Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm? / The Charles Walton Murder

In 1943, four boys exploring woodland in Hagley Wood discovered a human skull hidden inside the trunk of a wych elm tree.

The victim was later identified only as “Bella” — but who she was, how she died, and who placed her inside the tree have never been answered.

Then, just a few years later and less than fifty miles away, another case unsettled rural England. In the village of Lower Quinton, farm labourer Charles Walton was found brutally murdered in circumstances that fuelled rumours of witchcraft, ritual killing, and the occult.

Over time, the two cases became linked through folklore, speculation, and fear.

In this episode of The Eclectic, we explore the mystery of Bella in the wych elm and the murder of Charles Walton — examining the evidence, the theories, and the strange atmosphere that continues to surround both cases.

Because sometimes, it’s the stories around a crime that become impossible to bury.

🎧 Listen now on Acast, Spotify & Apple Podcasts
 📌 Follow on Instagram & TikTok: @theeclecticpodcast

Who put Bella in the wych elm? - Wikipedia

Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm? — Foulplay Games

"Who put Bella in the Wych-Elm?" - The Documentary - a Film and Theatre crowdfunding project in Stourbridge by Jayne Harris

The 80-year-old mystery of the skeleton found in a wych elm - BBC Reel

‘Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?’: Espionage, Witchcraft, and other Theories – Curious Archive

Who put Bella in the Wych Elm? Cathi Unsworth on the spooky true story - Serpent's Tail

