AN ANATOMY OF A GHOST HUNT: Hubert Hobux and the before, during and after of a paranormal investigation.

Albeit an excellent military surgeon, George Henry Lamson found rural general practice pointless and dull. He was fond of travel and holidays and had a firm dislike for hard graft and honest toil. Since his bedside manner was far from the best, the locals found him flippant, inattentive and unreliable. He often showed his contempt for the trivial complaints he was presented with. After his position in Rotherfield had become untenable, he spent the remainder of Mrs Lamson’s inheritance to buy another practice in Bournemouth. The problem was that Dr Lamson had become addicted to morphine during his years as a military surgeon, and that with time, this addiction escalated out of control. He became incapable of running his practice, claimed medical degrees and military decorations to which he was not entitled, and circulated libellous statements about the wife of a friend of his. A bad businessman, he accumulated considerable debts and eventually had to flee Bournemouth in disgrace as a bankrupt, leaving his wife and daughter behind in a cheap Chichester hotel.

George Henry Lamson returned to the United States, making futile attempts to combat his morphine addiction, before going to Shanklin to see his family. After a jolly family gathering in August 1881, the cripple Percy Malcolm John became severely ill, groaning with pain and vomiting copiously; just beforehand, Dr Lamson had purchased a quantity of the potent poison aconitine. The hapless Percy recovered from this attempt on his life, however. As Dr Lamson sat brooding over his failures in Rotherfield and Bournemouth, and his futile travels to America, alone in his tiny hotel room in the London November gloom, he was becoming increasingly desperate. Not long ago, he had possessed a comfortable house, a good medical practice, and a steady income; now, he had neither of these things, and he was poor as a church mouse. Dr Lamson entirely lacked employment and occupation, something that did not agree with him, and we all know who it is who finds work for idle hands to do. Had the Doctor been classically minded, he would have been reminded of the legend of the once-famous Byzantine general Belisarius, said to have been reduced to a blind beggar in his old age, having to ask passers-by ‘Date obolum Belisario’ – ‘Give a coin to Belisarius’. Dr Lamson had once had power over life and death, the wounded Serbian and Romanian soldiers relying upon him for their recovery like if he had been something of a deity; now, he was just yet another penniless, unemployed vagabond, struggling to keep his head above water amongst London’s unwanted flotsam and jetsam.

Once more, George Henry Lamson thought of Percy Malcolm John, upon whose demise his wife would inherit much money. In December 1881, he visited the school in Wimbledon and persuaded Percy to swallow a gelatine capsule, with the words “Here, Percy, you are a swell pill-taker; take this and show Mr Bedbrook [the headmaster] how easily it may be swallowed!” When Percy died in agony the same evening, the doctors present suspected that this was a case of murder. Dr Lamson had fled to France, but due to the lack of both money and morphine, he did not carry out his plan to hide in France, but returned to London to face the music, hoping that the poison he had made use of could not be detected. When Percy had been autopsied, samples of various organs had been kept for analysis, however, and the forensic scientists found that he had been poisoned with the uncommon vegetable toxin aconitine. This sealed the fate of Dr Lamson: he was found guilty of murder, sentenced to death, and executed at Wandsworth Prison on April 28 1882. During his criminous and wasted life, the Doctor had accomplished some good but also much wickedness; short and evil had been his days, as he stood on the scaffold counting one or two more seconds, the longest lasting in his life, waiting for the drop to open.

The police detectives, and even Lamson’s barrister Montagu Williams, felt certain that Dr Lamson was a double murderer, having poisoned both his brothers-in-law for the sake of profit. Comparing his murderous career with those of the prolific medical killers Palmer and Pritchard, it indeed seems likely that Dr Lamson murdered Hubert John as well and got away with it. As a military surgeon, he had seen that life was cheap, with the wounded soldiers dying like flies; now both Hubert and Percy were invalids, crippled by tuberculosis and scoliosis, worthless and parasitic existences whose sufferings should be put an end to, he must have reasoned, like hastening the death of a badly mutilated soldier. Perhaps the greatest mystery in the Lamson case is why he did not wait until he had Percy under his influence at the Chichester hotel, where the invalid could be given some ‘medicine’ with complete security, before Lamson signed the death certificate himself.

