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For our ramble this week,

we'll go first to the blue hills of the Cotswolds.

The open air,

the countryside

where the sheep are the aristocrats of their kind.

Thatched roofs cover cottages of stone

and, incidentally, hearts of gold.

And near the village are the famous Rollright Stones,

which they say are earlier than Stonehenge.

The story goes that a lord of the province

aspired to become King of England,

but that wasn't okay by the local witch.

So she turned him and his knights into lumps of stone.

And let that be a lesson to you, Mr. Brownsmith.

Cotswold hospitality is a byword among those who travel.

I came to visit my parents here in the Cotswolds.

And my father and I one evening went down to his local pub.

Where I started chatting with a local.

And he said, "Have you heard of the murder of Charles Walton?"

In 1945, on the slopes of Meon Hill...

...a particularly gruesome murder was committed.

Who's there?

Who is it? Who is it?

Who are you?

He was battered to death with a stick.

Keep away, keep away!

He was pinned to the ground with his own pitchfork.

I say keep away!

A sign of the cross was cut on his chest

with his own billhook.

His name was Charles Wharton.

We challenge death

out of the village.

Challenge death out of the village.

We challenge death out of the village.

Charles Walton, by all accounts,

was a harmless old man.

He was warm. He was friendly.

He offered greeting to people he passed in the street.

So why did someone go into the field that morning

and kill him in such a brutal fashion?

It was the day particularly rich in black magic Association.

The Druids were reported to have made sacrifice to the earth.

Had the villagers blamed him for a bad crop

that had happened that year.

Was this the last ritual killing in modern Britain?

The murder of Charles Walton struck a nerve with the nation.

This bizarre ritualistic killing

fueled the tabloids for decades.

It inspired the imaginations of rebellious youths.

I was, as ordinary schoolgirls do,

doing séances with my friends.

And bored housewives.

And also authors, screenwriters, and directors

of the 1960s and '70s.

There is nothing fictitious about black magic.

It is a fact which has existed for several thousand years.

Satanic ceremonies will be happening in Britain tonight.

It was this moment in cultural history

that birthed its own genre, the folk horror movie.

Amy's at the castle and hold debauched gatherings.

Men and women stripped naked.

It's usually some idyllic picture box

English village

where all the villagers seem to be acting

a little bit strangely.

Someone in this village is practicing witchcraft.

The horror lies in the fact

that it comes out of the beliefs of the folk,

like in "Midsommar".

No!

Custom? It's fucked!

To do with fertility represented in men,

to do with giving a sacrifice of blood

back to the land, like "Kill List".

So the Charles Walton murder case directly influenced

a whole host of folk horror offerings,

but specifically "The Wicker Man".

It's an enormously bizarre thriller,

almost an occult musical.

A policeman goes to an island, Summerisle,

where a girl has allegedly gone missing.

The island is run by a pagan cult.

I think what I relate to most with "Wicker Man"

is the idea of sort of being contained within a society

that's kind of mad.

British people put a huge amount of importance

in structures and rituals.

To the outside, they seem completely pointless,

but have a dark underbelly.

And it all goes back to this murder in 1945.

A very English murder in a very English village.

If you cut through the headlines

and the horror movies...

...then you'll find a real mystery...

...a mutilated dead body

that even the soberest minds have failed to explain.

My motive in coming here was to find the truth.

It poses a terrifying question.

Who are we?

What is really going on in England's green

and pleasant land?

What are we hiding?

Who killed Charles Walton?

And most intriguingly...

...why?

So on the morning of February 14th, 1945...

...Charles Walton, he's a 74-year-old farm laborer

in the Lower Quinton...

he goes downstairs for his morning breakfast

with his niece, Edith.

And she prepares for him the snack

he always takes out into the fields each day to work.

He leaves his house at 8:30.

And Edith watches him leave.

He crosses the lane from his house.

She returns from her job that evening at 6:00,

and she enters the cottage,

fully expecting to find her Uncle Charles at home.

But he isn't.

This is very odd, because Charles Walton

usually gets home at about 4:00.

He has terrible arthritis, he feels the cold,

and he doesn't like to be out in the cold weather.

So she's alarmed.

She knocks on the door of a neighbor,

tells him that, you know, Uncle Charles hasn't come home.

The neighbor's concerned.

They go across the lane, through the churchyard,

out into the fields.

And they search for about 20 minutes

and they enlist the help of Alfred Potter...

...the farmer who's employed Charles Walton

to trim the hedges.

And they come across in the field

where Charles had been working that day,

where two hedges intersect...

...they find Charles lying in that corner.

His pitchfork has been impaled

through his face and part of his throat.

And the trouncing hook,

the tool he uses to trim the hedges is buried in his neck.

- Morning, sergeant. - Morning, sir.

- Had any luck? - No, sir.

That's obviously where it happened, sir.

Over there.

When Charles Walton's murder occurred in Lower Quinton,

it was in 1945, on Valentine's Day.

Lovers walk, they call it, sir.

Not there was much love here last night.

Nobody really knew what had happened.

A famous policeman called Fabian got involved.

This is Fabian of Scotland Yard.

He later had his own TV show.

He was a very well-known household name.

Let us meet the real Bob Fabian,

the man called England's greatest detective.

He himself became involved in investigating this murder.

We can see that parallel directly with "The Wicker Man",

with Sergeant Howie.

An outsider policeman arrives at this strange village.

Good day to you, sir. I'm the harbormaster.

Sergeant, Howie, West Highland Police.

It's kind of hard to imagine today

a police officer being a household name.

But Robert Fabian was the most famous detective in Britain.

He's worked undercover in the underworld.

He's taken down cat burglars.

He has solved every case he's ever worked.

And so when the local police in Warwickshire

turn up at the Lower Quinton crime scene...

