The Hammersmith Ghost panic and the shooting of Thomas Millwood, 1804

Hammersmith, 1803. Today it is part of west London. Then it was a village on the city's western edge, and London had no organised police force. In October 1802 a suicide in the parish may have fed talk of a restless spirit. Around November 1803, the sightings began.

The reports centred on the churchyard of St Paul's. Witnesses described a figure very tall and dressed all in white, sometimes covered with a sheet or large tablecloth. Others spoke of a "calf-skin dress, with horns on its head, and glass eyes."

A woman crossing near the churchyard at about 10 p.m. saw it rise from the tombstones. It pressed her in its arms. She fainted. Thomas Groom, a brewer's servant, was crossing the churchyard between eight and nine o'clock. Something came from behind a tombstone and "caught me fast by the throat with both hands." It gave him a twist round. Then he saw nothing. His fist had met "something soft, like a great coat."

Rumour did the rest. Two women, one elderly and one heavily pregnant, were said to have died of fright. None of it was ever substantiated. On 29 December, the night watchman William Girdler chased the figure near Beavor Lane. It pulled off the sheet and ran.

Armed men now patrolled the lanes, hoping to lay the ghost. Among them was Francis Smith, a 29-year-old excise officer with a fowling piece. Thomas Millwood, a bricklayer, dressed for work in white. He had been taken for the ghost before. His mother-in-law, Phoebe Fulbrooke, urged him to put on his great coat.

That night, at about 10:30 p.m., Millwood left his parents' house on Black Lion Lane to go home to his wife. His sister Anne heard a voice. "Damn you. Who are you and what do you want? I'll shoot you if you don't speak." Then the shot. It came so fast, she said, that her brother had no time to answer. Small shot struck the left side of his lower jaw. He died instantly. Smith told the wine merchant John Locke he had shot a man he believed to be the pretended ghost, and gave himself up to a constable.

Smith faced the Old Bailey on 11 January 1804, before the Lord Chief Baron, Sir Archibald Macdonald. The jury returned manslaughter. The judge refused it. Guilty of murder, or acquittal. The jury came back with murder. Smith was sentenced to death and almost fainted. That same evening a respite arrived from the King. The sentence became one year's imprisonment with hard labour.

Within days, an elderly shoemaker named John Graham went before the magistrates. He said he had worn a white sheet to frighten his apprentices, who had been scaring his three children with ghost stories. He was released on bail. The sources do not show him admitting the throat attacks, or the horns and glass eyes. Copycats and panic may account for the rest. For separate sightings in St James's Park, The Times blamed magic-lantern phantasmagoria. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid doubts it.

The case left a mark on the law. The 1804 ruling meant a mistaken belief excused force only if it was reasonable. It stood for about 180 years. Then, in 1984, R v Williams (Gladstone) held that a genuine mistaken belief was enough. On 3 January 2004, two centuries on, BBC News told the story of the murdered ghost.