repeats his conviction that the bells were not rung by any mortal hand. No new facts had come to light in the interval, and no reasons are given for this second change of opinion. Again, though devoting many pages to describing the courses and the attachments of the wires, the state of the weather, and so on, Major Moore never tells us of whom his household consisted and never describes a single occasion on which, when they were all gathered together in his presence, the bell ringing occurred. Further,

28:36 a writer in the Ipswich Journal made the sensible suggestion that Major Moore should begin his investigations by gathering all his household into one room and posting trustworthy friends about the house. Major Moore, in quoting the letter, adds, I did not in any way follow the advice therein offered.

28:53 Podmore had laid out all of this to get to an interesting conclusion. Quote, I venture to suggest, as a plausible theory, that Major Moore, in homely phrase, was not such a fool as he looks, and that his book is a gentle satire on those who were ready on such evidence as that here offered to believe in supernormal or even unfamiliar agencies. This established a theory that Moore, who, as Podmore pointed out, was a well-respected man and a member of the Royal Society, was not trying to create a hoax so much as to make a satirical commentary on the proclivity to attribute things that are difficult to explain to the paranormal. One very vocal critic of this whole thing was... Trevor Henry Hall. Hall, who was born

29:36 in 1910, made a living writing books, debunking various historical haunting accounts. by offering up rational explanations for the various phenomena associated with them. I will say also he is himself controversial because he's pretty conceited and dismissive of everybody as he does this. He's very unkind to anybody that was ever perhaps duped by anything. But when it came to the Beelings Bells, Hall's take was that Moore became so emotionally invested in the Bells that his account can't be entirely trusted, even with all of the notes that he took. Hall's conclusion is that one of the house staff was pranking Moore the entire time. In 1972, Daniel Cohen's book, In Search of Ghosts, examined numerous stories of hauntings,

30:27 including the Beeling spells. He noted that it's the most well-documented instance of bells ringing without human hands being involved, but is also skeptical. He points out that while Edward Moore gives a lengthy description of the bell system at Beeling's house, it's also pretty confusing and notes, quote, the confusion seems deliberate rather than the result of bad writing.

30:53 Having read that one sentence, I don't know if I agree. Cohen also references the scientific word salad that we referenced earlier, which is why I don't entirely agree, noting how very confusing that is, making the case that that's also deliberate. He describes Moore's writing on the subject as, quote, a gentle satire on the investigations of other odd phenomena. But Cohen thinks the satire was too gentle because people still think it's a real poltergeist case. Sort of like people not realizing what the onion is in today's parlance. It happens all the time. And that was, you know, in the 70s. People still today... debate over whether Beelink's bells was an actual poltergeist case although I think most people

31:40 at this point are like somebody was clearly messing with something you could just reach up and yank on those wires if you wanted yeah we did with a hoe but what if you used your hand you need the hoe to do six at one time though yeah I love this story because it is so cockamamie and I just find it charming It's marvelously silly, and I like a little silly Halloween action sometimes. Do you have some silly listener mail? It's not silly, but it's pretty cool. Okay, good.

32:13 And I asked you about it earlier, and I know you also find it cool. We are delighted by this listener mail, which comes from our listener, Justin, who maybe other listeners know of, because you'll see. Justin writes, Hi, you might have noticed last night's September 28th episode of Jeopardy had a question about a recent subject of yours, the Bavarian Illuminati. I got that clue right because I was listening to your episode about it on the flight to Los Angeles to film that very episode. Thank you for a spectacular podcast and bringing joy and also important lessons to us all. Justin Robbins. I gave his full name because he's a Jeopardy champ. And the fact that we got to help in any tiny way is very

32:51 flattering and delightful. Yeah. And I love it. And... He includes pet tax. Yay. He writes, for on-theme pet tax, my family's dog, Gracie, had a phase where she decided to sit exactly where my mom did to watch TV. Mom put a blanket on her to see what would happen. The results are attached. Gracie also likes the cold a lot.

33:10 Gracie looks like a German shepherd in these pictures. She is sitting under a blanket looking like a delighted, mature lady enjoying her TV time. She's watching her stories. She's probably watching Jeopardy to watch you win. That is the coolest thing ever. There is another attachment that sounds like maybe Gracie was doing something cute in the snow, but I can't get it to load. But Gracie is a beauty.

33:32 What a sweet baby. And also, congratulations and how cool again. I love it. Listen, the Bavarian Illuminati is a gift that keeps giving. While we were in Germany and Czechia recently, our Austrian guide, I talked to him about it. I was surprised that he was not All up on the Bavarian Illuminati. And he kind of dismissed it as, I think, what did I tell you, Tracy? He was like, oh, some little angry things. That sounds very like him, is the thing to say. Peter is spectacular. We loved him.

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