The Effect
It is the long dark winter of 1723 and at a large country house near the village of Bellingham in the north-east of England, a dramatic series of events is about to play out.
Lee Hall, a large and handsome stone house on the banks of the river Tyne, is shut up for the winter. Its owner, Colonel Ridley, has recently returned from India with a considerable fortune, and has now decided to see the colder months of the season out in his London residence. At the hall, he leaves behind a skeleton staff of three trusted and loyal servants. They are operating under strict instructions: they must maintain the property and keep the building and its contents safe. Under no circumstances should any strangers be admitted into the house. And there should be no exceptions.
Late one afternoon, however, as the winter light is thinning towards dusk, a lone pedlar comes calling. He is a poor man, dressed in mere rags, and carrying a large pack. He asks the servants at Lee Hall whether they might make an exception to their master’s rule and grant him shelter for the night. The north-east of England is known for its harsh winters, and the long, chilly nights are especially brutal. The staff tell him they are sorry, that they sympathise with his plight but are at risk of losing their jobs if they disregard their master’s orders and allow a stranger into the house.
Disheartened, the man reluctantly agrees to find shelter elsewhere. But, before he leaves, he begs one final favour. He is just on his way back from Newcastle, he says, and has with him a heavy pack full of fabric and linens. As he doesn’t know where he will spend the night, he wants to ensure that this pack is safe, so he asks the servants if he can leave the pack with them and return the following morning to pick it up. Feeling sorry for the pedlar, the servants agree, taking the pack and placing it securely in the kitchen. It is a very large and odd-shaped pack, square at one end and round at the other. Nevertheless, the servants think no more about it, returning to their work.
It is later that evening, as the house is cloaked in the thick darkness of a winter night, that one of its servants, a maid called Alice, goes into the kitchen to retrieve some candles. Because it is so dark, Alice at first thinks she must be mistaken. That, surely, her eyes are deceiving her, that the large pack on the kitchen floor is not really moving of its own accord. She lights a candle, watching it a moment longer. It is indeed moving, she sees, rocking and wriggling as though it has come to life.
Terrified, Alice cries out to alert the attention of the other servants who rush to her aid. But by the time they reach the kitchen, the pack is quite still again and the others begin to suspect that Alice is mistaken. She begs her two colleagues to open up the pack, but Alice’s fellow servants are honest and scrupulous, reluctant to open something which does not belong to them. They examine the outside of the pack instead, feeling the cords binding the linens inside of it together, and this confirms to them that it genuinely does contain bundles of fabric, just as the pedlar alleged.
But Alice is still unsettled by the peculiar pack on the kitchen floor, and so a young manservant called Edward, perhaps keen to win her undying affection, declares that he will fetch his gun. And no sooner has he made it back to the kitchen, than the mysterious pack has started twitching again. Young and impetuous, and without stopping to fully consider the consequences, Edward points his gun and fires.
The Method
A young manservant at Lee Hall points his gun at the strange pack of linens sitting on the kitchen floor, and fires. To his horror, and to the horror of the two other servants with him, the pack emits a terrible and anguished series of screams. Then an ominous red puddle begins to seep out of it and onto the flagstones.
Trembling with shock, and knowing they have no choice but to look inside the pack now, the servants set about opening it up. To their complete astonishment, they discover it is not full of bundled-up linens at all. What they find is a very small man, now dead after being shot by Edward’s gun. A cutlass is tied to his right hand, and inside the pack with him are four loaded pistols. Intriguingly, on a strap around his neck, the man wears a silver whistle.
Despite the bizarre chain of events they’ve just experienced, the servants waste no time in figuring out what must have happened. The pedlar who had visited Lee Hall earlier that day was not a pedlar at all, but a member of a criminal gang, a gang with a plan to rob the house when the servants had retired to bed. The small dead man in the pack was his accomplice. As soon as the household was asleep, the man in the pack had intended to cut himself free with the cutlass, draw back the bolts on the doors, and summon his criminal cohorts. Together, they would then proceed to empty the house of its valuables.
The servants call reinforcements from the village and together a total of twenty-five men with sixteen of their own guns, plus the four loaded pistols found inside the pack, stake out the hall. At one o’clock in the morning, after plunging the house into blackness some time earlier in an attempt to give the impression that everyone had long gone to bed, the men position themselves at the rows of ground and upper-floor windows. Then one of the servants creeps to the door, opens it up and, ensuring he cannot be seen, blows the silver whistle.
There follow a few tense beats of silence as the men of Lee Hall wait, straining their eyes and ears for any signs of the robbers. Only minutes later, a band of men on horseback burst out of cover and advance towards the house. They are met by a hail of gunfire, men fall to the ground outside and the rest of the thieves start to flee. The men inside Lee Hall peek out, and are able to make out four bodies lying on the ground. They dare not leave the safety of the building, so it is only in the bitter early light of the following morning that they open the doors and edge outside. All is quiet now and there is no one to be seen. The only signs of the gun battle of the previous hours are several large sheets of frozen blood upon the ground. The man who had concealed himself in the pack is later buried in the local churchyard.
The mystery of the Lang Pack is a fantastically dramatic tale that has no doubt been liberally exaggerated over the centuries. It does, however, remain a sobering reminder of the kind of ‘country house heist’ that must have been relatively commonplace in the 18th century and the centuries before it; a time when country houses were mothballed for their rich owners to spend winter in the city, whilst opportunistic local robbers took their chance to claim the riches inside.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