The Woman in the Tree: Revisiting the Wych Elm Mystery

Bella in the Wych Elm - Josef Jakobs - 1898-1941

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to the eclectic. Some cases do not resolve into answers. They accumulate detail instead. And in doing so, they leave behind something heavier than explanation. This is one of those cases. In the countryside between Birmingham and Worcestershire, there is a question that has refused to die. It has appeared on walls, bridges, abandoned buildings, and railway arches for more than 80 years. Painted in hurried white letters, scrubbed away, and written again. Who put Bella in the witch elm? The question belongs to one of Britain's strangest unsolved mysteries. A case that begins with a skeleton hidden inside a tree, slowly expands into something far darker. A story tangled with wartime paranoia, folklore, witchcraft, and the strange persistence of rumour. The region, once known as the Black Country, earned its name from industry. Coal seams, ironworks, furnaces, and smoke once blackened the landscape around Birmingham and the West Midlands. During the Industrial Revolution, the sky itself often seemed stained dark by soot and fire. Even in daylight, workers described the horizon glowing red from furnaces that never fully cooled. Today, much of the region is quieter, greener, almost picturesque. But the land still carries an older unease. Near Hagley and Stourbridge stands a place called Witchbury Hill, where the earth still rises around the remains of an ancient Iron Age hill fort. At its centre stands a black obelisk, stark against the countryside. And nearby, for decades, the same question has continued to reappear. Who put Bella in the Witch Elm? No one knows who wrote it first, no one knows why it keeps returning. And perhaps the most unsettling of all, no one truly knows who Bella was. The story begins on the eighteenth of April 1943. Four teenage boys, Tommy Willetz, Bob Farmer, Robert Hart, and Fred Payne, were wandering through Hagley Wood with little more than boredom, hunger, and the hope of finding something they could take home. Britain was deep in the Second World War. Food was rationed. Birmingham had already been devastated by Luftwaffe bombing raids, and across the country families survived however they could. The boys spent the day searching fields and woodland for rabbits, birds' nests, or anything edible that might help stretch the supplies at home. As evening approached, instead of heading back, they slipped deeper into the woods. The woods felt different as the light began to fade. Earlier in the afternoon, the boys had laughed their way through the undergrowth, climbing embankments, throwing stones into streams, and kicking through fallen branches in search of anything useful. But deeper inside Hagleywood, the sounds of the outside world seemed to thin away. The trees crowded closer together there. Even during daylight, parts of the woodland felt strangely dim, the branches knitting together overhead and blocking out what little winter sunlight remained. The boys moved carefully now, pushing through brambles and dead undergrowth while the cold evening air settled around them. Rabbit holes were everywhere, but mostly empty. Birds' nests had already been stripped clean by other scavengers. Still, none of them wanted to go home empty handed. Britain was deep into rationing by then. Food was never guaranteed, and every family had learned to stretch what little they had. A few eggs, a trapped rabbit, even a handful of edible plants could matter more than people later remembered. So instead of turning back toward the village, they kept walking deeper. That was when they noticed the tree. It stood apart from the others, twisted and oddly misshapen against the darkening sky. Its trunk bulged outward near the base before splitting into tangled bare limbs that reached crookedly over the woodland floor. Even before they approached it, something about the tree seemed wrong. Older somehow. As though it had been standing there long before the rest of the woods had grown up around it. It stood apart from the others, twisted, stunted, and hollow. Its thick trunk split outward into tangled bare branches, giving it an almost unnatural shape against the fading light. Newspapers would later call it a witch elm, though researchers now believe it may actually have been an old hazel tree. Hazel trees were often coppiced, repeatedly cut back and harvested without killing them. Over time, sometimes across decades, the centre could hollow out naturally, leaving cavities large enough to hide animals. Or in this case, something else. Robert Hart climbed first. About four feet above the ground, he peered into the narrow opening in the trunk. At first he thought he had spotted the remains of a dead animal. He reached inside with a stick and carefully hooked the object toward him. What emerged was a human skull. For a moment, none of the boys spoke. Most of the flesh had rotted away, but strands of dark hair still clung to the scalp. A patch of skin remained attached to the bone, stained dark with dirt and decay. Whatever excitement had carried them through the afternoon vanished instantly. Panicked, the boys placed the skull back inside the hollow and agreed not to tell anyone. But one of them could not let it go. Tommy Willetz lay awake that night, unable to escape the image of the skull staring back from inside the tree. He was older than the others, close to the age where boys of his generation were already being swallowed by the war. And somewhere in the darkness of Hagley Wood, hidden inside a tree, was a dead woman no one seemed to be looking for. By morning, Tommy still had not slept. At breakfast, his parents immediately realized something was wrong. After repeated questioning, he finally confessed what the boys had discovered. His father contacted the police, and within hours officers were following the boys back into Hagley Wood. Finding the tree again proved more difficult than expected. In daylight, the woods looked completely different. Paths seemed unfamiliar, landmarks