It appears that the author, who was officiating there as temporary chaplain to the jail, was a man of indisputable and well-known integrity, and a very popular preacher throughout the county.
In order to render his work useful and instructive, innumerable references are made to the Scriptures, but his quotations are of too great a length for the following abridged tract, which is copied from the original and contains only the account of the interview the author had with Croxford’s Ghost.
THE GHOST
It appears from the account given in a pamphlet reprinted and sold by G. Henson, Letterpress and Copper-plate Printer, Bridge Street, Northampton, 1848, that on Saturday, August 4, 1764, John Croxford, together with three others of the names of Seamark, Deacon and Butlin were tried at the Assizes of Northampton and convicted of murder.
It came out at the trial that the unfortunate victim was a native of Scotland, travelling with goods, and that by chance he called at the house of Seamark, a shepherd’s hut in the parish of Guilsborough, Northamptonshire, where Croxford and his companions used to meet, where they robbed and afterwards cruelly murdered him, and in order to prevent a discovery consumed his body in an oven; which was proved on the evidence of one of Seamark’s children, who was an eye-witness to the transaction, by looking through the crevices of the floor from the room above.
They were all found guilty and executed on August 4, 1764, and Croxford’s body hung in chains on Hollowell Heath, in the parish of Guilsborough, near the spot where the horrid deed was perpetrated—(and no spot more suggestive of such a tragedy could be imagined).
The author of the work—at that time (1764) holding the appointment of chaplain to the Northampton Jail—after quoting passages from various writers to prove the reality of the subject, proceeds to give an account of the appearance of Croxford’s Ghost, as follows:
“I shall now proceed without further lett or impediment to a plain and conscientious account of the ghost or apparition which was the occasion of my troubling the world with this narrative; unless I first observe that the behaviour of the prisoners, one of whom is the subject of these pages, lately tried, condemned and executed at Northampton, for the murder of a person unknown, upon the evidence of Ann Seamark and her son, about nine or ten years old, was such as astonished every beholder....
“Clear and conclusive as the evidence was against them, no arguments, even after condemnation, though delivered and enforced with the utmost energy, precision and perspicuity by a learned and worthy divine, were able to reach their hardened hearts and prevail for an open and unreserved confession of their guilt. Even at the gallows, in their last addresses to the people, they insisted on their innocence in the strongest terms imaginable; wishing the heaviest penalties an offended God could inflict might be their portion in the next world, if they were guilty of the murder that was laid to their charge and for which they were about to suffer.