...and they see the severity of the crime,

the brutality of it...

...they realize they need a greater level of expertise

to handle the case.

Fabian gets this request to travel out to Lower Quinton.

This quiet hamlet of less than 500 people...

...where everyone knows everything...

and suspicious behavior is easily noticeable.

So he heads out there believing he's going to catch his man.

Do you know her?

When Fabian arrives, he has a game plan.

He starts off by having a Spitfire fly over Lower Quinton

and take a reconnaissance photograph.

He has it blown up to wall size

and he pins it up in his operations room

in the police station.

And his plan is to interview all 493 inhabitants

of Lower Quinton,

and use colored pins to denote each person,

stick them in the map,

and then he can see who was near the murder scene

at the time of the killing,

and thereby identify who the killer was.

Alfred Potter is a local farmer,

and he's the farmer that Charles Walton is working for.

Fabian suspects Potter of the murder pretty quickly.

If you don't cooperate with me here and now,

you may well find yourself inside a police cell tonight.

Have I made myself quite clear?

Alfred Potter is 40 years old.

He's a big guy. He's physically imposing.

Broad shoulder, big chest, thick neck.

He comes across as sort of a dunce and not too smart.

But Fabian thinks that behind the facade

is someone of extreme cunning.

So Potter helps look for Charles Walton

the night he doesn't come home.

He actually touched the handle of the trouncing hook

that was buried in Walton's throat.

Fabian confronts Potter on this, and Potter says,

"Well, when we found the body,

I wanted to make sure Walton was dead."

If you stumble across someone

and they've got a pitchfork through their face

and a trouncing hook buried in their throat,

chances are they're dead.

You probably don't need to check.

And while they're standing over this body...

...Potter turns to the police officer and says...

"I'm really famished."

If you're standing over the body of someone

who's been horribly mutilated,

usually your appetite isn't going to be

the first thing you think about.

This guy wanted to get away from the crime scene

as quickly as possible.

And why?

Eventually, Potter has a moment of stunning honesty...

...and admits that he's been skimming wages

from his family's business.

And to Fabian's mind,

there's some sort of money problem going on here.

Could he have done the murders?

I mean, could he be one of those people with a split mind --

sane one moment, but mad the next?

Walton, in the village, is rumored to walk around

with large sums of cash.

You have Walton working in a field...

...away from the village on Potter's property.

He's a perfect target. It's a crime of opportunity.

Couldn't Potter have killed Walton to steal his money?

It is a thin motive.

There is no evidence, obviously, that a robbery occurred.

Walton's niece, Edith,

said she wasn't aware of him carrying around money.

Then the question is, if this was a murder for robbery,

why was the crime so brutal?

Fabian never charged Potter with a crime

because he just couldn't find that one piece of evidence

to basically seal the deal.

Something that Fabian found particularly irritating

and suspicious about the villagers...

...was that a brutal murder had been committed in their midst,

but nobody seemed terribly bothered.

Nobody seemed in the least bit nervous

that there might be a demented killer harbored in their midst.

They seem more intent on stonewalling him

than showing any interest in the apprehension of the killer.

I suspect murder and conspiracy to murder.

Your lordship seems strangely unconcerned.

He had a constant feeling

that instead of coming forward to help him,

the village was covering something up.

Sergeant, if I were you, I would go back to the mainland.

Stop interfering in things that are no concern of yours.

The natives of Upper and Lower Quinton

and the surrounding district are of a secretive disposition,

and they do not take easily to strangers.

Therefore, I have borne in mind the possibility

of there being some local history attached

to the murdered man or his neighbors,

which we have not yet touched upon,

and which may have a direct bearing upon the murder.

Fabian's failure created a vacuum

into which, one by one,

other investigators who were not official began to seep.

And the first to get there was a very respected academic,

a leading Egyptologist called Margaret Murray.

...Dr. Margaret Murray,

who is probably the leading authority on witchcraft

in the world today.

Dr. Murray, have you ever met a witch yourself?

I've seen a witch. I didn't meet her.

She was a farmer's wife, and I saw her on the road,

and I passed close by her and had a good look,

and I thought she was one of the most disagreeable people

I'd ever seen.

Now, what sort of powers did she have?

Well, she claimed to be able -- She was credited...

I don't know whether she claimed that she was credited

with being able to kill the animals,

the farm animals,

and the other farmers' wives were terrified of her.

Kathy.

Kathy. Kathy.

Margaret Murray's take was that pagan witches were practitioners

of an ancient religion.

Hail spirit of the dark,

take thou my blood, my flesh, my skin, and walk.

Rise now from the forest, from the furrows...

They were surviving pagans.

Hail spirit of the dark.

These were disgusting people

practicing a religion of sexual orgies...

...and sacrificial bloodletting...

...left over from the darkness of prehistory,

and therefore the witch trials were justified,

which resulted in a slaughter of tens of thousands of people.

Elizabeth!

Murray made a few additions to the tradition of witchcraft

as a surviving pagan religion,

which became standard and popular culture

like horror and thriller novels of Dennis Wheatley.

You fool!

I'd rather see you dead than meddling with black magic.

One was that witches,

traditionally gathered in covens,

had ideally 13 members.

Now that our coven of 13 has been restored,

we can begin the setup.

Margaret Murray emphasized not only

that some witches had been guilty of hideous crimes...

...but that that sort of witch

was still around in modern England...

and still secretly practicing human sacrifice,

as seen in "The Devil Rides Out".

Father of darkness, King of death,

I pledge this knife.

Margaret Murray went to the Lower Quinton area.

She disguised herself as an artist

and thought that way to ingratiate herself

with the local people and uncover some more facts

about the murder of Charles Walton.

She later gave an interview to the Birmingham Post

and suggested that Walton had been a human sacrifice...