shifted. For a time the search parties wandered through the undergrowth, unable to relocate the hollow trunk the boys had stumbled upon so casually the evening before. Eventually, they found it. When officers climbed up and looked inside, they immediately confirmed the remains were human. The site was secured while arrangements were made for a full forensic investigation. The following day, detectives returned alongside Dr. James Webster, the recently appointed director of Birmingham University's West Midland Forensic Science Laboratory. Recovering the remains proved difficult. The opening into the hollow was narrow, positioned several feet above the ground, and the skeleton had settled deep into the base of the trunk. Eventually, investigators made the decision to cut the tree open. An axe was brought in. As the trunk split apart, the full extent of the concealment became visible. Inside sat the skeleton of a woman, forced feet first into the hollow cavity. Over time, the body had sunk deeper into the tree as decomposition took hold. Roots had begun threading through the bones and fragments of clothing, making it seem almost as though the tree itself had grown around her. Investigators carefully removed the remains piece by piece. Woman appeared to be around five feet tall. Several teeth were still intact, suggesting she had likely visited a dentist regularly. This was something less common among poorer working class women at the time. Fragments of clothing remained inside the hollow, a cheap rayon skirt, mustard coloured cardigan, underclothes, and crepe soled shoes. A piece of taffeta was found stuffed into the woman's mouth. Dr. Webster believed it had likely caused suffocation, which meant Bella had almost certainly been murdered before being hidden inside the tree. Then investigators found something unexpected nearby, a woman's identification card. For a brief moment it seemed the mystery might end almost as quickly as it had begun. But the lead collapsed almost immediately. The identification belonged to a living woman who denied ever visiting Hagleywood and had no explanation for how the card came to be there. And so the dead woman inside the tree remained nameless. There was one small area where the investigation appeared to make progress. The blue leather shoes found near the tree were traced back to their manufacturer, who believed they had most likely been sold at a market in Dudley sometime around early 1940. They were worn but reasonably well made. Not expensive, but not especially cheap either. Unfortunately, even that lead quickly faded. The shoes were the wrong size for the dead woman, and investigators could not prove they belonged to her at all. The manufacturer could identify where they had probably been sold, but not who had bought them. Once again, the trail disappeared. As forensic work continued, investigators made another unsettling discovery. One of the woman's hands could not initially be accounted for. Later reports suggested the hand may have been found buried separately nearby, though descriptions of the scene varied between sources and became increasingly distorted in later retellings of the case. That uncertainty would matter later. Because over time, the missing hand became one of the details most heavily absorbed into folklore. Months passed. The police still had no name, no confession, no family members searching for a missing woman. Thousands of missing person reports were checked, dental records were examined, investigators followed leads across Birmingham and the wider Midlands. Nothing matched. It was as though the woman hidden inside the tree had vanished from the world before she ever died. By the end of 1943, public interest had already begun to fade. Britain was still at war, bombs still fell across cities, families already carried enough grief of their own without dwelling on the story of a nameless skeleton found in the woods. Then, sometime that winter, the silence broke. In Old Hill, near Blackheath, someone scrawled a message across a wall in white chalk. Who put Lubella down the witch helm? At first it looked like crude vandalism, perhaps a joke, perhaps someone trying to reignite interest in a story already slipping from public memory. But then the message reappeared again. And again. On the twenty eighth of March 1944, a man named L White reported finding another chalked message on the side of his house. Before he had even reached the police station, he spotted another nearby written in the same hand. Soon the words began appearing across the black country, on walls, railway arches, abandoned buildings, fences, and alleyways from Hellzowin to Wolverhampton, always in white chalk, always asking the same question. At first, even the wording seemed uncertain. Sometimes it was Lou Bella, sometimes Annabella. Sometimes the phrasing shifted awkwardly, as though whoever was writing it was still searching for the correct version. But eventually the message settled into the form that would become infamous. Who put Bella in the Witcher? Police photographed the graffiti and sent samples of the chalk away for examination. Investigators believed the message had most likely been written by the same person, but that solved nothing. What the graffiti did accomplish was something stranger. It gave the dead woman a name. And once Bella had a name, people began imagining a life for her. Some believed she had been a foreign woman who arrived in Britain during the war and disappeared before anyone thought to report her missing. Others imagined something far stranger. That Bella had been a Nazi spy. It was the perfect wartime theory. Enemy agents, hidden identities, parachute drops, bodies concealed before secrets could be exposed. Britain in the 1940s was already saturated with fear of infiltration. Birmingham was an important industrial target during the war, and the idea of enemy operatives moving quietly through the countryside did not seem entirely impossible to many people. But the theory quickly but the theory quickly began collapsing under scrutiny. The hollow tree was too narrow for