King's Lynn's Exorcist's House carries a name that does real work in a town with as dense a concentration of witchcraft-era ghost stories as this one, marking it out from the surrounding buildings as somewhere specifically associated with the formal, church-sanctioned practice of exorcism rather than the more informal cunning-folk tradition found elsewhere in East Anglian folklore. The house is said to have been home to a medieval exorcist, and the tradition attached to it culminates in a final, failed case in the sixteenth century.
As the story is told, that last exorcism did not resolve peacefully. Its failure, or its outcome more generally, is linked to the death of a woman accused of witchcraft, who was burned at the stake in King's Lynn's Tuesday Market Place, the same square where the town's later witch hangings and the Duke's Head's boiled maidservant are also said to have met their ends, making this small square one of the most repeatedly invoked sites of execution in King's Lynn's collected folklore. Burning at the stake was not, in fact, the standard English punishment for witchcraft, which was more usually hanging, reserved instead for heresy and for women convicted of certain categories of treason such as killing a husband, a distinction that makes the specific claim of burning here worth noting as potentially reflecting either a genuinely unusual case or some blending of witchcraft and heresy accusations in how the story has been passed down.
No specific name, date, or documented trial record has been traced for this entry beyond the house's own name and its attached tradition, and it is recorded here as local legend rather than a verified historical account. What the story does capture, whatever its precise factual accuracy, is the close historical entanglement King's Lynn's own folklore draws between the formal, sanctioned practice of exorcism and the far less formal, frequently fatal business of witchcraft accusation in the same period.
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