This is a strange story about tenant farmers and greedy landowners <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And about three nineteenth century mysteries that remain unsolved <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Barnet Scarecrow could be found in the middle of Lister’s Field <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was never visited by anyone as it was said to be a harbinger of ill fortune <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My story is also about a farmer named Josiah Painter <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Who was suspected to be involved in the disappearances <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of George Mallory Stephens in 1839 his son Matthew in 1861 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And Matthew’s son Adam in 1891 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was the common factor <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This being that they had served notice on Josiah Painter<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For non payment of monies owed<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1891 Josiah Painter would have been ninety-five <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But no hindrance of age was noted by the people who knew him well <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was also involved with a Mary Bell and had been so since his wife died<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But hard as they tried the police could not find any evidence that connected <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Painter with the murders if they were murders at all as no bodies were ever found <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed all three members of Stephens family had just disappeared <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you wonder of my interest the reason is that I was born and raised in Barnet <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And knew all the stories and legends of the Barnet Scarecrow from a young age <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And because of this I had decided to write a book in collaboration with a local history society <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I did find very chilling was that no date of death was even recorded for Josiah Painter <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed he was recorded as still the being the tenant of the farm in 1911 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which was a nonsense because of his improbable age <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was also a mention of him in the St Andrews parish magazine in 1916 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But this is vague and I have not been able to confirm the content<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is known that he lost wider members of his family in the Great War <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I have not been able to confirm this clearly from any reliable source <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In theory Josiah Painter had vanished just like the three members of the Stephens family <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And up to month ago I was drawing a complete blank <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The farm itself was demolished in 1935 so that houses could be built nearby <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had exhausted all my lines of enquiry <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A farmer from Lincolnshire who also had an interest in the mystery then contacted me out of the blue <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was distantly related to the Stephens family whose line died out when Adam vanished in 1891<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He asked if anybody had ever looked closely at the scarecrow or scarecrows <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although I was not positive I told him of the local legends and their impact <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Lincolnshire Farmer then asked me whether the construction of the scarecrows had ever been considered and I had a distinct feeling that he was going to be able to solve the mystery <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He suggested that over the years the successive scarecrows had actually been the human remains of the missing landowners and that Painter himself had actually started the rumours about the terrors of the area<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobody would suspect that the wretched scarecrow was actually a putrid corpse <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When weathering and decay had taken its toll then he would just replace the scarecrow <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The new scarecrow would be of a classical construction <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He would bury the bones of the missing men in Lister’s Field as if nothing had ever happened <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was so simple as to be brilliant <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hide in the plain sight <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Lincolnshire Farmer agreed and later informed me that a corpse had been used as a scarecrow in Lincolnshire in the 1850s but the miscreant had been careless and was later hung <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later over a beer I said that whilst the scarecrow theory was very likely to be true what bothered me was the very advanced age that Josiah Painter seemed to have reached without dereliction <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that there were no proven records of his death <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was asked about the source information confirming Josiah’s date of birth <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The parish records noted that a Josiah Painter had been born in the December of 1796 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was all I had <\/p>\n\n\n\n
No other information existed <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Lincolnshire Farmer further asked if I had ever been to Whitby <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that is where I will close this strange tale <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Please with the facts presented <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Make up your own minds<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And do sleep well <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a strange story about tenant farmers and greedy landowners And about three nineteenth century mysteries that remain unsolved The Barnet Scarecrow could be found in the middle of Lister’s Field It was never visited by anyone as it was said to be a harbinger of ill fortune My story is also about a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14686"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14693,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14686\/revisions\/14693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}