Lore - Legends 44: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

Folklore has a way of ringing down through the centuries, calling out to be heard. And for this particular set of legends, that couldn’t be more literal—or terrifying. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Jamie Vargas. ————————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ————————— Sponsors: Mint Mobile: For a limited time, wireless plans from Mint Mobile are $15 a month when you purchase a 3-month plan with UNLIMITED talk, text and data at MintMobile.com/lore. Quince: Premium European clothing and accessories for 50% to 80% less than similar brands, at Quince.com/LORE for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Acorns: Acorns helps you automatically save & invest for your future. Head to Acorns.com/LORE to sign up for Acorns to start saving and investing for your future today! Squarespace: Head to Squarespace.com/lore to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code LORE. ————————— To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here. ————————— ©2025 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

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BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. BetMGM.com for Ts and Cs. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Welcome to Lore Legends, a subset of lore episodes that explore the strange tales we whisper in the dark, even if they can't always be proven by the history books.

So if you're ready, let's begin. They left the old world for Canada, but little did they know. A piece of it came with them. Soon after settling into their new home, the O'Grady's were all gathered together, eating dinner. Then their evening was interrupted by an unearthly mournful whale. The family looked out the window, but they couldn't see anything. The horrific whale continued for another moment, echoing through the night and sending goosebumps down their spines. And then it vanished.

The O'Grady's asked around, and some of their neighbors told them that they had heard the sound as well, but none of them knew what made it. Disquieted, the family went to bed and just tried to forget the whole thing. The next morning, the eldest son went on a long-awaited fishing trip with his father. The rest of the family waited for them to come back, laid in down with their catch, but the hours passed by and the father and son never came home. Once dinner time arrived, the O'Grady's sent messengers to the beach to look for their missing family members. But those messengers returned without news and the family was left to stew in their worry.

Finally, they saw approaching torches, elated the family dashed to the door, but it wasn't their family who knocked. It was a group of their neighbors and they were carrying two dead bodies. The father and son had both drowned and the banshee that had trailed the O'Grady's from Ireland had tried to warn them just the night before. You probably don't have a banshee to follow you around and alert you of impending doom and hopefully you won't

need one. But you don't need a banshee scream to tell you that the echoes of folklore are everywhere. The sound of our ancestors' beliefs ring throughout our lives, and they don't always have a supernatural source. And all you have to do is listen. I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore legends. Historically speaking, most people have not always wanted more cowbell. In fact, if someone had a fever, then I would wager that a bell was the last thing they wanted in the room. You see, bells have a long history of getting tangled up in superstition, and some of those superstitions were pretty negative. Over the years, bells of all kinds—church bells, dinner bells, and even handbells—have

been linked to omens—the good, the bad, and the deadly. According to one superstition, if you break a dinner bell then death will come to your home soon after. Another claims that hearing a church bell during a wedding meant that the bride or groom would soon die and if you ring a bell for no reason then it could lead to bad luck and eventually even death. Of course another superstition says that accidentally ringing a bell could lead to happiness.

Plenty of these beliefs contradict themselves. That's one of the complicated things about superstitions. Depending on where they originated from, the same action could be interpreted in widely different ways. Even so, bells have frequently been tied to death. In many cultures, a bell was rung when someone died, both to scare off demons and to lure the deceased soul away from the body. And it was a pretty important ritual, too.

In one instance, in Huntingtonshire, a newborn died and was buried and no bells were rung. One neighbor said that she was devastated for the mother, and I quote, because when anyone died, the soul never left the body until the church bell was rung. But while the bell could kill you, it could also bring you back to life. Bells have been used in necromancy rituals for centuries. For example, in 18th century France, in order to bring a person back to life with a bell, that bell had to be made on the same day and at the same hour as the

deceased was born. The bell would be carved with a number of symbols and magical words and then left in a cemetery for seven days. At the end of that time, the bell would have the energy it needed to revive the dead. The supernatural uses of bells usually depended on the region that these superstitions came from. For example, in China, they were once used to keep dragons and evil spirits away. Some nobles even believe that ringing bells during an eclipse would make the sun disappear from the heavens. And in Bali, bells were once tied to birds' feet so that they could dispel air spirits as they flew through the skies.

