Sarah Ramsden was discovered by her youngest daughter, aged six, on a spring afternoon.
The 43-year-old lay face down on the bedroom floor, with severe blisters on her arms and body. Nearby, an inverted glass bottle spoke of her unfortunate fate: Sarah had died from ammonia combustion and asphyxiation. Her husband Jonas Ramsden, 50, was found hanged from the ceiling of their stone cottage in Yorkshire.
The year was 1900 and the story was spread luridly in national newspaper reports: an 'alleged murder and suicide in Holmfirth', 'a shocking domestic tragedy.' The crime committed, one newspaper ventured, by Jonas: 'a jealous weaver.'
The Henley and Oxfordshire Standard reported on an investigation into the case: 'Their daughter said her father had threatened to drive himself, his wife and witness away. Due to his jealousy, Mrs. Ramsden left her husband with her six children, but returned three weeks ago," the newspaper reported, adding that she had consulted a lawyer with a view to obtaining a divorce decree. Not long after, she was dead.
I admit that none of the foregoing is the kind of thing that holidaymakers typically want to think about during our full English-speaking holiday in a character cottage. But that was the strange outcome for me, when a holiday in a cottage in rural Yorkshire collided with my (thoroughly midlife) hobby of house history research.
I started poring over census records and newspaper clippings for the secret history of old houses during the pandemic lockdowns when, with the shops closed and time on my hands, I came up with the idea of researching friends' house histories as birthday gifts. When I caught the bug, I started researching the history of buildings I passed through, including hotels and vacation homes.
Today the Ramsdens' two-storey cottage is 'Cozy Cottage', a well-appointed holiday home a short climb up a stone staircase from the Grade II listed Sid's Café in Holmfirth (of Last of the Summer Wine fame, known for its tasty Yorkshire sandwiches tea cake). I spent a pleasant two weeks in the summer of 2021 with my partner and young son in the cottage, visiting my mother, who lives nearby.
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In its 2020s incarnation, the cottage - a classic two-storey 'basement', perched on the hillside with a two-storey second home above - features muted soft furnishings, a full Sky TV setup and a pleasant sun-heated stone terrace .
The single double room offers views of white pigeons roosting on the roofs of the town and the lush green Holme Valley beyond. Even armed with knowledge of Victorian history, the cottage's cheerful outlook gave little hint of its dark past. At least for me.
However, my more superstitious other half, Tim, was less confident. Looking suspiciously at the attic hatch on the narrow stone staircase, he asked the morning after my murderous revelation.
"Do you think all those bad feelings are the reason I'm having trouble connecting to the internet?" and added: "It all scares me a bit, if I'm honest I would rather not have known."
In an ongoing YouGov survey of British leisure activities, genealogy is currently in the top 25 'cerebral' hobbies, with the over-50s particularly fond of exploring their family trees (for baby boomers, the hobby ranks 14th in popularity on a list of reading, baking and watching TV).
House histories have also increased in popularity in recent years, boosted by the BBC Two house history show A House Through Time, the fifth series of which is currently in production, and by the expansion of genealogy websites such as Ancestry.co.uk and FindMyPast. co.uk, which have simplified the process of searching for addresses in newspaper archives and census records (eliminating the need to delve into microfiches in our local libraries, as we only did in the 2010s).
Melanie Backe-Hansen is a resident historian and co-author, together with presenter historian David Olusoga, of A house through time (2020, Picador), the book to the popular TV series. Backe-Hansen says many of us harbor a fascination with the previous occupants of the buildings we live in, even as transient vacationers.
"As a resident historian, one of the first things I am asked is: 'Have you discovered ghosts or murders?'" she laughs. "For most of us, there is something eerie and yet strangely fascinating about uncovering dark stories of the past that hide within the walls of our homes."
Hotels, of course, have long offered extensive histories of their properties in guest information folders in their rooms, many of them sanitized items highlighting links to royalties. Vacation rental companies are also tapping into the appeal of real estate history to a particular demographic of history-loving tourists.
This includes Unique Homestays, which are independent accommodations named after events that took place in the buildings in which they reside. These include The Brandy Thief, a seaside cottage in Devon that once housed the stash of 18th-century bootlegger Hannibal Richards (of the feared Cruel Coppinger drinking gang), and The Cable Hut in Pembrokeshire, the base of a small unit of soldiers who sent secret messages to America via a nearby telegraph cable station.
Hannah Jones of Unique Homestays says quirky property histories are appealing: "particularly the US market, but also people looking for a bit of atmosphere: something that's more of a conversation piece than your standard holiday home".
Now listed as a holiday accommodation on luxury booking site Crabtree & Crabtree, the 16th-century tower at Keith Marischal, a manor house in East Lothian, features a spiral staircase and large four-posters in its four cheerfully decorated double rooms. However, during the brutal North Berwick witch hunts of the 17th century, hundreds of condemned women were housed here the night before their execution, after 'confessing' they were witches.
Although the holiday home company is not 'actively marketing' the property's grim involvement in these pogroms, they told Telegraph Travel that owners Sophy and Alex Campbell have a collection of clippings about the tower's past and would 'love to talk to them about the history of the tower. this one with curious guests."
More recent discoveries in my holiday genealogy career are, thank goodness, less macabre. There was the cottage in Cornwall that was once home to a priapic James Edward Rowe, who in 1939 was fined 12s and 6d for sending a 'filthy letter' to a Mrs Tregear, 'a married woman of impeccable character '. (The letter invited Mrs Tregear to 'entertain' Rowe and another unnamed lady on the cliffs at Pendeen.)
The 16th century Falcon Hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon, now the beautiful historic boutique hotel Indigo Stratford-upon-Avon, was - I discovered, after a pleasant stay here in 2022 - the scene of a fraud perpetrated by Marshall Cormack and Babette Elkington, who bilked the hotel of £1 and 1s in board and lodging by posing as Lord Cardarry and his sister, aristocrats of good repute from London.
"There had been many stories about them," said Chief Inspector Parker of their arrest in Oxford in 1932. "They had gone all over the country telling the same story." In the dock, Cormack said the scam road trip had started 'as a big adventure' and argued in his defense that he was 'going to write'. [the affair] ready for the press".
I like to think that the poor six-year-old who found her parents tragically dead in the modest stone cottage in the Holme Valley went on to have a happier life. The 1939 census, taken at the outbreak of war, shows that she lived at another address in the village with her husband, a truck driver, and two sons, a wool finisher and notary clerk. Both sons became decorated soldiers in the Second World War. Back at the cottage I brought her a strong Yorkshire tea while Tim wondered about my tolerance for the horrific aspects of our shared national past.
"To the spirits we travel with," I said, as he shook his head.
