Thomas Otter was executed at Lincoln on 14 March 1806 for the murder of Mary Kirkham, a young woman from North Hykeham whom he had married only the day before in what was known at the time as a knobstick marriage, a union forced through specifically to stop her and her unborn child from becoming a financial burden on the parish. Mary died from horrific injuries, including a fractured skull and stab wounds, apparently inflicted with a large club or fence post on the Doddington road just outside Saxilby, a genuinely brutal and well-documented act of violence against a woman who had been married to her killer for barely a day.
After his execution, Otter's body was gibbeted in chains at the scene of the murder, a practice deliberately intended as a public deterrent to others, and the gibbet reportedly stood on what is now Doddington Road for around fifty years afterward, a grim landmark that generations of local people would have passed on their way through the countryside.
The road became known as Tom Otter's Lane, leading to Tom Otter's Bridge, with nearby Gibbet Woods and Gibbetwood Farm still carrying the name today, nearly two centuries after the events themselves. The lane picked up a lasting reputation as haunted ground, and the Sun Inn at Saxilby, where the inquest into Mary's death was originally held, remains a point of interest for people looking into the case today, though how much of the surviving ghost story is genuine sighting tradition versus later retelling built around a genuinely gruesome real crime is hard to separate with any confidence at this distance in time.
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