Bells once had significance in the Christian church as well. In medieval Europe, people believed that thunderstorms were caused by demonic spirits, but they also believed that ringing bells could chase them away. So whenever a thunderstorm started gathering in the distance, bell towers would ring, hoping to dissuade the storm from coming any closer.

Some bells were even baptized, presumably so that they would have even more of a divine power to chase those storms away. Many French bells were inscribed with phrases that can be translated to something like, It is I who dissipate the thunders. And some had even less catchy inscriptions, like one that read, Whensoever this bell shall sound,it shall drive away the malign influences "'of the assailing spirits, "'the horror of their apparitions,

"'the rush of whirlwinds, "'the stroke of lightning, "'the harm of thunder, "'the disasters of storms, "'and all the spirits of the tempest.'" It's a mouthful, to say the least. And because of this superstition, it should come as no surprise to us

that a lot of people died ringing church bells during thunderstorms. It took a long time for people to realize that metal, particularly metal in high places, attracted lightning. Between 1750 and 1784, just in Germany, 122 bell ringers were killed by lightning. In 1786, Paris' government actually outlawed ringing bells in the middle of a thunderstorm. But old superstitions always die hard, and the practice continued until the 1820s. Church bells occupy an odd place in the world of folklore. In some stories, they fight storms, but in others, they act as a warning bell. And in yet others, they provide nothing more than the echo of a memory.

One of the more interesting legends about a church bell comes from Bowmere, a village in Shropshire, England. According to the story, the village was once inhabited by people who scoffed at the Christian God. They may have been Saxons or Romans, it's never specified in the stories, but they worshipped a whole pantheon of deities and they weren't terribly interested in converting Not that they weren't invited to convert They were often an old priest tried to win over their hearts and when he failed He always warned the villagers that God would punish them, but the villagers didn't listen They just made fun of the old priest and chased him off time and time again, pelting him with mud and stones.

Despite the abuse, the priest never gave up on saving their souls. He begged and pleaded, but the villagers still refused to pray to his god. Well, one year the winter brought heavy rain, and on Christmas Eve buckets of rain fell all day long. While the villagers spent all day celebrating their gods, the priest and his fellow parishioners took vigil at a midnight mass. And during that mass, one of the things they did was ring the Sanctus Bell. It was the last thing that any of them would ever do. All of a sudden, upon ringing the bell, the villagers heard a roar.

And then, before they could react, a rush of water swept down into the village. The entire town, including the chapel, flooded, and then, just as quickly, every building was washed away. In a matter of moments, Bomir had been divinely wiped off the face of the earth as punishment, they say, for never turning to the Christian god. The only thing left was a deep pond where the church once stood, known today as Bowmer Pool. A legend claims that if you sail over the pond on Christmas Eve, you can still hear

the sanctus bell ringing. Now today we know that Bowmer is situated in a floodplain, where flash floods are common. It's more likely that any devastating flood events in the town's history can be chalked up to nature, rather than retribution from God. Also, experts believe that Bowmere Pool was formed at least 15,000 years ago, far too long ago to have been formed this way, as the story claims. Even so, locals continue to hear the bell on Christmas Eve. A bell that's ringing for all the lost souls.

They say the devil died the day that Christ was born. Now this isn't official theology. If you've ever attended a church service, then you know that most clergymen believe that while the devil's cause was lost as soon as Jesus was put in that manger, he is still currently operational in our world. But according to the medieval church and the modern-day congregation of the Dewsbury Minster Church of All Saints in Yorkshire, England, Satan was struck dead the moment Christ came to earth. And so, to celebrate this momentous occasion, the Dewsbury Minster Church

tolls their bells every Christmas Eve. The bell rings once for each year that's passed since Jesus' birth, then it's meticulously timed so that the bell's tolling will end at midnight. They call this practice the Devil's Nell. The Devil's Nell isn't done with just any old bell though. The church has a very special one up in their bell tower that they ring on Christmas Eve. One that was made because of a murder. And no, we're not talking about the Devil's murder this time. I mean the killing of an actual flesh and blood human being. The story is a bit vague.

