“I am the spirit of such a woman who lived with Walker…” 21 December 1630. Midnight. An old miller prepares to finish his work in a corn mill in the hamlet of Lumley, in the County of Durham. Suddenly he hears movement on the floor below him, and as he takes a flaming candle and descends the stairs, he is shocked to discover “… a woman standing upon the midst of the floor with her hair about her head hanging down and all bloody, with five large wounds on her head...” This was the scene for Northern England’s most singular and legendary Christmas ghost story. Then another tale, set in the 19th Century, was told in the press of a mysterious haunting that was occurring in the old mill house at Willington Quay, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The two narratives, seemingly dissimilar to each other, had captured the imagination of many historians and ghost hunters for years, and still do to this very day. Now it is time that the two are threaded together, in one of the most true and horrifying experience of a ghostly encounter, related through the miller and the apparition of the murdered woman, like never before…

“25th January 1682(3). A sad cruel murther comitted by a boy about eighteen or nineteen years of age, nere Ferryhill, nere Durham, being Thursday, at night….” Over 300 years ago, Ferryhill, an obscure town in the south of County Durham, played host to one of the most horrid and tragic murders in the county’s history. A farm servant murdered the three children of his master in cold blood with an axe. It was described in a London print as the “most horrid and barbarous murder that ever was heard of in the North or elsewhere”. There was no motive for the crime, and nothing in the murderer’s character to suggest that such an event could take place, and yet in his later confession, the perpetrator said that he acted only on the “suggestion of the enemy” – The Devil. For the first time since the murders, all of the evidence leading up to, at the time of, and after the event is collected together as one of the most intriguing investigations into this sad and macabre event, and lays bare some interesting information that have never been known to the public before. Did the Devil come to Ferryhill? Read on, if you dare…

From the ‘Demonic County Durham’ author of ‘Axe Murder in Ferry-Hill near Durham, 1682’ and ‘The Vengeful Spirit of Lumley & Willington near Durham, 1630’, comes the final book of this terrifying trilogy… 15 November 1641. Margaret Hooper returns home to the small hamlet of Edmundbyers, following an errand for her ill husband; her mind was troubled. It would seem that she had come into contact with someone or something that had vexed her on her journey and she would continue with her agitation until she went to bed. This would start a very frightening demonic visitation and possession to be ever recorded in County Durham. It would be her family’s belief in God and a miraculous intervention that would finally save her from the evil that tormented her. Welcome to Hell…

A political, cultural, and intellectual study of race, sex, and Western empire. This book interrogates a system that represents race, gender, sexuality, and class in certain systematic and oppressive ways. It connects sex and eroticism to geopolitics to examine the logic, operations, and politics of sexuality in the West.

This book on deliverance talks about demons, - their origin, - nature, - manifestation and - expulsion. The author, Z.T. Fomum who has personally carried out several deliverance sessions and led many people to freedom from the grip of demons, clearly shows, with Biblical examples, the different forms and manifestations of demons and the Biblical ways taught in the Scriptures to cast out demons and free their captives. This book is also rich in instructions and steps that can help anyone deliver themselves from demons and terminate with the past. This book, if made a handbook, can make you a minister of deliverance, and help protect you from the influence of demons.

In many near eastern traditions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam, demons have appeared as a cause of illness from ancient times until at least the early modern period. This volume explores the relationship between demons, illness and treatment comparatively. Its twenty chapters range from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt to early modern Europe, and include studies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They discuss the relationship between ‘demonic’ illnesses and wider ideas about illness, medicine, magic, and the supernatural. A further theme of the volume is the value of treating a wide variety of periods and places, using a comparative approach, and this is highlighted particularly in the volume’s Introduction and Afterword. The chapters originated in an international conference held in 2013. "Ultimately, Demons and Illness admirably performs the important task of reminding modern scholars of premodern health of the integral role played by these complex and shifting entities in the lives of people across the globe and through the centuries." -Rachel Podd, Fordham University, in: Social History of Medicine 32.3 (2019) "Given the sheer breadth of its scope, the volume is, of course, illustrative rather than comprehensive in its coverage, yet there is a definite coherence to its content, aided by the introduction and afterword which bookend the work and help begin to draw out the threads of commonality and difference. As such it constitutes a significant and welcome resource for comparative explorations of historical-cultural links between demons, illness, medicine, and magic, while offering a clear invitation to future work." -Matthew A. Collins, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43.5 (2019)

Tabloid headlines attack the binge drinking of young women. Debates about the classification of cannabis continue, while major public health campaigns seek to reduce and ultimately eliminate smoking through health warnings and legislation. But the history of public health is not a simple one of changing attitudes resulting from increased medical knowledge, though that has played a key role, for instance since the identification of the link between smoking and lung cancer. As Virginia Berridge shows in this fascinating exploration, attitudes to public health, and efforts to change it, have historically been driven by social, cultural, political, and economic and industrial factors, as well as advances in science. They have resulted in different responses to drugs, alcohol, and tobacco at different times, in different parts of the world. Opium dens in London, temperance and prohibition movements, the appearance of new recreational drugs in the 20th century, the changing attitudes to smoking: by taking us through such examples, moulded by socio-economic and political forces, including the growing power of pharmaceutical companies, Berridge illuminates current debates. While our medical knowledge has advanced, other factors help shape our responses, as they have done in the past.