The Stone Barn

The thick stone walls of the barnhad kept the summer’s heat at bay, cool air with the scent of musty straw washing over me as I forced the wooden door open. Wedging it in place with a fragment of broken tile, I stepped into the shadowy closeness of the old building. The structure felt almost watchful in its stillness, the only light coming from the open door and the skylights set high up in the walls, where dust particles spun and danced in the slanting sunlight.

I walked the length of the interior noting the old stalls, their wooden sides split and warped with age, the remains of a few broken bales of straw spilling out over the cobblestone floor. The walls were made from irregular limestone blocks held together by crumbling mortar and the building was at least 17th century in date, if not older. At the far end was a simple wooden ladder leading upwards to a small hay loft, enclosing maybe a quarter of the roof space.

I hunted around and found a few forgotten bits and pieces; the obligatory rusted horseshoe, some sacking, a broken rake. There were strips of cracked leather that had once belonged to a fine bridle, rags used for cleaning and numerous nails and odd fragments of metalwork, all hand forged. Mice had made a nest in the old straw and up in the rafters the rustling of feathers suggested roosting birds.

Stepping back outside, the bright sunshine momentarily blinded me as I grabbed bag off the ground. I had been carrying out an archaeological survey of the farm for the past week, and having already tackled the decrepit farmhouse and outbuildings, the barn was the last remaining structure to be recorded. It also appeared the best preserved, having somehow withstood both the weather and the ingress of human trespassers.

The farm had belonged to the same local family for generations, the final occupant having lived there all her life, before passing away inside the house. With no other family left to claim it, the farm had sat silent and abandoned. It was now due to be demolished and cleared, the land sold for development. I felt a sense of sadness about the place which had once been a thriving family home, and had gone about my work in a somber mood: I always hated seeing history in the final stages before its destruction.

Starting with the ground floor I began to survey the interior, noting such things as the positions of the low stalls and the patterns of cobbles. I had recorded dozens of old buildings in the past and normally enjoyed the soothing task of measuring up but today felt different. I couldn't explain it, I felt on edge, startling at small noises and being distracted by hints of movement in the corner of my eye. By the time I had finished as much of the ground floor as I could get to, I was glad there was only the hay loft left to investigate.

The day had drawn on, and with less light filtering through the skylights the shadows inside the barn had grown longer. I grabbed my torch and stood, pondering the old wooden ladder. It looked strong enough to take my weight and I placed a tentative foot on the lower rung, bouncing gently a couple of times. When nothing happened, I cautiously climbed the rest of the way up, flinging my bag before me onto the wooden floorboards of the loft. At the top I stepped off and stood there, one hand still grasping the last rung of the ladder. I had a brief moment of vertigo and took a deep breath before shining my torch around the open space. The dust was heavier up here, the air thick with the mustiness of old hay and the mess left behind by nesting pigeons.

Peering about, I could make out enough of the wooden boards to see that the floor was safe to walk on as long as I stayed away from the edges, which opened straight out onto thin air several feet above the cobbled surface. Carefully, I got on with the task of measuring and planning, making an overlay to go with the ground floor plan already completed. The feeling of being watched had me turning my head a couple of times, but there was never anything there. I put it down to the presence of a pair of pigeons and finished the survey. It was only then that I realised something was odd. The stone wall at the end of the barn should have been the same thickness all the way up it’s height but It wasn’t: It was thicker above the loft, just over a foot thicker in fact.

Edging my way carefully over the floorboards, I got up close to the wall and shone my torch across the surface. Why was the wall thicker? Had the roof needed more support at that end? I couldn’t see any reason why it would have; the oak timbers were normal for a barn roof and they all appeared original. As I was staring at them, the light from my torch flickered across a symbol carved into the beam above my head. Assuming it would be a fairly common carpenter’s mark, I moved the light back over the spot again, illuminating the beam. There, deeply carved into the surface, was a daisy wheel design or Hexfoil; a geometric design of six ‘petals’ within a circle. These were traditionally placed next to the entranceway of an old building as a form of ‘witch mark’ to keep away or trap evil spirits; the spirit getting ‘lost’ following the ever repeating pattern of the daisy and so not bothering the household. I had found them before on wooden lintels over doors and scratched into the plaster beside window frames but never on a roof beam.