the dramatic image people imagined. No parachute was found, no coded materials, no evidence Bella had had any connection to espionage whatsoever. The spy theory fit the mood of wartime Britain far better than it fit the evidence. And once that theory began fading, the rumors turned elsewhere. Some locals pointed toward travelling Romani caravans and suggested Bella may have belonged to one of them. That theory soon gathered darker additions of its own, whispers that she had been killed by her own people for some private offence. Police did investigate the claim and confirmed that Romani families had passed through the area during the relevant time period, but again there was nothing concrete. There was no evidence Bella herself was Romani and absolutely no evidence of some secret execution carried out by travelling families. It was suspicion masquerading as theory. What remained was darker still. In the more superstitious corners of the Midlands, people began whispering about witchcraft, about ritual killing, about black magic. Those rumors may have remained little more than local folklore had the case not attracted the attention of one particular woman. Professor Margaret Murray. By the 1940s, Murray had become one of the most famous and controversial figures associated with British folklore and witchcraft studies. For years she had argued that the witch trials of Europe were not simply episodes of hysteria, but distorted remnants of an older pagan religion that had survived underground for centuries. She was not viewed as a fringe eccentric by the public, and when Margaret Murray spoke about witchcraft, people listened. Murray became fascinated by the details surrounding Bella's concealment inside the tree. In older folklore beliefs, imprisoning a body within wood was sometimes said to trap a spirit and prevent it from escaping. She also focused heavily on the reports that Bella's hand had been removed before burial. Murray linked this to the legend of the hand of glory, a gruesome folkloric object supposedly fashioned from the severed hand of a corpse and associated with thieves, sorcery, and ritual magic. Then there was the name itself, Bella. Murray wondered whether it might echo Belladonna, Deadly Nightshade, a poisonous plant long associated with witchcraft and occult folklore. But this was the point where the line between evidence and storytelling began to blur. The original forensic reports do not clearly confirm deliberate mutilation, and many later retellings of the case appeared to exaggerate aspects of the discovery. Still, Murray's theories changed the atmosphere surrounding Bella forever. Once the idea of witchcraft attached itself to the case, it spread quickly. The rumours deepened, the mystery darkened. And then, in February 1945, another killing transformed the rumour into fear. On Valentine's Day, a 74-year-old farm labourer named Charles Walton was murdered near Mayon Hill in Warwickshire. The killing was savage. Walton was found pinned to the ground with a pitchfork driven through his body while a pruning hook had been forced into his throat. To people already unsettled by the growing folklore surrounding Bella, the similarities felt impossible to ignore. Almost immediately, rumours began linking the two cases together as part of something occult. That connection would never survive serious scrutiny. But in the atmosphere of wartime rural England, isolated villages, blackout knights, ancient superstitions, and a countryside already alive with rumour, the overlap felt meaningful. Bella had become a mystery. Charles Walton, he became the next shadow cast by the same fear. And beneath Mayon Hill, another investigation was just beginning. Earlier that afternoon, Charles Walton had stood alone in the fields beneath Maeon Hill, looking out across Lower Quintin, the village where he had spent most of his life. These days he preferred the fields to people. The hills were quieter, no questions, no gossip, no noise. Only the sound of birds overhead and the wind moving through the grass. Farm labour had never been easy, but age and arthritis had made it harder with every passing winter. Walton relied on two walking sticks now, though he still worked several days a week whenever the weather allowed. He was glad neither Alfred Potter nor his niece Edith could see how little he had managed to finish that afternoon. But Charles Walton was not as alone as he believed. It would be four hours before anyone realized he was missing, five before someone thought to check the farm, and six before they found him lying cold and rigid in the blood soaked earth beneath Mayan Hill. It was the fourteenth of february, nineteen forty five, Valentine's Day. As she always did, Edith Walton spent the day working at the Royal Society of Arts, operating a printing press after the organization temporarily relocated from London during the war to escape the worst of the Luftwaffe bombings. At around half past five, she washed the ink from her hands, gathered her belongings, and made her way home through Lower Quinting to the small cottage she shared with her uncle. When Edith reached the cottage, the silence unsettled her immediately. Her uncle should already have been home. She searched the house quickly. Nothing. Alarmed, she crossed the road to the home of her neighbour, Harry Beasley. Harry had not seen Walton that day, but agreed to help search for him. Together they passed through the village, beyond St. Swythern's churchyard, and towards the Furs, the farm where Walton worked. There they collected the farm owner, Alfred Potter, before heading out into the fields. The night felt unnaturally dark. Mist drifted down from Mayan Hill, spreading damp cold across the landscape, and then, in the corner of the field, they found him. Charles Walton lay on the ground with a pitchfork driven through his face, into the frozen earth beneath him. And worse still, a pruning hook had been forced deep into his throat. Potter remained beside the body while Harry escorted Edith back toward the village. Not long after, Beasley returned with a growing crowd