The Reverend Samuel Wesley moved his large family to the rectory at Epworth, in the flat, isolated fen country of the Isle of Axholme, and it was there over the winter of 1716-17 that the household reported weeks of escalating disturbance. It began, by the family's own later account, with groans and knockings heard around the house, which the children at first thought might be caused by a family servant playing tricks, before the noises grew too strange and too persistent for that explanation to hold.
Over the following weeks, family members reported doors bursting open on their own, furniture and crockery breaking without visible cause, heavy footsteps on the stairs, and a dog reduced to a state of terror by whatever was moving through the house. Samuel Wesley himself, initially sceptical, came round to believing something genuinely inexplicable was taking place after his own direct experiences of the phenomena, and kept a written record of events as they happened, later drawn on by his son John Wesley when compiling an account of the case. It was Wesley's daughter Hetty who gave the presence its lasting nickname, Old Jeffrey, after a servant of that name who had died shortly before the disturbances began, on the theory that his spirit might be responsible, though the connection was never more than family speculation.
What makes Epworth unusual among English haunted-house cases is the sheer quantity of near-contemporary written testimony behind it, produced by an educated clergyman's family rather than assembled decades later from secondhand report. That documentary weight, combined with the family's later prominence through Methodism, has kept the Epworth poltergeist a fixture of English ghost-story anthologies and serious poltergeist literature alike, cited as one of the best-recorded cases of its kind even by writers who remain sceptical of any supernatural explanation.
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