...a propitiatory right to make the crops grow...

...of a surviving group of black magic practicing witches.

No!

So the second theory is that he was killed by witches

as part of some sort of blood sacrifice to the land.

When you think of witchcraft, you think of hysteria,

as something that just exists in people's mind.

But in the 1960s, there were real witches.

There was an explosion of interest in the supernatural

and in ritualism.

The revival of public interest in witchcraft

is one of those curious features of life today.

But it's very difficult to get to the truth

of what it's all about.

On one estimate,

there are 30,000 people practicing in witchcraft

in this country alone.

But even so, it's enough to make you think,

are there really dangers involved?

And now to meet the witch, Dr. Gerald Gardner.

Dr. Gardner, how many witches are there today?

Well, about 400, I should think.

And do these people worship the devil?

No. Good Lord, no. They've got their own gods.

Their own god's a very nice god. They're the old gods of Britain.

And you asked me to believe that you are a witch yourself?

Yes. I can be initiated into --

brought into a circle in the proper way.

Away from the circle,

the initiate, blindfolded,

is prepared for the ordeals

which he must undergo before becoming a witch.

The first is water.

Michael?

Michael!

As well as the elements,

the initiate is made acutely aware of himself.

- Naked, blind... - Michael!

...alone.

He is confronted with some of man's basic fears --

of nakedness,

drowning,

falling,

pain.

If he cannot master them and himself,

he will be considered incapable of wisdom

and will not be initiated.

"Legend of the Witches" is very much representative

of witchcraft at the time.

This idea of witches out in the woods naked,

what's referred to as skyclad in Wicca.

It's something I've done myself when I was younger.

It comes into Wicca because of Dr. Gerald Gardner.

Gardner and my dad were great friends.

Dad always famously used to say, King of the witches.

His hair goes this way and his beard goes that way.

He made the witchcraft revival happen

by being a retired civil servant with nothing to lose.

He liked taking his clothes off, basically.

And he discovered the witches.

The witches liked him.

He recreated witchcraft as a living,

breathing religion in the UK.

Be frank, one reason for the secrecy today

is because covens are an excuse for sexual orgies.

Oh. That's nonsense.

Well, what do you dress in when you dance?

The traditional witches costume.

Which is what?

The skin.

- In the nude? - The nude. Yes, exactly.

Symbolic whipping lets him understand

that from now, he is subject to the discipline of the cult.

In spite of this, he is told

in other religions, you would kneel

while I would tower above you.

But in ours, we are taught to be humble.

You can honestly say that witchcraft does no harm?

No, I think it's absolutely no harm at all.

On the night of Friday, September the 13th, 1963,

something strange happened in this place.

A workman unlocking the door of the 800-year-old keep

found this...

...two human effigies.

The top one male, the bottom one female.

Between them -- a soot blackened sheep's heart

pierced by 13 hawthorn twigs.

The work of a practical joker,

a crank, or someone dabbling in black magic.

Gerald Gardner was accused by the press

of whitewashing Wicca and witchcraft.

The tabloids reported on this huge explosion of black masses

all over Britain.

Animal sacrifices, seances with the dead,

summoning demons, and casting curses.

If you've got power to do good,

then presumably you can do harm as well.

Yes, we could if we wanted to.

We only know that they do practice witchcraft

by what people say.

But we never see anything.

I'm uneasy about it.

You know, when I hear about it.

What makes you uneasy about having witches living here?

Lack of knowledge, I should think.

You know, I mean, if you don't know anything about anything

on the subject, what do you do?

You get nervous. You get frightened, don't you?

There's one particular lady in the village

who's convinced that I gave her a great dose of diarrhea,

which is absolutely ridiculous,

but, um, she's convinced that I was the cause of it.

The bishops regularly denounce the alleged witch cult

as an attack on the Christian family.

Ken Malin is 23.

He's done many jobs

and is convinced his failure to make money out of any of them

was due to the malign influences of the devil,

rather than his own shortcomings.

Have you ever seen the devil?

I think I've seen him once, yes.

I said, you know, I'm going to sell my soul to the devil.

And I used to sit in front of the mirror

or something like that, and I'd pray.

I'd pray to the devil.

I'd pray to the devil and say, "Take my soul.

Give me all the things that I want.

Give me a white Rolls-Royce with black windows

and a TV aerial on top.

Give me all the wealth.

Give me all the girls I want to go to bed with."

But I woke up one night

and I saw this incredibly handsome man

standing in the room.

I mean, really handsome.

I mean, you know, it was a real attraction.

I just almost wanted to sort of touch him.

But I became frightened.

And when I closed my eyes to sort of try and get rid of it,

it was still there.

I mean, the moment I closed my eyes,

it was still there in my mind.

I command in the name of the father,

and of the son, and of the Holy Ghost

that all evil forces, all evil spirits,

all forms of witchcraft, black magic, or sorcery may depart.

Beat down Satan under our feet

and call these evil forces to depart.

I feel a definite kind of violent force attacking me.

Sort of thing that almost knocks me out.

And, I mean, there have been occasions

when I have been knocked out.

The force coming out from him was so great

that I was flung about five feet across the altar.

Charles Walton lies buried

in Lower Quinton's peaceful churchyard.

A murder victim whose killer I failed to bring to justice.

I've never said this before, but I think I know who did it.

Who, though, will come forward with the evidence?

After the efforts of Fabian,

Scotland Yard's best detective, is unable to solve the murder...

...Margaret Murray came from London to do her investigation,

who believed witches did this.

Then in 1956, this woman steps forward...

...and claims to know who did it.

And she claims to have been a witch.

She won't give her name,

but she provides all the details,

details that the police haven't been able to suss out.

And she tells a story.

And it's the story of outsiders coming into the village...

...gathering in a field around Charles Walton

while he's out there, trimming the hedge.