At Blenheim House School, all was not well after the execution of Dr Lamson. Many parents objected to keeping their sons in a notorious murder school, and although the headmaster Mr Bedbrook tried to convince them that there were no longer any murderous doctors on the premises, he was soon in serious difficulties due to the lack of pupils. It did not help that there were rumours that the ghost of Percy was haunting the murder school: nervous young boys swore that they had seen his spectre and heard the whirring of the wheels of his spectral wheelchair.

The Blenheim House murder school at No. 1-2 St George’s Road, Wimbledon, from Famous Crimes Past & Present.

Dr Lamson, and some vignettes from his career, including Percy Malcolm John in his wheelchair, from the Illustrated Police News, March 11 1882.

What appears to be a small print about the ‘Wimbledon Mystery’.

The murder school was still Blenheim House School in 1884, but by 1888, it had become St George’s College; it was still operational as late as 1894. In the end, Mr Bedbrook had to lease the school to King’s College, London, as a boardinghouse for boys, but the deal was a very unfavourable one, and poor Mr Bedbrook had lost his livelihood. In 1898, he took King’s College to court for allegedly breaking the original agreement but lost his case and was condemned in costs. In the end, Mr Bedbrook had to take a job as an assistant in a boot shop to provide his wife and five children with food on the table; to earn a meagre living, he sold footgear to the former pupils he had once taught Latin and Greek. In the summer of 1921, when William Henry Bedbrook went bathing at Southsea, he was swept out to sea and drowned miserably. ‘Famous poisoning case recalled – Aconite in Dundee Cake for Schoolboy!’ exclaimed the Dundee Evening Telegraph, reporting on the sad demise of the 75-year-old former schoolmaster. His wife Rose survived him until 1928, and he is likely to have descendants alive today. The haunted murder school no longer stands, having been destroyed many years ago.

There may well be some truth in the story that Lamson thought the aconitine was an untraceable poison, but nevertheless, he had taken one risk too many and this would lead to his downfall. Through his escalating morphine abuse, George Henry Lamson had created a fearsome Golem in his own image, a perfectly amoral creature capable of killing with coolness and premeditation; this once brave and promising young doctor had become both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, both Frankenstein and murderous Monster, as he sped towards his doom from Wimbledon’s haunted murder school on a Highway to Hell.

Jan B.

This is an edited extract from Jan Bondeson’s book Doctor Poison (Troubador Publishing 2021)

GAUZE AND EFFECT

Ectoplasm and the empowerment of Women

By Amanda R. Woomer

Womanhood has been met with endless attempts to control her. For centuries laws, fashion, and religion have been used to control females no matter the color of her skin, the amount of money in her pocket, or the power she may hold. Despite the fact that women have been closely linked to the supernatural in the form of healers, witches, priestesses, and shamans since the dawn of time, over the centuries, she was pushed aside to make way for priests, doctors, and, even today, macho ghost hunters. But despite this dismal peek at the history of femininity and the paranormal, there was a time in our history when women were seen as leaders and were able to find some sort of autonomy in life… and it was all thanks to a slightly questionable, most likely fabricated sticky substance called ectoplasm.

In the midst of the 19th Century, the views of life and death and what came next were changing rapidly. Thanks to women in power—Queen Victoria and Mary Todd Lincoln—who openly grieved for their husbands, new (and extremely regimented) mourning customs were born, focusing especially on the changing roles of women. With the birth of the Spiritualist Movement with the Fox Sisters in Hydesville, New York, and the unimaginable death toll from the American Civil War, people stopped turning to their churches and priests to seek out answers about the afterlife and, instead turned to themselves.

Mediumship is a contested topic even in today’s day and age—not just in the paranormal world but in the mundane one as well. Charlatans hide among the genuinely gifted individuals, sometimes tainting the group as a whole. And yet, no matter how many frauds there may be, people have always flocked to psychics (and will probably always flock to them). As long as someone claims they can communicate with our dead loved ones, we’ll be drawn to them… it seems to be part of our mortal nature.

Back when psychic mediums first appeared on the world’s stage, they didn’t just tell audience members that their loved ones were present—for who would pay to see a show like that? In the early days of mediumship, it was a performance for the masses, and these performers—whether truly gifted or not—knew that words were not enough to convince their audience that the spirit world was present all around them. They needed to show them in creative (and sometimes messy) ways.

“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.”

Timothy 2:11-12 (KJV)