The oldest version of this legend claims that many years ago, in the little town of Soothill, there was once a bad-tempered blacksmith who was master of an iron foundry. One day, in a fit of passion, he threw a little boy into one of his furnaces, killing him. If this had happened today, the blacksmith would have been put away for life. But hundreds of years ago, Soothill gave him a much lighter sentence. The blacksmith was required to make a bell for the town's church steeple, so he did, and it was deemed that crafting a bell for the Lord wiped away his sins. Now, another version of this story claims that the killer wasn't an iron worker at all, but a nobleman. It's believed that

in the 13th or 14th century, a man named Sir Thomas de Soothill committed a murder. Who exactly he did murder is unclear. Most versions don't say, and the one that does just says that he drowned a serving boy in a pond. But with a name like Soothill in a town called Soothill, it's clear that Sir Thomas was too important to be jailed for his crime. So as penance, he gave the bell to the church and the bell was named Black Tom.

To this day, Black Tom is the bell that is rung every Christmas Eve. It's fitting, a dark history for a bell that annually celebrates death, no matter how justified the devil's death might be. Funnily enough, there may even be some truth to the legend behind the bell. The Dewsbury Minster Church dates back to the 11th century, well before any little boys were allegedly thrown into any forges or ponds. According to the church's official bell ringers, the current iteration of Black Tom is not the original Black Tom. The bell was recast in 1820, and then again in 1875.

The 1875 version is the one that still rings out today. The bell ringers also claim that the bell was actually gifted by a man named Thomas de Soothill. Now, whether or not Sir Thomas de Soothill actually existed, let alone if he murdered someone, is much harder to confirm. The original version of the legend didn't include any dates and the dates that we do have don't have much evidence to back them up. According to one folklorist, the bell has been ringing in the steeple

since the 13th or 14th century, while another says that the murder that inspired the bell happened five or 600 years ago. Some newspapers throughout the years have claimed that the murder happened during a few specific years in the 15th century, but they never provided proof for that. And on top of all of that, over the centuries, the last name Soothill

has had many different spellings, making Sir Thomas de Soothill a difficult man to track down. And because Thomas was a common name, there have been multiple Thomas Soothills tied to nobility. The best we can say is that there were Thomas Soothills in Yorkshire, but we can't say if any of them were actually murderers. And this, by the way, is a little glimpse into just how difficult the research process

can be when studying folklore. The farther back we go, the harder details become to pin down, and that tug of war between belief and skepticism becomes more and more of an epic struggle. And that's not to say, of course, that the process isn't fun. But here's the thing. Folklore doesn't have to have a real event behind it. In the end, whether or not a man once killed a boy and paid for it with a church bell doesn't really matter.

What matters is what people believe. Black Tom is a treasured relic for that community. And whether the tolling bell is dressed up with the blood of the innocent or is just an old bell, the story it tells still rings the same. Major Edward Moore had just returned home from a Sunday church service on February 2nd of 1834 when his servants told him that the house's dining room bell had rung several times while he was gone.

But here's the thing. No one aside from the two servants had been in the home at the time. As far as they could tell, the bell had rung on its own. Now Moore's house was a large manor. Built in 1775, Beeling's house became Moore's home in 1806. And in the nearly 20 years that he had lived there, he had never heard any of the house's nine butler bells ring without someone's hand being attached to the other end. And before I move on, let me clear up what a Butler Bell is.

If you've seen the television show Downton Abbey and you remember scenes where the servants sit around their table down beside the kitchen and have their meals and there's a wall with a bunch of bells on it, those are the Butler Bells. Each one of those bells in that kitchen area is connected to a room somewhere else in the house. So someone in those rooms could ring the bell there, and down

in the kitchen the corresponding bell would ring for the servants. Think of it as a rudimentary intercom system, in a time before electricity. Edward Moore, though, shrugged off the mysterious dining room bell. It was a large house, after all, and even though only two servants had been inside at the time, it was easy for Moore to just assume that someone else had come in at some point and messed with the bell. The next day, the same butler bell rang again, and again Moore shrugged it off. But when he returned home on Tuesday afternoon, his servants immediately told him that, and I quote, all the bells in the kitchen had been ringing violently. When Moore went down to the kitchen to investigate, the cook told him that five of the nine butler bells had been ringing violently. When Moore went down to the kitchen to investigate, the cook told him that five of the nine butler

bells had been ringing. At this point, the entire staff was afraid. They had been the only ones in the house when the cacophony started, and they hadn't been able to find the person responsible. As Moore stood there and examined the butler bells, the same five started to ring again. According to him, their movements were, and I quote, so violent that I should not have been surprised if they had been shaken from their fastenings. And the bells rang out again and again,

kicking off every 10 or 15 minutes. And then later that night when Moore and his son were eating dinner, the bell that was in the room with them started ringing as if swung by an invisible hand. The bell pealed every few minutes all throughout dinner, with Moore looking on, dumbfounded. The bells of Beelings' house continued to ring on their own power for nearly two whole months.