And they stab him with his pitchfork.

And they pour his blood into goblets.

And they dip their robes into the blood...

and they dance around his body.

This is the popular conception of what witches do.

We asked Europe's leading witchcraft authority

what he thought of this widespread image.

That has a lot of rubbish.

Alexander Saunders, Europe's king of the witches.

When people meet me in the street,

they're so terrified of me,

after seeing a scene like that.

Alex Saunders is the person

who emerges as the most famous witch in the world

in the 1960s.

He is a working class man from the Birkenhead,

Liverpool region.

He reinvents himself as a pagan witch,

inspired by Gerald Gardner's witch religion.

They come from all over the world,

and some of them asking for help.

The majority of them are people asking for initiation.

And from 1964, he's got the perfect partner called Maxine.

He was especially protective of vulnerable young women

because being gay,

he really had no vested interest at all in exploiting them.

He must have initiated more people into pagan witchcraft

than anybody else in history.

We followed up one of these inquiries

and found a young lady,

far from the image of the cranky spinster

one might associate with witches and broomsticks.

Penny's leaving her work earlier than usual today

because she has a most important date.

I'd always had this interest in the occult

ever since I can remember,

but I didn't know how to go about contacting anyone

until I read a book about Alex Saunders.

A friend of mine phoned up one day and she said,

"Janet, I've just read a fascinating book

about a man called Alex Saunders.

He says he's the king of the witches,

and I'm going to meet him."

Alarm bells.

I grew up in a Christian household.

My grandfather was a deacon of the church

and became a Sunday school teacher.

I had no interest in the occult at all

because to me it was all satanic.

I've thought about what I'm doing quite a lot

and talked it over with my parents and friends and people.

Almost all of them think I'm crazy.

So I said, "Well, if you're going, I'm going, too,"

because my attitude was,

you're not getting involved in this, darling.

So the two of us set off to meet Alex Saunders,

who lived in a very dingy little flat in Notting Hill Gate.

Well, in the book it shows us dancing around fires.

I found him fascinating.

And something about witchcraft made sense.

I decided I'd go along and join the coven as well.

I had no idea what I was walking into,

because I thought I'd put on a lovely robe,

and that would be it.

And Alex said, well, actually, we're filming an initiation

and we need an initiate.

And you, Janet, are the initiate.

On the floor is a circle nine feet in diameter,

with a candle burning at each of the four cardinal points.

I bring before you Janet.

"Take her clothes off." What?

"Well, you're the initiate. You have to be naked."

I've never seen a naked man in my life.

So here am I, being told to take my clothes off

and be naked in a room full of strangers.

Outside the circle stands the initiate,

who is waiting to be admitted.

She is naked and blindfold.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.

So I took all my clothes off and stood there shaking in my boots,

which, of course, I wasn't wearing.

When one of the women came in

and she proceeded to tie me up like a chicken and blindfold me.

Well, I was led into a room where the incense was burning.

I'm on my knees, trussed up like a chicken,

and they take the blindfold off.

Right in front of me and fully erect

was the first male naked penis I'd ever seen.

And it was not a pretty sight.

But on the other hand, if you're going to be a witch,

you put up with all sorts of things.

There was an efflorescence of British horror film

starting in the late '50s,

but there was a kind of concentration of them

in the early '70s.

Increasingly weird and wonderful British horror films.

Look.

What do you see?

It's very easy to look back at them now

and view them purely as fantasies.

But there was a very strange interbreeding

between film stories and the bizarre stuff that was going on.

The horror movies look like the products

of deranged imaginations of the directors,

but they actually look like they're lifted

from documentary footage of real witches made at the time.

"Secret Rites",

what you see in that documentary is very, very slightly hyped,

but otherwise it is actually pretty accurate portrayal.

I do summonst her and call her up

to witness my rights and to guard the circle.

In late 1960s Britain,

there was a major societal shift culturally, socially.

People exploring drugs, psychedelia,

new ways of thinking, new ways of being, alternative religions.

There were witches on chat shows.

Being a witch is bloody hard work.

We've had everybody in our coven

from building site laborers down to grandmas.

In fact, you probably all know a pagan

or a witch somewhere who lives quite close to you

and you would never even guess what they are.

I'm a secretary.

I do spray painting most of the time.

I work in a boutique.

Witchcraft was everywhere, it was all pervasive.

Witchcraft is growing in this country

and there are so many black covens.

I am issuing a challenge to the others.

Come out and fight me for my throne.

There was an awareness that Britain was going nuts.

It was almost as if the country were sort of entering

into a nervous breakdown, a kind of collective nervous breakdown.

Britain goes through an identity crisis.

Its empire has ended.

It's not as rich as it used to be.

There's class war.

There's sexual revolution.

There's satire,

and the institution's respect for them is crumbling.

And all the assumptions about how to behave

were blown to smithereens.

Has it helped you, being a witch?

The entire advertising industry is witchcraft, darling.

The poor old public is permanently spellbound.

Witchcraft is the only religion

that the UK has given to the world.

Because it involved a certain amount of nudity,

it was a salacious, it was exciting,

it was titillating.

It was catnip to the Sunday papers.

Witches in popular culture has changed over the decades.

If you think about the notion of the witch

as a hag in "Snow White" or "The Wizard of Oz"...

...but then the 1960s and '70s in folk horror,

we see these kind of young, nubile,

kind of naked women, very sexualized.

I did some articles on witches once.

No. Not witches, damn them.

People who thought they were witches,

the psychology of it,

it's a sex thing, deep down, of course.

Mostly women go in for it.

This reflects what was going on in society.

There's a lot of sexual liberation with the pill.

Women can be in charge of their own sexual freedom.

Being in a circle full of naked people was liberating.

A lot of the women were young. They were good-looking.

