This is one of the more unusually well documented ghost cases anywhere in the country for its period, resting not on later folklore collection but on the direct, contemporary written testimony of the investigating clergyman himself, William Rudall's own diary recording that he personally returned to Higher Brown Quartils, encountered the apparition, and spoke with it before seeking formal ecclesiastical permission to act.
The involvement of the Bishop of Exeter in formally sanctioning an exorcism gives the case an institutional dimension rare in this register, the Church of England of the 1660s treating the reported haunting seriously enough to authorise a specific religious response rather than leaving the matter to purely local, informal folk practice.
The story's later literary afterlife, reshaped and popularised two centuries on by Robert Stephen Hawker for a mass Victorian readership in Dickens's own magazine, means the widely known modern version of the Botathen Ghost is itself a retelling rather than the primary source, and this register draws its confidence rating from the underlying seventeenth century diary account rather than from Hawker's later, more embellished literary version.
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