In Simple Terms
In the 1600s, some people studied ghost stories without believing every word—or dismissing them all. John Aubrey collected strange accounts, considered what evidence people had, and stayed open to doubt. One frightening sight turned out to be a pile of manure. His approach offers a useful lesson: check a story before deciding what it means.
When Ghosts Entered Scientific Debate
One night around 1671, Symonds, the vicar of Garsdon in Wiltshire, was riding home when something frightening appeared behind him and leapt up beside his horse. According to the account recorded by John Aubrey, the creature kept pace with him until they reached the vicarage. There it dismounted, turned toward Symonds, and opened its mouth in a terrifying way. The vicar said he recognized the ghost: it was John Estcourt, a man who had died about two years earlier.
Today, the tale might seem tailor-made for a Halloween gathering. But it raises a question that predates social media: how should we respond to a supernatural claim? Should we believe it because a respected witness told the story, or reject it simply because it is unusual? In England in the second half of the 17th century, this was no minor question. Some people interested in science debated whether spirits and witchcraft existed, how such claims could be tested, and what to make of accounts that were hard to verify.
The Royal Society, founded in 1660, became England’s leading scientific institution. Its members’ interests were not limited to things they could see in everyday nature; some thought reports of ghosts and witchcraft deserved examination too. Joseph Glanvill, a Fellow of the Society, argued that such phenomena were real. In a book published in 1681, he collected detailed accounts that he considered evidence. He believed that denying the existence of spirits meant more than rejecting particular ghost stories: it also challenged belief in God.
But studying supernatural stories did not mean accepting every one as true. John Aubrey, also a Fellow of the Royal Society, was interested in the subject and directed readers to Glanvill’s book, but he did not treat it as the final word. He thought Glanvill could be too quick to believe a story. This difference matters. The debate was not simply between people who believed in ghosts and people who denied them. It also concerned the reliability of witnesses, the possibility of error, and how to distinguish a credible report from illusion or deception.
Aubrey lived close to the place where the Symonds story was said to have happened. He was born in 1626 in Easton Percy, a few miles from Garsdon. That local connection gives his account a clear link to the area, but it does not automatically prove the story. Knowing a place, or being close to the witnesses, can help explain a tale and its context; it does not remove the need to weigh the evidence.
A Project to Record Wiltshire’s Natural World
In 1656, Aubrey began work on a book about the natural history of Wiltshire. It was an early attempt to create a wide-ranging portrait of the natural world in an English county—and the first survey of its kind in England. The project took many years, however, and by the time it was complete, other surveys had already been published. Even so, his book remained an important work in the eyes of his contemporaries. In 1691, the Royal Society commissioned a copy of the manuscript for its library.
The book was not arranged according to narrow categories. Aubrey moved among a wide range of subjects, sometimes wandering far from his main topic into stories that seemed strange or unrelated. In his discussion of birds, he included reports of creatures in North Africa as large as pelicans. In a section about men and women, he considered whether giants existed. Near the end of the book, he added a chapter titled “Accidents,” gathering unusual events. Among them was the report of the ghost Symonds claimed to have encountered.
To modern readers, the inclusion of ghosts and giants in a book about nature may seem surprising. But collecting people’s accounts was part of the work of building knowledge at the time. Before forming a general explanation, interested observers had to record what people said about the world, natural and supernatural alike, then consider what could withstand scrutiny. This method did not guarantee that every report was true. It did, however, preserve each account along with the clues and doubts surrounding it, rather than dismissing or accepting it too quickly.
Between Believing a Story and Exposing a Hoax
Aubrey has sometimes been seen as gullible, particularly because of the only book he published, Miscellanies, which appeared in 1696 and included stories about unexplained events. But his stated position was more cautious than that of someone who swallowed every tale. In effect, he said that he had never witnessed such events himself, so he had no grounds to declare that they were impossible. Even so, he did not treat every story as equally credible. He estimated that perhaps only one in a hundred circulating accounts was true.
That estimate suggests considerable restraint, not blind belief. In Aubrey’s view, the possibility remained open, but a large number of reports did not prove that the reports were true. People might repeat the same story, add details to it, or interpret an ordinary event as supernatural. The important question, then, was not whether many stories existed, but whether there were reasons to find one particular account more convincing than the others.
Aubrey also recorded cases that he concluded were deceptions. One involved a woman named Catherine Waldron, who claimed to be bewitched and had pins inserted into her body in an attempt to prove her claim. Painful details or a shocking scene did not make the claim immune to examination and doubt. A harsh experience, by itself, cannot prove a particular explanation; nor does a person’s or audience’s conviction automatically turn a story into fact.