During that time, Edward Moore conducted an investigation into the matter. At one point, he gathered the entire staff into one room to ensure that no one was sneaking off and playing a prank with the bells. He also wrote down how the bells' movements differed when they were rung by a hand and when they were ringing on their own. He even checked on the bells' wiring, which had been in perfect working order, and kept track of the weather conditions each day it happened. More came up with every conceivable possibility to explain the phenomenon.

Perhaps a family of nesting blackbirds were jostling the bells wiring. Maybe it was mice. Maybe the metal that the bells were made of was expanding and contracting, but nothing seemed to fit. Desperate, Moore wrote about his situation to a newspaper called the Ipswich Journal. In his letter he asked for readers to suggest what they thought could be causing his Butlerler bells to ring nonstop. And it paid off. Well, kind of. You see, the responses that he got weren't very good ones. One reader asked if it could be an electricity issue, while another asked if it could be caused by the shift in the wet soil under the house's foundation.

Yet another suggested that Moore should invite everyone he knew to his house, lock them all in the same room, and see if the bells rang then. If not, then it would mean that he had caught the prankster. In the end, Moore never figured out what had happened to his butler bells. He wrote a book about the entire experience, concluding, and I quote, "...if I had a year to devote to such consideration and the promise of a thousand pounds in the event of discovery, I should despair of success. I would not, indeed, attempt it."

Today the Beelings House is still standing, but the bells don't ring on their own anymore. They've been disconnected from their 19th century wires, and now they simply exist as a reminder of the house's mysterious past. Some people have chalked the entire event up to a poltergeist. After all, the easiest explanation was that a mischievous spirit was wreaking havoc in the halls of the Beelings house. Historian Ronald Pearsall said that the bells were a classic example of pure poltergeist. Still, most people don't believe that the supernatural was the answer here.

They believe that someone was ringing the bells deliberately, and that perhaps More himself was either just unaware or in on it the entire time. Folklore has a way of enmeshing itself with society. It's easy to get caught up in a story, and for that story to spread like wildfire until it's part of the cultural consciousness. Take for example that long-held belief that ringing church bells dispelled thunderstorms. If anyone had thought objectively about it, they might have realized that more people died from being struck by lightning while ringing those bells than they would have if they had just weathered the storm. But the folklore told them that bells chased away thunder, and so they looked for any

evidence they could find to confirm their biases. The same thing may have happened in the Beelings house. After Moore published his account of the self-ringing dinner bells, a whole host of Suffolk County residents piped up and said, now that I think about it, something similar happened to me once. But it's doubtful that a high number of locals also had a bell-ringing poltergeist inside their own homes. Folklore's power of suggestion is strong, and it can be even more so when it comes to

sounds like a ringing bell. Suddenly something innocuous and commonplace can easily become something suspicious. As for more, historians believe that the ringing Butler bells actually had a simple explanation. Some scholars have suggested that someone really was playing a practical joke on Moore somehow and sneaking into his house and rigging the bells to ring. But others have gone so far as to say that the ringing bells just never existed at all. The entire ordeal could simply have been a prank. Not on Moore, but on the rest of us.

Some have suggested that Moore made the whole story up just to get a kick out of tricking his neighbors into believing that he had a ghost. After all, when it comes to pulling off a hoax, all the hard work is spent on the planning and implementation. Getting people to believe the lie is often just as easy as ringing a bell. I hope you enjoyed today's deep dive into legends of powerful bells. There's a beautiful amount of variety to the stories and a certain purity to it all. After all, the simplest legends always ring the truest. But of course, we aren't done just yet. There's

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of a website or domain. Squarespace, build something beautiful. They left all the passengers to die. It was the biggest catastrophe in Prince Edward Island's history. The island itself is picturesque, with rolling green lawns and beautiful beaches. It's the kind of place that you would never expect anything truly terrible to happen. A haven sheltered from the harsh realities of the world. And I do mean that literally. Situated just north of Nova

