Right, sit back and relax. This is an odd, violent, largely nonsensical tale. It goes like this.

A wayward lad called Fred Baddeley, who is thin yet greedy, gets a job at a farm on the other side of the Wolds: the farmer has offered him the job in the belief Fred will be cheap to feed and clothe. Unfortunately, Fred eats the house bare, and if the farmer beats him this only increases his appetite. One day, the farmer finds Fred with his head between the bars of the storehouse, so he thrashes him and pulls off his thumbnail. Later, Fred steals the farmer’s best coat, so he chops off one of Fred’s hands with an axe and threatens him that if anyone is told what has happened he will report Fred to the police for stealing. Fred steals again, and this time the farmer breaks his arm so badly it has to be amputated. Worried that his local lack of popularity might lead to his hayricks being burned, the farmer then orders Fred to keep watch all night, without giving him time off his day work. Fred falls asleep, and the farmer finds his ricks ablaze. Incensed, he lobs Fred into the fire and he is burned to death.

The tale is recounted by Marie Clothilde Balfour in the last instalment of her three-part ‘Legends of the Cars’, published in Folklore (1891). This third instalment comprises tales Balfour admits are less polished than those in previous instalments: in a short preface, she refers to them as ‘drolls’, and says she did not write them down in full when she heard them, and has instead largely pulled them from memory.

Balfour lived in Redbourne while collecting the tales, though it is not clear precisely where she was when she heard this morbid mess of a story. She claimed to have been told it by the same man who told her ‘The Flyin’ Childer’ (which is perhaps even more barmy), and there are stark similarities in terms of the extent and type of violence and logical inconsistency of both tales. We have therefore chosen to locate both tales, tentatively and almost arbitrarily, in South Kelsey, at the Bull Inn, where it is logical they may have met.

Balfour suggested this tale and ‘Sam’l’s Ghost’ are different parts of the same story. 

Words by RORY WATERMAN