Thomas Sinden's death is a matter of genuine documented nineteenth-century record, the case having attracted national newspaper headlines at the time, giving this entry a considerably stronger evidentiary basis than the earlier, undated exorcism tradition also associated with the house, Sir John Chandos Reade's own real and documented reputation as a violent drunkard and former High Sheriff of Oxfordshire lending the local suspicion of his involvement genuine contemporary social plausibility even though the official verdict recorded his butler's death as accidental.
The sequence of events, a late-night summons by the servants' bell to Reade's own bedroom, followed almost immediately by a loud noise and Sinden's own injured, bleeding return, gives this case an unusually detailed and dramatic timeline compared with most of this register's more vaguely described historical deaths, the specific documented time, 11:15pm, adding a further layer of precision uncommon among comparably aged cases.
The separate and considerably older tradition of a sealed, now-unlocatable exorcism room within the same house gives Shipton Court two quite distinct layers of dark reputation, an undated, almost folkloric account of successful but costly spiritual intervention, and a specific, documented and genuinely unresolved nineteenth-century death, and this entry records both honestly as separate if thematically related strands of the house's own accumulated unsettling history.
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