Tidworth’s Demon Drummer

The strange affair of the demon drummer of Tidworth in Hampshire, England, created such a flurry of excitement in the reign of Charles II that the king appointed a royal commission to inquire into it.

In March 1661 John Mompesson, a local magistrate of South Tidworth, ordered the arrest of vagrant musician William Drury an the confiscation of his drum. Mompesson promised to return the drum if William Drury was proved innocent. But the matter was dropped, so Drury was released and vanished-minus his drum.

The following month, while Mompesson was in London, the drum was sent to his house. His wife stayed at home and that night was alarmed to bear noises. She was convinced that the household was being burgled. Three nights later, on Mompesson’s return, he too reported ‘a thumping and Drumming on the Top of his house.’

After a month the drumming on the roof stopped, only to start coming from the room where the drum was kept. Then furniture was hurled about, floorboards flew up and bedclothes were whisked off at night. The children’s beds rose under them, and invisible hands tugged their hair and beat their legs. The servants were also terrorized.

Mompesson blamed witchcraft, but when the ‘racketing spirit’ refused to perform for the royal commissioners, there were rumours of fraud, which the magistrate angrily denied.

But not everyone agreed that fraud might be involved. One investigator, Joseph Glanvill, philosopher and fellow of the newly founded Royal society, published an account of what he witnessed. The story Glanvill tells in his 1681 Saducismus Triumphatus, also known as Witches and Witchcraft, is that he heard scratching from behind a bolster, followed by a noise like a dog panting under the bed, in which lay ‘two modest little girls’. He and a companion searched the room but found nothing unusual. Later he saw something he thought a rat or mouse – moving inside a linen bag, but when he looked it was empty.

In 1663 William Drury was jailed in Gloucester for theft. There he asked another man whether he had heard of drumming at a gentleman’s house in Tidworth. ‘I have plagued him,’ he said, ‘and he shall never be quiet, till he hath made me satisfaction for taking away my Drum.’

Drury was tried for witchcraft and sentenced to transportation. The disturbances ceased while he was out of the country but resumed when he managed to return, and continued for several years. Glanvil’s account does not say how the story of the demon drummer of Tidworth ended.