Collecting and describing evidence was a fundamental part of natural history at the time because observations might eventually support new explanations. From that perspective, recording a supernatural event did not necessarily mean declaring it true. It could instead preserve details that might later be compared or tested. Aubrey did not present himself as a judge who knew what lay behind every event. He was a recorder trying to gather accounts while leaving their interpretation open.
What Made the Symonds Story Worth Examining?
Aubrey did more than repeat the vicar’s tale. He included details about the witness that might affect how readers judged his account. He described Symonds as a strong, sturdy man, not someone expected to startle easily or be ruled by his imagination. His position as a clergyman might also have given his testimony weight with those who heard it. But these details tell us about the witness; they do not prove that what he saw was a ghost. Someone can be honest and composed and still misinterpret what happened in the dark.
Aubrey also placed a skeptical note beside the account: a French saying claimed that drunk people see devils. This is not evidence that Symonds was drunk; it tells us nothing about his condition that night. But it points to the possibility that human factors can affect what someone sees, or how they understand a scene. Aubrey did not hide a consideration that might weaken the story, even as he recorded it.
The most intriguing detail concerns the horse. According to the account, the animal returned home trembling and drenched in sweat. It remained in that state the following day and refused to eat its oats. Aubrey saw this as further evidence that something on the journey had truly frightened it: a horse could not make up a story or decide to lie. But genuine fear does not reveal what caused it. The animal might have been frightened by something its rider could not clearly see, or by a sound or movement. Its trembling alone was not enough to identify a ghost as the source.
Here we see the difference between recording an observation and explaining it. Trembling, sweating, and refusing food are signs that other people could notice. Saying that a ghost caused them is a conclusion that goes beyond what those signs can establish on their own. Aubrey had no test that could settle the nature of the figure the vicar saw, and the surviving details do not let us reconstruct the scene with certainty. But he kept the account, the clues that might support it, and the considerations that might weaken it, leaving readers room to think.
Testing a Ghost on a Dorset Road
Aubrey’s records include another story about a rider who came across what he thought was a frightening creature, but this one ended quite differently. The man was a servant to Sir Ralph Bankes, and Aubrey described him as an active young fellow. Late one night, he was crossing Badbury Warren in Dorset when he saw something dark. At first it seemed small, but as he drew closer, it appeared to grow larger.
Fear took hold of the rider, and he imagined that his hair was standing on end. But he decided not to run away before finding out what he was seeing, and rode his horse toward the mysterious object. When he reached it, he found neither a spirit nor a creature, but a pile of horse manure. What had seemed to grow in the distance was an ordinary object whose appearance had been distorted by darkness and distance.
This incident differs from the Symonds story in one crucial respect: the witness did not stop at describing what had frightened him. He approached it and tested his own interpretation. In the vicar’s case, the record does not say that anyone managed to check directly what the apparition was. The first story therefore remained open to several possibilities, while the second ended with the source of the confusion identified. The difference was not how frightened the two men felt, but whether the cause of their fear could be examined.
From an Old Tale to a Useful Habit
What stands out about Aubrey’s approach is not that he had a definitive answer about ghosts, but that he tried to treat accounts with varying degrees of confidence. He considered who the witness was and how he behaved, placed the story in context, and recorded both what might support it and what might raise doubts. When a claim could be tested, as the servant to Sir Ralph Bankes tested his, direct examination was stronger than a guess prompted by a distant shape at night.
Still, we should not confuse Aubrey’s approach with modern scientific methods or credit him with certainty he never claimed. He lived in a time when people discussed spirits and witchcraft as part of wider questions about faith and nature, and the limits of what they could test were different. To judge him fairly, we should focus on what he actually did: he gathered reports, did not claim to have seen the ghost himself, neither dismissed every possibility nor accepted every account, and acknowledged that most stories might be made up while leaving open the chance that a rare one was true.
This habit remains useful when an unusual story spreads today, whether it is a confusing image, a startling video, or a widely shared eyewitness account. It helps to ask: Who saw what happened? Can the details be checked? Are there simpler explanations? What do we actually know, and what have we added to the scene ourselves? Trust in the storyteller is not enough, and an event’s strangeness alone does not make it impossible or real. Sometimes, as the Dorset rider discovered, the best test is to get closer before giving something a frightening name.
The Bottom Line
The stories of Symonds and the Dorset rider bring fear and curiosity together, but they show two different ways an unexplained report can end: one remained unresolved, while the other could be tested and turned out to be a pile of manure. John Aubrey, who began his natural survey of Wiltshire in 1656 and preserved the vicar’s account in his work, was more cautious than his reputation sometimes suggests. He understood that the possibility of a true event did not justify believing every story, and that doubt need not close the door on investigation. The lasting lesson of his records is to note the details, examine what we can, and separate what people saw from what they concluded it meant.