The Drummer of Tedworth is England's most celebrated early poltergeist, centred on the household of John Mompesson, a magistrate of Tedworth (modern Tidworth) in Wiltshire, between 1662 and 1663. Mompesson had prosecuted a wandering ex-soldier and drummer, William Drury, for collecting money under false pretences, and had his drum confiscated. Soon after the drum was brought to Mompesson's house, the family began to suffer nightly torments: phantom drumming on the roof and walls, scratchings, objects flung about, children lifted in their beds, and foul smells.
The story
The disturbances drew sightseers from across the country, including agents of the king, and Drury — by then transported for theft — was said to have boasted that he had plagued the magistrate and would give him no peace until his drum was returned. The clergyman Joseph Glanvill investigated and made the case the centrepiece of his Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), arguing it as proof of the reality of spirits against the new scepticism of the age. Whether trickery, hysteria or something stranger, the Tedworth drumming became the model for every English poltergeist story that followed.