Scotia, Canada, the island is separated from the mainland by a thin strip of water called the Northumberland Strait. And five months out of the year, that strait is completely frozen over. That meant that before the invention of telephones, Prince

Edward Island was cut off from the rest of civilization for nearly half of the calendar year. But when the Northumberland Strait wasn't covered in ice, it was the island's main way to get mail and supplies to and from the mainland. It was important enough that by the 1840s, a regular steamboat service was established to carry both passengers and mail across the strait. In 1853, the original steamboat was

retired and it was replaced with the brand new Ferry Queen and this is where the trouble started. On October 17th of 1853, the Ferry Queen was scheduled to make a standard trip from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island to mainland Canada. Aside from the crew, the boat would be ferrying a handful of passengers and several bags full of mail. Everyone was eager to get going, but that day the wind was particularly strong, and the captain postponed the journey for six hours. By noon he decided the wind had delayed them long enough and he ordered the Fairy Queen

to set sail. But even though the wind may have died down, the churning sea water had yet to do the same. Only a short while after leaving harbor, the Fairy Queen was hit by a barrage of intense waves, breaking some of the equipment on board. And then the engines stopped running, the pumps stopped working, and the ship started to take on water. Most of the passengers didn't realize that anything was wrong until the crew started to act differently. But they weren't trying to get the ship running again, or getting the passengers to safety. No, they were doing as little work as possible. According to one passenger, and I quote,

A few of the crew worked well, but generally speaking they could not be got to work except only at short intervals, ceasing as soon as the passengers' backs were turned. The crew appeared to be in an undisciplined condition, the captain having no command over them. You see, the sailors just needed to do enough to save their own skins. Nobody else mattered. So the crew neglected the passengers, refusing to round them up or show them to the lifeboats. Instead, they took the ship's two lifeboats for themselves.

The boats had enough room to carry everybody, but the crew filled the remaining space with the mail bags that they were delivering. The captain climbed in, the rope was cut, and the crew dropped to safety, leaving everyone else on board. The abandoned passengers did the best they could to find a way off the ship, but it was no use. The best they could do was to frantically ring the fairy queen's bell, hoping that someone would hear it and come to their rescue. But nobody ever did. Eventually, a strong wave tore the ship apart. Some people managed to cling to the wreckage as a sort of life raft, but others weren't so lucky, sinking down into the depths of the Northumberland Strait. Those who had found something to hold onto were forced to hold for hours, withstanding the battering waves and wind, because otherwise they would be next.

According to one testimony, finally after eight hours of exposure to the storm and cold, they were cast ashore on the north side of Marigamish Island, some 12 or 15 miles from the scene of their disaster. In the end, five passengers survived and seven died. Meanwhile, the captain and the entire crew made it out safely with their mailbags. They never went back to save the people they had left for dead, and

they never faced any punishment for their actions. It was a senseless loss of life, a tragedy in every sense of the word. And it turns out one that had been forewarned. On the morning of October 7th,

before the fairy queen left the harbor, a disturbance had occurred at a local church on Prince Edward Island. The Kirk of St. James was the oldest Presbyterian church on the island. But despite its age, they never seemed to have problems with ghosts hanging around. That is, not until that fateful day in October.

The morning of the disastrous journey, two church members heard what sounded like the peel of a ship's bell. The bell tolled eight times, just like it would have on any seafaring vessel. But the bell's sound wasn't coming from a boat. It was coming from the Kirk of St. James itself. So they went to the church to investigate. The whole time they were walking over, the church bell continued to ring. When they arrived, they found something odd. There were three women, all dressed in white. The women didn't seem to notice or hear them approach.

It was as if they were entirely in a separate world. The men fetched the church sexton, and when they all returned, they saw that the three white women were entering the kirk, with a fourth woman ringing the bell in the tower. But when they finally got to the top of the tower, it was empty. The men probably thought that the strange apparition would never be explained, but in the end the mystery didn't take long to solve. Later that same day, four of the church's congregation died on the Fairy Queen, ringing

the ship's bell in desperation, hoping for a savior. This episode of Lore Legends was produced by me, Aaron Manke, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Jamie Vargas. Just like you, I have mixed feelings about ads in podcasts. They certainly keep the lights on and they pay the staff and I am grateful for that, but they can also be an interruption to a beautiful mood. So if you're interested in supporting the show and willing to chip in a bit per month,

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