They were taught to be proud of their bodies,

to represent the goddess.

And that was fantastic.

They were exploited to some extent, but willingly.

And it upset your mum that you were naked in the papers.

My father was sitting there reading a newspaper.

I said, "I think I'd better tell you something, Daddy.

I don't quite know how to tell you this, Dad,

so I'm going to come straight out with it.

I'm naked on the cover."

Without batting an eyelid, he lowered the newspaper,

peered over the top, and went,

"That's nice," and pulled the newspaper up

and continued reading.

And that was my father's initiation into witchcraft.

The counterculture was sort of spreading

into people's breakfast tables.

You know, Mr. and Mrs. Average Briton

couldn't open their tabloid newspapers

without reading bizarre stories.

And all this fed, really, into horror films of the period.

A date with the devil.

A bacchanal with Beelzebub.

- Sounds wild! - It's Sunday supplement stuff.

The details of the Charles Walton murder --

well, they were extremely gruesome.

And the intimations of ritual murder

were so gruesomely glamorous.

This titillated the tabloids enormously.

And, of course, filmmakers.

I've heard of things. Every now and then.

There's a song and dance about it in the Sunday papers.

Devil worship, graves dug up, churches desecrated...

...blood. Stories of blood.

After the Walton murder in 1945,

there were actually several novels on the subject

of ritual murders.

There was Robin Estridge's novel, "Day of the Arrow,"

which became a film called "Eye of the Devil,"

in which the marquis of a region of Bordeaux

has had a failed crop for three years running

is ritually sacrificed...

Alain! No!

...in order to ensure that the wine will flow better in future.

This heathen mumbo-jumbo, these sadists!

Sharon Tate was making a film called "The Eye of the Devil"

and the film company obviously had heard about Alex Sanders.

And so they decided to get hold of real witches

to consult about the film.

He and Maxine went along and they met the cast,

and Alex did one of his oogie boogie bits,

as I call it,

which basically involves Maxine lying on the floor

and he's -- I don't know what he's doing,

but anyway, he's doing something with Maxine.

There was Norah Lofts novel called "Devil's Own,"

which became a Hammer film in 1966 called "The Witches."

- Afternoon, miss. - Good afternoon.

And in that, Miss Mayfield decides to become a teacher

in what appears to be a beautiful, idyll village.

The occult novel that inspired "The Wicker Man"

was "Ritual" by David Pinner.

The Charles Walton murder case also directly influenced

a whole host of other folk horror offerings...

Who's that? Who is it?

...like "Robin Redbreast,"

"Penda's Fen," "Plague of the Zombies"...

This is a Cornish village inhabited by

simple country people, riddled with superstitions.

They all represent the theme of the outsider

coming into a local village where the villagers are unwelcoming,

unfriendly, uncooperative.

Is there anything we can do, vicar?

Yeah. You can keep away from us.

Please, it was not our fault.

Leave us alone!

- But surely, you -- - I said leave us alone!

Which certainly happened in the Charles Walton case.

The villagers were not only misleading people,

but they were blatantly lying --

making up stories,

giving fabricated evidence,

leading the police down all sorts of rabbit holes,

different tracks.

Whose desk is that?

No one's.

Margaret Murray said specifically in the Walton case,

that the murder had been committed

to give the blood sacrifice to the land for fertility purposes.

And from his blood, the crops would spring.

The earth has to have sacrifice.

So Fabian left Lower Quinton,

never having resolved this case,

never having found out what really happened.

Did you find the girl?

No, well, I can't say I'm very surprised.

"The Wicker Man" is set on a far-flung island

among people who are still trying to live in the distant pagan past.

But it's also very much a film of the 1960s and '70s.

The hysteria around Charles Walton,

the sexual revolution,

and a fascination that people had for witchcraft.

I invoke thee and call upon thee, mighty mother of us all.

Bringer of all fruitfulness.

Queen of Heaven. Queen of Hell.

Horned hunter of the night.

The wind is crying through the trees.

And we invoke thee to appear.

Mighty god of the sun,

Bountiful goddess of our orchards...

So "The Wicker Man" is as much about fact as it is fiction.

But the killing of Charles Walton

wasn't the only occult crime that inspired folk horror.

Highgate Cemetery.

Something was going on there.

I worked for an architect.

He came into work one morning,

he was as white as a sheet.

And I said, "Are you all right?"

And he said, "I've just had a weird experience, Janet.

Um, you're a witch, aren't you?"

And I said, "Well, you know I am. Why?"

He said, "When I went home the other night,

I parked my car where I usually park it,

right by the railings of the old Highgate Cemetery."

I went, "Yeah, so?"

"I saw something, Janet."

"What did you see?"

"I don't know," he said,

"but it scared the hell out of me.

It was about seven foot tall with blazing red eyes,

and it was staring at me.

And it was shaped like a human being,

but I don't know what it was."

He said, "I've never been so scared in my life."

He said, "I ran. I absolutely ran to my house."

Shortly after that,

David Farrant started investigating the concept

of the Vampire of Highgate Cemetery.

Farrant wanted publicity.

He contacts a newspaper.

The journalist wanted to take somebody along

who was a natural born medium --

muggins here.

So I'm going to be roped along to go marching

into an old cemetery.

I am a natural medium,

and I think the idea was that I was supposed to be able to dowse

where the vampire was,

and maybe communicate with it.

In the meantime, Farrant goes with a different young lady.

According to the newspaper reports,

the young lady danced naked on top of the gravestone.

Farrant, not content with naked ladies dancing on gravestones,

decided to slay the vampire.

Have you ever seen this -- vampire?

I have seen it. Yes.

I saw it last February. And I saw it on two occasions.

What was it like?

It took the form of a tall gray figure,

and it -- about eight feet tall,

and it seemed to glide off the path without making any noise.

