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The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

Mysteries of People and Places

Dateline: August 16, 1660

On the night of August 16, 1660, a 70-year-old rent collector (manager of Viscountess Campden’s estates at Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, England), William Harrison, disappeared from Chipping Campden and only his hat, comb and ‘collar band’, or scarf, were found. His servant, John Perry, confessed to his murder and implicated his mother Joan (who was thought to be a witch) and his brother Richard. All three were hanged, although a body was never found.

Fully two years later, the ‘murdered’ William Harrison returned to Chipping Campden, with a fantastic story, which he laid out in a sworn letter to Sir Thomas Overbury, a magistrate of the county of Gloucester. Harrison wrote that he had been kidnapped by two armed horsemen, who stabbed him through the side and thigh with swords. They had taken him on a long journey through England to Deal, where they had put him on a ship.

The ship was captured by Turkish pirates who sold the old man into slavery in Smyrna (now Izmir), Turkey. Many months later, Harrison's Turkish master freed him on his death-bed, and Harrison made his way back to England via Lisbon, Portugal.

No true solution to the ‘Campden Wonder’ has ever been forthcoming, and questions remain such as why John Perry confessed, and why a septuagenarian would be bought and sold as a slave. Many possible explanations have been put forward in numerous plays, pamphlets, poems and novels. A website with a forensic bent now exists that is devoted to the remarkable case, with a modern-English paraphrase of the original pamphlet by Overbury (1676) posted at this page.

English poet John Masefield (1878 - 1967) wrote two plays on the subject: The Campden Wonder and Mrs Harrison. The latter dealt with the popular myth that Harrison's wife had committed suicide on learning that her husband was alive; in reality, little is known about Mrs Harrison – she may even have been dead before 1660, and the 'Mrs Harrison' of Overbury's account the wife of William Harrison's son Edward.

« Index of articles on folklore and other topics

Kaspar Hauser, mystery boy of Nuremburg

Edgar Allan Poe's mysterious visitor

External links

The Campden Wonder website

http://www.campdenwonder.plus.com/

Pete Clifford's Campden Wonder blog

The Campden Wonder at Wikipedia

More on Chipping Campden

Chipping Campden website

A few views of Chipping Campden in Old Postcards

Unsolved mysteries (Google search)

Mysteries in the news