I momentarily forgot about the puzzle of the wall as I recorded this new find, but once finished I went back to the wall, the location of the daisy wheel making me wonder whether there had been an opening at some time, which had then been blocked up. I could see no sign of this though, and I stepped back, musing over the odd construction.

As I stared at the wall I realised that a group of five stones, located about three feet above the floor of the loft, didn’t quite match the rest. Stepping closer, I ran my hand over the anomaly and suddenly there was movement, a slight bowing of the wall inwards at that point. I jerked my hand away and peered closer. Yes, there was a definite difference in the surface now and I reached out again, pressing lightly on the central stone of the five. The mortar around it crumbled and I grabbed at the stone before it fell, lowering it gently to the floor. Staring at the hole I’d just made, I leant in and carefully removed the other four odd stones. A void was now fully exposed, approximately twenty inches across and filthy with dust and cobwebs. Something else was there too, partially hidden by the crumbled mortar but still visible.

I reached into the void and slowly removed the artefact. It was an old wine bottle, called an onion bottle for its squat shape, with a thick base and slightly wonky neck, still stoppered by a layer of wax. Turning it around in my hands I guessed it dated to about 1700, sometime after the barn had been built. I could also feel something inside, moving about as the bottle turned. Placing it carefully on the floorboards at my feet, I knelt down and shone my torch through the surface of the glass, trying to get some idea of what was inside. I could see what appeared to be tiny pins, some kind of fibre, possibly hair? A liquid was also present, sloshing about in the bottom, thick and viscous. I realised then what It was...a witch bottle!

I sat back on my heels stunned. Witch bottles were normally buried underneath buildings at the threshold to ward away evil. Any spirits were supposed to go into the bottles where they would become so engrossed in counting the pins that they would drown in the liquid and be trapped forever. I thought of the daisy wheel on the beam above me. Someone had gone to great lengths to protect this end of the barn from harmful spirits. They had hidden the bottle behind a false layer of stone and I wondered why anyone would go to such lengths? It was strange and all of a sudden I felt the weight of those lengthening shadows, the silence in the barn becoming oppressive and the feeling of being watched intensifying. I decided it was probably time to finish up for the day so I gathered the kit back into my bag and climbed down the ladder.

Once down I emptied the bag to make space and grabbed my spare shirt before climbing back up again to the bottle, carefully wrapping it in the shirt for safety. I paused for a last look around the loft, when a sense of furtive movement in the far corner made me startle and I stepped back, stumbling on a loose floorboard. I dropped the shirt which flew open and released the bottle, sending it tumbling to the floor and rolling over the edge, where it smashed onto the cobbles below. I stood unbelieving as pins rolled out from the tumbled glass shards, the liquid draining away into the dirt. A spiral of dust flew upwards, followed by a gust of cold air and I cried out, a feeling of horror gripping me. What had I done?

In haste, I grabbed my bag and went to scramble down the ladder, only to find my arm being violently jerked back as if the strap of the bag had been snatched by an unseen hand. Unbalanced, my foot missed the rung and I slipped, arms flailing uselessly, following the bottle into nothingness until my head hit the cobblestone floor.

They found my body cold and still on the floor of the barn later that night, the remnants of the broken witch bottle near my hand. They assumed I had been carrying it down the ladder and slipped, a terrible accident, said the police report, nothing more. Nobody questioned why my empty bag remained in the hay loft where it had come to rest after being pulled from my shoulder. In fact no one ventured far into the loft at all and nobody bothered to look more closely at the end wall.

A month later the building report was written by hands other than mine, the only mention of the witch bottle and daisy wheel in my photographs being as a curious tradition. The old barn was finally demolished and it was a great shock to the developers when the remains of a human skeleton were found in the rubble of the end wall.

And the spirit that was released after the bottle smashed? Well, let's just say that the occupants of the new housing estate never slept that peacefully in their beds.