Farrant, because he can't keep his mouth shut, gets arrested.

Desecration of the dead.

In the late '60s and early '70s,

the line between fiction and fantasy became somewhat blurred.

In fact, they do say that a Hammer film

called "Dracula A.D. 1972"

was directly inspired by the Highgate Vampire.

Well, come on, before some nosy cop nabs us

- for loitering with intent. - Intent to what? Rob a grave?

David Farrant used to come into the shops.

I would see him. I got to know him a bit.

And he was one of these foppish hippy types.

He was born to wear a velvet drape suit and lace cuffs.

But in a case of what-goes-around-comes-around,

it interests me that when the Highgate Vampire palaver all began,

right at the end of 1969,

an earlier Hammer Dracula film, "Taste the Blood of Dracula,"

had been filming in Highgate Cemetery.

Action!

This may have stimulated imaginations,

the fact that a vampire film was being shot in the cemetery.

And so eventually we end up with apparently"Dracula A.D. 1972"

was inspired by the Highgate Vampire.

I summoned you!

It was my will.

I think this really is an indication

that fiction and fantasy were bleeding into the real

or the imagined, or whatever it might be,

but nevertheless, stuff that was happening in the real world,

in a most intriguing and off-the-leash kind of way.

What is interesting also is what Farrant was accused of.

He was accused of actually doing rituals.

This is something that was actually going on.

Like you see in "Dracula A.D. 1972,"

you were having this whole crowd from Hampstead

who were experimenting with cultism using old churches.

They were dabbling.

They weren't serious occultists, they weren't serious witches,

but they were dabbling around.

You can't underestimate the power of Dennis Wheatley,

Hammer House of Horror, Hollywood, all those things.

I call on Andras, Grand Marquis of Hell.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

They are dabbling.

And they don't know a demon from an entity.

If enough people believe in something, it can become real.

It can materialize.

So if enough people had believed

that there was a vampire in Highgate Cemetery,

they could manifest this.

I was at Highgate Cemetery a few years ago,

and I was looking through the wrought iron gates

to see if I could see anybody's gravestones...

...and I felt something.

I looked across the lane

and there was a man in a stovepipe hat, all in black.

He was about seven foot tall, it seemed,

and in two or three strides, he was across the lane.

I saw the Highgate Vampire.

Despite the sensationalist tabloid headlines

and all the horror films, the question remained --

who killed Charles Walton?

And most puzzling of all, why?

The Charles Walton Enigma is not just that of a

straightforward whodunit.

It's the enigma of Britain itself.

Was Britain's pagan past secretly alive in the present?

Or was this just yet another fantasy?

So in 1945, as Fabian's investigating this crime,

his first motive for the killing that he comes up with

is that it's a robbery.

But there is no evidence, obviously,

that a robbery occurred.

So the second theory is that he was killed by witches

as part of some sort of blood sacrifice to the land.

And according to these theories,

he was murdered in broad daylight

and then there was a pagan dance ritual around his body.

It's a village of 493 people.

They're aware of outsiders.

If you have a coven of 13 people walking through the town,

someone's gonna notice that.

One of the villagers

is probably the murderer.

When the Charles Walton murder occurred in 1945,

basic forms of folk magic were still carried out.

The origin of festivities such as this

at Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire

lie centuries back in prehistory.

What you see is the she-male...

...dancing at the head of the procession.

The hobby horse...

...and the horned dancers, with the antlers.

And that festival is still carried out.

Beltane is, of course, May Day...

...where traditionally you would jump over a fire

for the purpose of fertility in the countryside.

They're jumping through the flames

in the hope that the god of fire will make them fruitful.

The May Queen appears at Beltane

and she's the regrowth of the land.

There's actually so much in the horror films.

The first example has to be "The Wicker Man".

Then films made later, such as "Midsommar."

Normally a young girl is chosen.

Sometimes it was a competition.

You still see it around in folklore customs around the UK.

- You are our May Queen. - Me?

- Yes! - Why?

You won!

The Cotswold Hills at the bottom of Warwickshire

in the mid 20th century,

was one of the most folklore- saturated parts of England

and especially the area around the village of Lower Quinton.

Warwickshire people seem to have the same kind of affinity

with witchcraft that the Welsh have with singing.

Today, one of Warwickshire's best known witches is Irene Ison.

In fact, she's been called the Queen of English Witches.

There are still so many self-contained villages

who really do not like strangers and don't like visitors,

and they cover all things up

that they don't want anybody to know about.

The communication here,

although for radio, television, and telephone

still people believe in the old ways.

These standing stones on a ridge above Long Compton village

are known locally as the Rollright Stones.

Covens of witches,

who, even in these modern times,

visit the Rollright Stones in the dead of night

and dance naked around his unmoving form.

Rollright Stones have very, very, very strange energy.

Really a warmth to it in a strange sort of way.

It's a great place to work.

You can get loads of people into the Rollright Stones.

I've been to handfastings there.

It's a nice place. It's fairly central.

You can't really park there very well.

But it's so open.

You feel you are somewhere else.

One of the very last real murders

of somebody connected with witchcraft

was that of Anne Tennant...

...right underneath the famous prehistoric monument,

the Rollright Stones.

She was murdered by a farm laborer called John Heywood.

He murdered her because he was convinced that she was a witch,

and that she had bewitched both him and his livestock.

This is not the Middle Ages, it's 1875.

And he had killed her in the same way

that Charles Walton died.

He had pinned her down with a pitchfork.

And his defense was that he didn't mean to kill her.

That he knew -- and this was indeed a very widespread

popular superstition,

that you could break the curse of a witch,

providing you drew blood from her.

And it seems extremely likely that the person

who killed Charles Walton would have known

how Ann Tennant had died.

These villagers were only a few miles from each other.

