Burton Farm, near Weobley, was owned in the late seventeenth century by the landowner Thomas Tomkyns, and it was his new tenant, a woman named Elizabeth Bridges, who first reported the disturbances that would go on to make the farm's name locally from 1669 onward. What she described reads today like a genuinely comprehensive catalogue of classic poltergeist activity: nightly knocking at the door with nobody present to have knocked, furniture moved and overturned overnight, baked goods that went missing only to turn up hidden in entirely different rooms, garden vegetables dug up and then, strangely, replanted rather than simply stolen, milk that turned sour with a taste like vinegar, and livestock sickening and dying with no explanation anyone could offer.
Word of the disturbances eventually reached a local man named John Jones, who offered to sit up through the night and investigate for himself, arriving suitably prepared with a mastiff, a sword and a lantern, the equipment of a man expecting a genuine physical confrontation rather than a quiet vigil. What he encountered instead, by his own account, was something considerably stranger than anything a dog and a sword could meaningfully fight: the cottage filled with circling cats making, in his own words, the most hideous unworldly noise he had ever heard in his life, the windows shattered around him, and his candle, his only source of light, simply went out.
Jones fled the property that night and afterward refused to return at any price, no amount of money or persuasion sufficient to convince him to set foot in the farm again. No explanation for any of the disturbances was ever settled on by anyone involved, and the case remains one of Herefordshire's more genuinely detailed seventeenth-century poltergeist accounts, complete with a named tenant, a named investigator, and a specific date, a level of documented human detail that most stories from this period in this collection simply cannot match, even though none of it can be independently verified today beyond the story itself as it has come down through the centuries.
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