of horrified villagers, drawn by rumour and fear toward the scene. Among them were two men who would soon become central to the investigation Detective Superintendent Alex Spooner of the Warwickshire County Constabulary, and Dr. James Webster, forensic pathologist and director of Birmingham University's West Midland Forensic Science Laboratory. Webster quickly realized the pitchfork and pruning hook were only part of the attack. Walton's head had been badly battered, partially caved in, and nearby investigators found one of his walking sticks lying in the grass, stained with blood and hair. There were scratches on the backs of Walton's hands, signs that he had tried desperately to defend himself. His chest, arms and hands were covered in cuts and puncture wounds from the farm tools. Potter confirmed both the pitchfork and the pruning hook belonged to him and had been lent to Walton for the day's work. The old man had been murdered with his employer's tools and beaten with his own walking stick. From rigor mortis and the condition of the body, Webster estimated Walton had died shortly after one o'clock that afternoon. After photographing the scene, Webster carefully removed the pruning hook from Walton's throat. The pitchfork proved far more difficult to dislodge from the frozen ground. Beneath him. And in the days that followed, newspapers across the Midlands filled with speculation over who or what could have committed such a savage killing. At first, Detective Superintendent Spooner dismissed the darker rumours immediately, but the whispers kept returning. Villagers spoke quietly about strange animals, failed crops, and bad luck settling over the land. Some talked about old superstitions still lingering beneath ordinary village life. Others, they repeated stories about Charles Walton himself, that he spoke to birds, that he possessed second sight, that he understood horses in unusual ways, that he knew things before they happened. In rural England at the time, large black dogs were often treated as omens of death or disaster, and as the interviews continued, Spooner slowly realized that many villagers were not speaking about Walton as though he had simply been murdered. They spoke about him as though something darker had finally caught up with him. The atmosphere around the case grew stranger by the day. Scotland Yard eventually assigned Detective Inspector Robert Fabian to assist the investigation. Fabian was experienced, disciplined, and deeply skeptical of superstition. Unlike many around him, he remained determined to find an ordinary explanation hidden beneath the rumours. But from the moment he arrived in Lower Quintin, the village resisted him. Fabian noticed the silence almost immediately. Villages were rarely quiet during wartime. Even in rural England there were usually children somewhere in the distance, the sound of carts moving along roads, dogs barking behind gates, voices carrying from open doorways, but Lower Quintin seemed to watch him instead. Curtains shifted as his car passed. Men standing outside cottages stopped talking when he approached. At the village pub, conversations dulled into uneasy silence the moment he stepped through the door. Fabian had worked enough murder investigations to recognise fear when he saw it, but this felt different. Not panic, not grief, something closer to distrust, as though the villagers had already decided that whatever had happened to Charles Walton was not something outsiders would understand. He spent days canvassing cottages throughout lower and upper Quintin, asking where people had been on the afternoon of the murder and what they knew about Charles Walton. Most answered reluctantly, others barely answered at all. Doors closed quickly, conversation stopped when he approached, and almost everywhere he went, Fabian sensed the same thing. The villagers knew more than they were willing to say. In his official report, Fabian later described the people of the surrounding district as secretive and suspicious of strangers. He began to suspect there might be some deeper local history attached either to Walton himself or to the village surrounding him. Something old, something unspoken. One morning, Fabian rose early and drove alone to the furs, as he had done many times since arriving in Lower Quintin. He crossed the fields toward the place where Charles Walton had died. Nettles now covered much of the ground, but the dark stain of blood still showed through the soil beneath them. From the lower slopes of Mayan Hill, Fabian could see much of Lower Quintin spread out below him, small cottages, narrow roads, and the church tower rising quietly above the village. Somewhere down there he believed was Walton's killer. What unsettled him most was that the villagers themselves did not seem especially frightened by the possibility. While he stood there, a large black dog came wandering slowly over the hill. Fabian had been missing his own bulldog back in London and almost reached down to stroke the animal, but the dog growled low in its throat, warning him away. A short time later, a young boy appeared from the same direction as the dog. Fabian was surprised when the boy smiled and waved instead of staring suspiciously like most of the villagers. Then Fabian casually mentioned the animal. The boy's expression changed instantly. He turned pale, and ran back the way he had come. Strange moments like that had followed the investigation almost from the beginning. And meanwhile, Alfred Potter remained at the centre of Fabian's attention. Potter owned the farm where Walton had been killed, employed Walton directly, and had already begun behaving in ways Fabian found deeply suspicious. Most troubling was the way Potter's account of the day kept shifting. At first, Potter claimed he had seen Walton working in the field around 1220 that afternoon, but had not approached him because he was dealing with a drowned heifer stuck in a ditch. Later, however, Potter altered the sequence entirely. Now he claimed he had gone home first to read the newspaper, pushing the business with the drowned