They're walking distance.

We fear that witchcraft has returned.

It is more than witchcraft.

When Fabian arrives in Lower Quinton.

Obviously, one of the first things he wants to do

is establish a motive for the crime.

"What motive?" I asked briskly.

"Revenge? A quarrel?"

"Well," he hesitated,

"Perhaps you'd better look at this."

"Folk Lore, Old Customs and Superstitions in Shakespeare Land"

by J. Harvey Bloom."

"Puzzled, I read, 'In 1875, a young man killed a woman

with a hay-fork because he believed she had bewitched him.'"

But Fabian ultimately doesn't pursue the angle.

Too much time has passed.

But then, in the 1950s,

a distant relative of Ann Tennant

writes a letter to the police

which makes its way to Scotland Yard.

And the letter basically says,

my great grandmother Ann Tennant

was murdered in Long Compton back in 1875

by a man with a pitchfork.

The man believed my great grandmother was a witch,

and she had a quote unquote "evil eye."

And she put a curse on one of his pigs, and the pigs died.

The Evil eye, for instance, has been known to be used there,

and I've actually seen this thing used and

I've seen its effects.

For instance on animals such as pigs and then cows.

They can be bewitched by the power of the evil eye.

It is a baleful glance thrown toward the object,

which is generally an object of hate.

And it causes, well, some misfortune,

usually some kind of wasting illness.

This sort of grabs the attention

of the Warwickshire police, who first see the letter,

because obviously Charles Walton was killed with a pitchfork.

And number two, Alfred Potter, the key suspect,

he'd had a cow die in a ditch the day before the murder.

Dead pig in the Ann Tennant case.

Dead cow in the Walton case.

Did the police believe that Potter killed Walton

over the death of this cow?

Just as Heywood had killed Tennant

over the death of his pig.

Did Potter believe that Walton was a witch?

By the late 1960s,

rumors were starting to circulate

that Walton had been odd in really quite profound ways.

I grew up in Warwickshire.

One time we had a lot of snowfall in the winter,

and we went sledging on hills very close to Meon Hill.

We heard all these stories and the fact that there was a ritual murder.

The story that I was told

was that the body was discovered with frogs pinned to the ground

all around the body,

and the frogs were pinned in various postures.

There have been so many accounts written

about this case,

and they all clue into the fact that Walton was a witch.

Depending on what account you read,

Charles Walton bred Natterjack toads.

He could talk to animals or he could forecast the weather.

He had all these powers of clairvoyancy.

The demon walks again!

He is said to have tied a toy plow to the leg of a pet toad

and sent it scurrying across the local fields.

And this is called blasting...

an ancient which tradition, apparently,

of killing fertile soil.

And so the rumor is that Walton was killed

because he bred these toads, he killed the crops.

And so the villagers wanted vengeance.

Oh, that's it. The crops failed.

In 1945, when the murder happened,

it was quite common to look for supernatural sources of bad luck,

such as dead cattle or personal ailment.

Let's chuck her in, see if she's a witch!

The accused could have had nothing

to do with the occult at all.

So it has come to this.

You accuse me, a priest, of working with the devil.

We can only judge by the evidence.

And there's a lot of that, old man.

Just innocent victims of spurious accusations.

As was most likely the case with Ann Tennant...

...and Charles Walton.

Unable to solve the crime,

Fabian leaves the force.

He starts writing his memoirs.

Elements of the supernatural start creeping in.

He says that during the course of his investigation,

he walks up to the top of Meon Hill one day

to look out at the village.

"I climbed Meon Hill, a bleak and lonely spot

to examine the scene of the crime for myself.

A black dog sat on the nearby wall for a moment,

then it trotted past me.

Shortly afterwards, a farm boy came along.

'Looking for your dog,' I asked him.

'What dog?' 'A black dog.'

The lad didn't wait to hear any more.

He fled down the hill.

Instantly, word spread through the village

that I had seen the ghost."

He then goes down to the local pub in the village.

A scene worthy of something like "An American Werewolf in London."

He confronts this group of yokels,

tells his story,

and they all suddenly exit the bar in silence.

"The dog incident caused a total change of attitude

towards us in Lower Quinton.

No longer did anyone cooperate with our investigation.

It was like the pulling down of a shutter."

Should the world know our business?

- It's murder, then. - Then murder it is!

"I realized for certain we were up against witchcraft

when the body of a black dog was found hanging from a bush

near the spot where Walton died.

I advise anybody who is tempted,

at any time and on any pretext,

to venture into black magic, witchcraft,

Satanism, call it what you will,

remember Charles Walton.

Think of his death,

which was so clearly the ghastly climax of a pagan rite."

When you read the official case reports that Fabian wrote,

he doesn't mention witchcraft.

Now, he does say the people of Lower Quinton

are a secretive lot, and there might be some sort of history here

that we're not aware of, that they're not sharing us.

Perhaps he kept it out of his official police reports

to avoid ridicule.

You know, you can't turn in a case report

to the Commissioner of Police going, "I think witches did this."

You're pulling my leg, sir.

After Fabian leaves the force,

he becomes a real celebrity.

This is Fabian of Scotland Yard.

Part of me thinks that Fabian was a natural entertainer.

Fabian might have just been giving people what they wanted,

stories of witchcraft and folklore from movies and TV.

There's recently been a murder in this district, as yet unsolved.

That's why we're interested in strangers.

I see.

My personal viewpoint?

I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever

that it was a witchcraft killing.

What you have is Alex Sanders regularly appearing

in the newspapers.

Margaret Murray is just trying to prove her own theory.

And Fabian is jumping on a bandwagon.

Charles Walton was living with you

at the time of the murder?

Yes.

Do you think that there was any chance

that witchcraft played any part in his death at all?

No. I think, um,

the papers made a lot of it.

