A “haunted” murder stone put in place for a Papplewick teenager has a tragic story behind it after the 17-year-old was beaten to death by Charles Rotherham more than 200 years ago.
Largely forgotten in the undergrowth of Thieves Wood, this simple stone was erected in 1819 by the shocked residents in response to the murder of a teenager from the rural village of Papplewick.
Seventeen-year-old Elizabeth “Bessie” Sheppard failed to return home in July 1817, after looking for work in the nearby town of Mansfield. She had been beaten to death with a hedge stake by Charles Rotherham, a Napoleonic War veteran from Sheffield, who had been drinking in the nearby Hutt public house.
Rotherham relieved Bessie of her only saleable possessions, a pair of shoes and an umbrella, and disposed of her body in a ditch. He returned to the Hutt, where he failed to sell his stolen goods, before continuing south towards Nottingham. He attempted to sell them again at another pub on the way, before finally succeeding in offloading the incriminating umbrella and shoes in a third pub in Redhill, Arnold.
After a huge manhunt, Rotherham was finally apprehended loitering on a canal bridge in Loughborough, Leicestershire, and sent back to Nottingham, where his subsequent trial and public execution by hanging drew large crowds.
Visitors looking for the often-overgrown memorial to Elizabeth Sheppard should take note that the ghost of Bessie is said to appear every time the stone is disturbed. The A60 Nottingham Road was widened in the 1930s and the stone moved back several feet. An eerie figure was seen loitering around the spot where the stone used to be for a number of days afterward. Similar sightings were reported 20 years later after the stone was hit by a car.
A final curious event happened in 1988, when vandals struck the cemetery in Papplewick where Sheppard is buried, and her gravestone went missing. A police officer was photographed by the Bessie Sheppard Stone for an item in a local newspaper about the vandalism. Feeling a strange need to touch the stone, the officer had a revelation, immediately returned to Papplewick and located the missing gravestone buried in vegetation 200 feet away from the grave. This gave Bessie her gravestone back, and the local newspaper a much more interesting story than they first anticipated.
