Was it a ghost? The murders in Bussey's wood

by Henry Johnson Brent

Not later than a month or two ago, I read in a spiritualistic paper, of the city of Boston,—conducted, by the way, with great editorial ability,—a communication from the boy murdered; but which contained no clue that could direct detection safely and judicially to any desired result.

In the written communication, signed “Isabella Joyce,” to which I have alluded, there are references to parties that had been previously arrested or suspected. She, however, distinctly exonerates the young man of the factory, whose flight is as yet unaccounted for; but whose innocence is beyond all question. She speaks, also, of that inebriated unfortunate to whom Dedham jail has become a matter of practical and suggestive recollection. The name of that eminent individual known to the police and the public by the euphonic appellation of Scratch Gravel, makes no figure in her revelations; though he confessed to many circumstances that would have led in ordinary cases to his implication in the deed. His admissions were tortured by over-zealous detectives into positive confession; but after strict comparison of his statements, made under the pressure of prison and terror, or rum reaction, with the exact incidents of his maudlin staggerings and stutterings, he was given up as not worthy of belief, though he madly made the attempt to get himself hanged.

It is my intention to give merely the pith and essence of these strange writings,—having placed the original papers in the hands of my publisher,—where any person, curious in such matters, can examine them.

The girl commences by appealing to her mother, and declaring that she cannot be happy until they have found that “terrible man.” She cries frequently to her mother, as if under some great spasm of alarm,—hints at certain persons,—exonerates others, who were suspected, and in such manner as to remind us of the terrible ravings and charges of the “afflicted children” who figured as the juvenile fiends and denouncers of the Salem Witchcraft tragedies.

In her outcries she speaks of a returned soldier, and checks her mother’s suspicions, that appeared to have gone astray in the wrong direction, and then directly charges the crime upon our poor dilapidated young friend, whose greatest misfortune it was to have been drunk on that fatal day, and been whipped or blackeyed in the evening.

The girl proceeds with repeated exclamations of Mother! Mother! and emphasizes the sufferings through which she passed. Be it remembered that she speaks only of murder throughout her disclosures, if disclosures they can be called.

Her second declaration is more minute and connected, but still it is a jumbled and very unsatisfactory narrative, or rather child gossip, of the circumstances and incidents as they occurred previous and up to the instant of the catastrophe. She again speaks of a soldier,—the one whose hand was cut; says she saw him in a garden as they passed along,—the garden across the brook; that he followed them into the woods. She now goes back to her trip out of Boston toward the wood, and tells that they got out at Burroughs Street, walked up the plain or plank (hard to decipher), till they came to a juncture of the road where it crosses the track of the steam cars, then to the right, and round a store or stone house to the left, over the brook to the other side. She expressly and suddenly declares, at this point of her recital, that she does not remember him. After they climbed over the gate (supposed to be the gate very near where she was found, and which opens from the Dedham road; there is another gate between the murder spot and Mr. Motley’s house), they saw the man. He followed, but up to that moment had not spoken to her. He now seems to have turned back, but, changing his mind, returned quickly and addressed her. At this she became alarmed and fled; he pursued. There is much confusion here,—a scuffling and tussling of sentences as if a mimic was giving to the life some quickly whirling scene of trouble and irritation and surprise, wherein there was the essence of a great danger.

It is a confused statement of Johnny’s having spoken of the sheep (Mr. Motley’s sheep down in the valley grazing at the time, watched by a vagrant boy, afterward examined by the authorities, and found to be no wiser than the flock he watched). She says she does not remember exactly—speaks of a knife which she tried to get hold of—of his cutting himself with it—of his throwing it into the wood. (If he did, he must have gone back for it and rescued it, for no such knife was found after a vigilant search over the whole locality.) She exclaims, “He murdered me!”—that he was scratched on the face and neck, and bears the marks “now,”—at the time of her manifestation at the spiritual sitting. At this point the paper is filled with wild and alarming cries to her mother. The idea presents itself again of a mimic reacting a scene in which the soul is driven to the very verge of madness by that dread fiend called Terror. The voice seems to pierce the air in its shrill proclamation of intense and terrible agony, and anon it subsides into stifled sobs and ejaculations of how much she suffered while the black deed was done,—how “sick” she was. After that outburst of mad appeal and piteous mourning she resumes her narrative, and describes her murderer. He wore blue clothes, and looked like a soldier; but not a soldier just from the wars. (A soldier loafing after his laurels had withered in bar-room atmosphere, I suppose.) She fixes his nationality distinctly,—an Irishman. It was one o’clock, she says; but the writing here is blurred and crossed, and very difficult, if not quite impossible, to make out and determine whether it is one or two o’clock. Her brother, she says, ran for help, and the man ran after him and killed him and came back to her. This statement is signed “Isabella Joyce.”

The other portions of the page of foolscap, on which her hand appears, is covered with a lively display of all sorts of penmanship,—the idle signatures of a small party of the other world’s inhabitants, who, it would seem, were in Isabella’s company.

Again she resumes control over the writing medium’s hand, and says,—