Um, and I lived with him all my life,

and I've never, never known such things.

I think it's ridiculous, really, the things that were said.

In his official police reports,

there is no mention of encountering

a black dog on the hill.

The black dog is important, though,

to the Charles Walton story

because in the 1929 book by Harvey Bloom...

there's a story in there about a young boy named Charles Walton.

According to this story,

young Charles Walton has put in a day in the fields,

and he's walking home and it's misty.

And he sees something take shape in the mist.

Young Charles Walton goes home. He's terrified.

No, sir, a sort of head, a face.

Of a fiend?

He goes back to work the next day in the fields.

And the same thing happens the following night

when he's walking home.

On the third night...

the spectral hound appears.

And this time, it's accompanied by a headless woman.

Now, according to the story in the Harvey Bloom book,

several days later, Charles Walton's sister dies.

And supposedly, this whole incident gave

Charles Walton the powers of clairvoyancy.

Beware my words, you fools!

For they are his commands!

This story is apocryphal.

No one knows where it came from, where it originated.

But a lot of people believe that Charles Walton

in the 1885 story

is the same Charles Walton who got murdered in 1945.

Welcome, Poole.

You have come of your own free will to the appointed place.

The game is over.

Game?

What game?

They say it's better the devil you know

than the devil you don't.

But the murder of Charles Walton suggests otherwise.

Perhaps the devil issomeone you know.

The Charles Walton who, according to Bloom,

encountered the dog

may not have been the same Charles Walton

that was murdered on Meon Hill.

But just because it may not have been true,

that wouldn't have stopped many of the villagers from believing it.

- Youare the right kind of adult.

Youuniquely were the one we needed.

I feel like particularly in the last 50, 60 years in Britain,

there's been a really strong paranoia around our identity.

That's kind of true of us today.

And I think horror always reflects the time

in which it's being made.

In the last decade, this folk horror trend has really taken off

- with things like "The Witch"... - Boo!

..."Midsommar,"

the films of Ben Wheatley, like "Kill List."

The brilliance of these films

is that they excavate into the depths of the British psyche

and churning up all that we fear about the world

and about each other.

There are these times that I've kind of spent

in the countryside.

There is that palpable feeling of invasion at times

when you go to your little, local supermarket

or your little butchers or the pub.

You arrive and you immediately break an unspoken rule.

I think "Men" does capture, in Rory Kinnear's performance,

particularly British idiosyncrasies.

- Apple from the garden? - Y-Yeah, it was delicious.

Scrumping, eh?

No, no, no, no, no. Mustn't do that.

Forbidden fruit.

Oh, uh, God. Sorry. I-I-I...

I'm joking.

There is this immediate kind of tension that you feel.

Who are you?

Why are you here?

There is so much neurosis about keeping others out

and maintaining the status quo within places like that.

These films portray a constant state of paranoia in Britain.

I have a weapon!

If you come in here, I'm going to use it!

Miss Marlowe, what on earth are you talking about?

You can just see people getting whipped up

into a frenzy over really strange ideas.

This is a country

that, in order to make a point of principle,

is willing to burn things up and do extreme things.

Well, don't you see that killing me

is not going to bring back your apples?

Summerisle, you know it won't.

Well, go on, man, tell them! Tell them it won't!

I know it will.

The final scene of "The Wicker Man"

is at once laughable and horrific.

And that, to me, is what Britain is.

I think in some ways...

...the Cotswold village

is the most likely place in the world for me

for somebody to sacrifice someone in a ritualistic way.

Oh, God! Oh, Jesus Christ!

Our fascination with the Walton murder

and "The Wicker Man"

points to an unease we have

about ourselves and what we're capable of.

Those lovely-looking tea ladies.

Or the charming butcher.

They aren't really who they say they are.

Beneath the veneer of politeness

and good manners lies something darker.

The enemy is not the barbarian at the gates,

clamoring to get in.

The enemy is already inside.

The enemy within.

Quite literally, the devil you know.

We know the terrible things we've done to each other.

We know the bad things we're doing to each other today.

Because we know ourselves.

And we know that deep down...

...it's possible.

"The Teletubbies" was almost entirely filmed on location

in the corner of a field on a farm

on the edge of the Cotswolds.

Cameras always angled down to include the rabbits

and the Teletubbies,

but if they'd just gone up slightly,

they would have seen the surrounding countryside

and, of course, Meon Hill.

I was the original Tinky Winky,

the first actor to inhabit that purple costume

with the triangular aerial.

Uh-oh.

Laa-Laa and Po and I

lived in a country house hotel,

and sometimes I'd take them for a drive in my little car.

And one day drove off trying to find Meon Hill.

And then we saw a sign saying "private property, keep off."

But the lane was so narrow, we couldn't actually turn round,

so we had to keep going.

And as we got into the driveway,

this ferocious black dog attacked the car.

And then the front door opened of this house

and this ferocious man just started shouting at us.

He was quite evil in his appearance,

and it just felt like the black dog

and the man with the shaggy beard

were almost like two manifestations

of the same evil spirit.

Charles Walton saw a black dog on nine consecutive mornings.

I can't help wondering whether that black dog

was the same black dog

that nearly hurled itself through the window of my car.

The filming went extremely well throughout the summer.

The director told me what I was doing was fantastic,

but the BBC didn't like my performance,

and they wanted me to be removed from the role.

So afterwards I got fired.

The "Sunday Mirror" approached me,

and I told them about Meon Hill.

How I experienced extremes of good fortune

and extremes of bad fortune.

And I can't help thinking that that earth energy

around Meon Hill actually had an effect.

And they say it's a place of power.

Well, the Teletubbies had a huge impact all over the world,

and it all emanated from that little place

just next to Meon Hill,

the site of the most recent satanic black magic murder.