animal to later in the day. It created a dangerous gap in his timeline, and the more Potter adjusted his story, the more Fabian became convinced he was hiding something. Then another incident deepened suspicion further. On the twentieth of february, five days after Fabian arrived in Lower Quintin, detectives attended the coroner's inquest into Walton's death at the town hall in Stratford upon Avon, while they were there by the first to speak with Alfred Potter. Lemmersney had already read Potter's official statement. At no point had Potter claimed to touch the murder weapons after discovering the body, but during conversation, Lemersney casually mentioned that the pitchfork and pruning hook would likely be fingerprinted. Suddenly, Potter became eager to establish that he had in fact handled both tools after finding Walton's body. Lemersney immediately found the shift unsettling. Why suddenly insist on touching the weapons unless there was a reason to explain fingerprints beforehand? And yet the explanation made little sense anyway. The tools belonged to Potter. His fingerprints being present would hardly have shocked investigators. Lemasny could not fully explain why the exchange disturbed him so much, but he left convinced of one thing. Alfred Potter was lying. In the end, however, the forensic results complicated matters further. Potter's fingerprints were not found on the tools at all. Favian remained wary of the farmer, but he was also a disciplined investigator. He trusted evidence more than instinct, and so far, there was still nothing concrete connecting Potter to the murder. There was another problem too. Fabian still had no convincing motive. Why would anyone want Charles Wharton dead? And why kill him with such extraordinary brutality? Then investigators uncovered something that appeared potentially significant. Charles Walton, despite living modestly, had not been entirely without money. Fabian checked Walton's bank account at the Midland Bank in Stratford upon Avon, and learned that after his wife's death he had inherited roughly two hundred pounds, a considerable amount for an elderly farm labourer during wartime Britain. According to Edith, Walton rarely drank, rarely socialized, and spent little beyond basic necessities. Yet when Fabian examined the account, less than two pounds remained. Where had the money gone? Fabian turned the question over repeatedly. Had Walton hidden the cash somewhere? Had someone known he possessed it? Had he lent money to another villager? Or had an argument over debt turned violent? Fabian soon learned that Potter himself had experienced financial problems. Farm workers quietly admitted wages had occasionally been delayed and money around the fairs had become increasingly tight. The theory immediately suggested itself. Had Potter borrowed from Walton? Had something gone wrong? The possibility disturbed Fabian. The possibilities were not proof. And then the investigation took another strange turn. One day, police officers driving near Lower Quintin struck and killed a large black dog that darted suddenly into the road. The following day, one of Potter's heifers drowned in a ditch on Mayon Hill. To Fabian, the villager's reaction was immediate and unmistakable. Where they had once seemed wary of outsiders, now they appeared openly hostile. People stopped talking when he approached. Doors closed more quickly. The investigators themselves began to feel unwelcome, almost blamed. After weeks in Lower Quintin, Fabian had made little real progress. No one seemed willing to speak honestly, and the investigation felt as though it was sinking deeper into silence with every passing day. Then Superintendent Spooner handed Fabian a stack of folklore books. At first, Fabian found the idea ridiculous, but Spooner had become increasingly unsettled by the strange parallels surrounding the murder. That night, Fabian remained alone in his temporary office long after the station had emptied. The book Spooner had handed him sat open beneath the yellow glow of the desk lamp, while rain tapped softly against the windows outside. Fabian disliked folklore at the best of times. In his experience, superstition usually appeared when evidence failed, and yet the details kept returning. Black dogs, blasted fields, dead livestock. Villagers whispering about Wharton as though he had carried something unnatural around him for years. The story of the black dog and Mayan Hill disturbed him more than he cared to admit. Not because he believed it, he did not, but because he could no longer ignore how perfectly it seemed to fit the atmosphere surrounding the case. Outside, somewhere beyond the station windows, the wind moved through the empty Warwickshire streets. Fabian closed the book. One of the books was called Folklore, Old Customs and Superstitions in Shakespeare's Land, written by clergyman J. Harvey Bloom. Fabian opened to a marked passage and began reading. In Alvaston, a plough lad named Charles Whalton met a dog. Fabian stopped immediately. Charles Walton. The story described a young ploughboy named Charles Walton walking home across Myon Hill in 1885 when he encountered a huge black dog standing alone beside a narrow lane. The dog appeared repeatedly over several days, watching him, waiting. Eventually the boy grew used to it. He patted the dog, fed it scraps, began treating it almost like a companion. Then one evening, in heavy mist, Walton found the animal standing beside a tall woman dressed in pale clothing. She had no head. The following morning Walton's sister was dead. Fabian closed the book uneasily. He could not even be certain the story referred to the same Charles Walton whose murder he was investigating, but the coincidence unsettled him deeply. Then Spooner handed him another volume. This one described a real murder. In nearby Lower Compton in eighteen seventy five, an elderly woman named Anne Tennant had been attacked by a farm laborer named James Hayward. Hayward stabbed her repeatedly with a pitchfork before driving the weapon into her skull. At the inquest afterward, Haywood openly admitted the