“I shall endeavour to relay to you the most disturbing tale of a woman, so devious and cruel that she was thought to be a witch. I suspect she was probably little more than a common murderer and con artist. I refer of course to the notorious “Yorkshire Witch” Mary Bateman.

Having travelled by train to Leeds (in less than hour - what a marvel! ) I found that the landscape has turned within this short distance into an industrial heartland with air thick in fumes. Large chimneys puff out black clouds of smoke into blue Yorkshire skies and the heavy odour of coal surrounds me.

The purpose of my trip is to visit Mary Bateman, nee Harker, whose unburied body still resides at Leeds General Infirmary. I dislike hospitals; the smells and noise can turn all but the strongest of stomachs. Mary, or what remains of her, is preserved for the study of students within the teaching part of the hospital. Her skeleton appears to be missing several key components and both her lower jaw and leg bones are no longer present. My guide, Mr Edward Burton, a short and very red faced cockney, started to give me, with ghoulish glee, an explanation for Mary’s state. “Once they executed her in York she was brought to us and, well, you see, they were different times and there was a public dissection,” he grinned. “Having no doubt enjoyed a few drinks in advance, a strip of her skin was proffered to the crowd and someone promptly offered a coin in exchange, perhaps seeing it as a charm to ward off evil. As word got round it soon became like a butchers’ market as piece after piece was held aloft and exchanged for money. A little stall was set up the following day to continue the selling, although there seemed to be a suspiciously large amount of Mary to go around! I suspect that some business-minded individual may have paid a visit to the butcher’s before setting up shop! To be honest, a devious schemer like Bateman might well have seen the funny side of it.”

Mary grew up in Thirsk working as a servant girl on a farm before moving to York to become a dressmaker. Her criminal activities forced her to flee to Leeds where her endless pursuit of money led her into fortune telling. She soon became a ‘wise woman’ and gained a reputation for removing curses, spells and bad omens, supplementing her income with acts of fraud and theft. On one particular occasion, after a quite devastating fire, she is reported to have taken to the streets to raise money and goods for the victims although, needless to say, none of it ever reached them. She gained a certain notoriety as “The Prophet Hen of Leeds” which involved her writing ‘Christ is coming’ on the eggs laid by the hen and charging a penny to view the eggs. The queue stretched around the streets but when the hen stopped laying prophetic eggs whilst re-homed for a short period with someone else, suspicions arose and Mary was found guilty of reinserting the eggs into the chicken after inscribing them. It remains a mystery why, upon discovery, no punishment was handed out for this crime, but Mary did still have many followers and believers in her gifts. There were none more convinced by her as Rebecca and William Perigo who approached Mary to get a curse lifted from them. Mary saw her opportunity and took them for everything she could get, selling them charms and potions. One such potion she told them to bake into a cake which they then shared. William started to feel ill and stopped eating but Rebecca persisted and ate almost all the cake, dying shortly afterwards. When it transpired that the cake had contained arsenic, Mary was arrested and her property searched. Many of the Perigos’ furnishings and large sums of money were found, along with the poison bottle itself. Even once sentenced to death and awaiting execution in the womens’ and debtors’ cells in the Castle prison complex in York, she swindled other prisoners promising them reprieves. She was hanged in front of a huge crowd which had gathered in the belief that the devil would appear and bring her back to life. She did, however, expire very quickly and her body was carted off to Leeds to await a grisly fate."