On a dark and stormy night, the rider found himself face-to-eyeless face with the swinging, rotting corpse of a murderer on a heath near Swaffham.

As the wind howled, the horse was thrown off course and into the hanging gibbet on the heath – an unearthly scream ripped through the air and something fell from the cage and on to the rider…a skeletal thigh bone.

The ghastly practice of gibbeting – hanging an executed criminal in chains in a specially-made cage – began in England in 1751. 

So many people were being given the death sentence that Parliament agreed additional punishment should be given to those who committed the very worst crimes: “…for better preventing the horrid crime of murder”.

Norfolk author, vicar and teacher Augustus Jessop wrote about a ghoulish encounter with Bradenham Heath’s gibbet in Arcady: For Better For Worse, written in 1887 (he saw a ghost himself, too, read his story here).

“One very intelligent farmer gave me a thrilling report of what his father had experiences on this spot shortly after the ghastly object had been set up,” wrote Jessop.

“It was dark when he started from the other side of the county, he rode alone. Just as he came upon Bradenham Heath, up rose the moon and the wind with her.

“His horse was very tired, he was compelled to ease him; the poor brute could hardly go. The storm burst forth in angry squalls and gusts that came with no warning, then lulled, then passionately began again. 

“Heaven and earth! There stood the gibbet, the moon shining full upon it.”

Eastern Daily Press:

Urging the horse forward, the beast trotted on, exhausted, before coming to a stop…underneath the gibbet. Suddenly, the man heard a “loud scream” and his horse trembled, swerved and he found himself pressed into the gibbet cage.

“A heavy weight fell down from the cage and brushed the rider’s boot in its fall…it was conjectured that the murderer’s leg bone slipped out and just missed the worthy farmer’s head in its fall.”

It is believed that the body in question was of Stephen Watson, 30, who was executed in Thetford in 1795 for the murder of his wife, Elizabeth.

Pronouncing sentence, Judge Mingay ended with: “May the Lord have mercy on your soul!"  to which the prisoner is recorded to have replied, "thank you my Lord, but you and the witnesses have had no mercy on my body."

Eastern Daily Press:

His body was placed in a gibbet – on display at Norwich Castle Museum, one of only 15 surviving gibbet cages (Norwich has two) – on Bradenham Common for decades.

In Machie’s Norfolk Annal, vol. 1, 1800–1850, it records that around June 8, 1801, a starling’s nest with young birds in it was taken “out of the breast of Stephen Watson, who hangs on a gibbet on Bradenham Common, near Swaffham”.

The Maid’s Head pub on a crossroads overlooking the heath – now closed – would have offered drinkers a fine view of Bradenham’s gibbet and Watson’s eventual decay. 

Novelist Rider Haggard discovered the remains of the gibbet and skeleton of Stephen Walton while digging on the common years later – it still had a piece of skull in the headpiece bearing scorch marks where the blacksmith had soldered the body into the cage.

It is now in Norwich Castle Museum’s collection, along with two pieces of Watson’s skull.

Do you have a story for Weird Norfolk? Contact stacia.briggs@newsquest.co.uk.