killing. He believed Anne Tennant was a witch. He claimed she belonged to a coven responsible for livestock deaths, failed crops, and blight upon the land. Fabian read on in growing discomfort. The descriptions of the killing echoed disturbing aspects of Walton's death, especially old folk beliefs describing witches being pinned to the earth to break curses placed upon the land. The similarities felt impossible to ignore. Fabian shut the book. The first story he could dismiss as folklore. The second was a documented murder case, and it mirrored Charles Walton's death in deeply unsettling ways. Still, Fabian refused to build his investigation around superstition. He wanted evidence, but evidence was becoming increasingly difficult to find. By early April the case had stalled almost completely, and on Fabian's final day in Lower Quintin, he heard one more story that convinced him the village itself was sinking deeper into fear. A black dog had reportedly been found hanging from a lone oak tree atop Mayan Hill, only a short distance from where Charles Walton had been murdered. By then, Fabian had heard enough about omens, curses, witches, and black dogs to last a lifetime. He boarded the next train back to London and did not look back. The murder of Charles Walton officially remained unsolved, but the rumours surrounding it never disappeared. And meanwhile, another mystery was quietly waiting beneath the surface once again. The woman in the tree at Hagley Wood, a woman the graffiti named Bella. By the end of 1943, the mystery of Bella in Hagleywood had already begun slipping away from ordinary police investigation and into something stranger. The chalk messages kept appearing across the black country, on walls, railway bridges, factory buildings, abandoned streets. Always the same question Who put Bella in the witch owl? The graffiti solved nothing, but it changed everything. Before the messages appeared, the woman in the tree had simply been an unidentified body hidden in woodland outside Birmingham. Afterward she became Bella. And once Bella had a name, people began imagining a life for her. In 1953, a woman named Una Mossop approached the police with a strange story involving her former husband, Jack Mossop. According to Una, Jack had once spoken in fragments about a drunken knight involving a Dutchman named Van Rout and a woman who later ended up dead. Over time the story became increasingly disturbing. Una claimed Jack eventually implied the woman's body had been hidden inside a tree. It was the first theory that sounded less like wartime fantasy and more like ordinary violence spiraling out of control. A drunken encounter, panic, a concealed body. But there was a problem. The statement arrived more than a decade after Bella's death, and Jack Mossop himself was already dead. And almost none of the story could be independently verified. Police considered the account seriously. Investigators tracked what leaves they could and attempted to identify the mysterious Dutchman supposedly involved. But certainty never came. The Moss statement remained suspended in the uncomfortable space between confession and folklore. Possible, but unprovable. And while police chased human explanations, another interpretation pushed the case deeper into darker territory. Professor Margaret Murray had already helped transform Bella from a murder victim into something symbolic. By the mid-1940s, Murray was among Britain's most well-known writers on witchcraft and ancient pagan beliefs, where investigators saw an unidentified body hidden inside a tree, and Murray saw a ritual. To Murray the entire case seemed laid with symbolic meaning, but there was a growing problem. The further the story drifted into folklore, the harder it became to separate from embellishment. The original forensic reports do not clearly confirm deliberate mutilation. Descriptions of the body change across retellings, and many of the details most closely associated with occult theories emerged years after the original investigation itself. All of it attached itself to the woman in the tree. Then came Charles Walton. His murder in My On Hill in 1945, it reignited every rumour surrounding Bella and amplified them into something larger. A farm laborer pinned to the earth with a pitchfork, a pruning hook forced into his throat, old stories of witchcraft spreading through the isolated villages. To many people living in the Midlands at the time, the overlap felt impossible to ignore. The Bella mystery and the Walton murder became permanently linked in the public imagination, even if evidence never truly connected them, and perhaps that is why both stories survived so long. Neither case offered closure. Bella remained unidentified, Charles Walton's killer was never officially caught. The uncertainty allowed folklore to grow into the empty spaces left behind. Over the decades, the messages about Bella never truly disappeared. The chalk eventually became paint, but the question remained the same. Who put Bella in the witch owl? The words appeared on the Hagley obelisk during the 1970s. They were scrubbed away, then they returned. Again in 1999, again years later. Try to erase them, and sooner or later they seem to come back. As though the landscape itself refuses to let Bella vanish completely. The real reason the case still lingers so powerfully in British folklore. Not because of what we know, but because of what we do not. There is no ending here. No courtroom confession, no final revelation, no satisfying solution waiting beneath the legend. Only fragments. A skeleton hidden inside a tree during wartime England. A murdered farm laborer beneath Myon Hill. Stories of black dogs and witches whispered through isolated villages. And a question that has now outlived almost everyone connected to the original investigation. Who put Bella in the witch helm? This has been the eclectic. A story not just about murder, but about the strange way fears flies, how woo messed, how frightful of gray, and how unanswered questions can become more powerful than answers themselves. Because sometimes you