The Effect
It is May 1953 in the remote and windswept parish of Warleggan on Cornwall’s isolated Bodmin Moor. For weeks now, locals have noticed that the single, lonely bell of St. Bartholomew’s church has fallen silent. The vicar, the Reverend Frederick Densham, a man known for his profound strangeness, has not been seen. Worried, Frederick’s neighbours decide to investigate. They arrive at the old vicarage to find it sealed like a fortress. The windows are shuttered, and the doors are barricaded from the inside with locks and bolts, masses of heavy furniture and piles of junk. And, after forcing their way in, the villagers make a grim discovery: the Reverend Densham’s body, decomposing amidst the squalor.
Despite Frederick Densham being a notorious eccentric in the local community, the discovery of his body unsettles his parishioners. Parishioners who haven’t visited their local church in some time. For Frederick’s death inside his chaotic, barricaded home is just the final chapter in one of the most bizarre stories in the history of the Church of England.
Just across the path from the vicarage in which Frederick died, is St. Bartholomew’s itself. This small and modest ancient Norman church, which for the past over 800 years has been a place of quiet reverence, has been transformed into a truly alarming spectacle. Every one of its walls, together with its series of simple, stone columns, are daubed in bright, jarring colours, and covered with disturbing, hand-painted slogans. One chillingly declares: “The Devil is very busy in Warleggan.”
But the strangest sight of all is yet to be revealed. For St Bartholomew’s at Warleggan is not, it turns out, empty of parishioners after all. For years, the Reverend Densham has dutifully rung the church bell every Sunday, calling the faithful to worship. But for years, not a single person from the village had answered his call. Yet if, on the day of Frederick’s death, you were to steal up to one of the church windows and peer inside, you would see something totally mystifying. A full congregation, every pew occupied, row after row.
Only, this congregation doesn’t consist of real, living and breathing people at all. This congregation is made up entirely of life-sized cardboard cutouts, their human silhouettes hunched and inert, blank faces staring silently towards the pulpit.
And, even more peculiar still, it transpires, is that the Reverend Densham has actually preached to these figures, read the gospels to them, tending to both them and his empty church for over two decades. So how to explain their presence, the church’s lurid decor, the fact that an elderly man felt the need to barricade himself inside his home? Were these blank-faced effigies not so innocent, after all? Did they have some extraordinary, preternatural power over Frederick Densham, a power that – ultimately – led to his death? Was Frederick right, that the devil was very busy in Warleggan… or rather scores of devils had taken up residence there, every one of them made of cardboard?
The Method
The bizarre behaviour of Reverend Frederick Densham was not the result of demonic possession – or even the Devil himself arriving in a lonely village in Cornwall – but the tragic endpoint of a long and bitter feud between a stubborn, unconventional man and a small, deeply traditional community. To understand the cardboard congregation, the garishly-painted church and Frederick’s heavily-barricaded house, we have to try to understand the man himself, and the parish that rejected him.
Frederick was not a typical vicar. He arrived in Warleggan in 1931, having already had a successful career as a timber merchant. He was an outsider with rigid, High Church, Anglo-Catholic ideas that were alien to the low-church, Methodist-leaning sensibilities of his new parishioners. He introduced incense, bells, and elaborate rituals that the villagers found strange and unwelcoming. They wanted simple services; he gave them what they considered to be “Popish” ceremony. The clash was immediate and absolute.
In reaction to this clash, Frederick had painted the inside of the church himself, crafting his tromp l’oeil congregation from cardboard and meticulously positioning the homemade figures along the pews. But these were just two examples of the reverend’s odd behaviour. There were many others.
The most compelling theory to explain Frederick’s eccentricities is that they were a coping mechanism for profound loneliness. Not long after his arrival, the parish of Warleggan began a campaign of shunning him. They refused to attend his services, ostracized him socially, and left him utterly alone with his duties. A vicar without a congregation is a man without a purpose. The cardboard cutouts, therefore, can be seen as a desperate attempt to fill that void. As Frederick couldn’t preach to the people of Warleggan, he created a new, perfect, and obedient flock who would never walk out or complain about his rituals. It was a way to continue his vocation in a world that had made it impossible.
While undoubtedly born from a complex sense of loneliness, Frederick’s actions also contained a strong element of defiance. He was a proud and stubborn man. The bright paint and the strange slogans plastered over the church were not just random scribbles; they were messages. He was publicly marking his territory and condemning what he saw as the godlessness of the village. The cardboard congregation could also be interpreted as a silent, sarcastic rebuke to his parishioners. He was showing them that he didn’t need them; he could, and would, create his own congregation. It was a grand, eccentric gesture of contempt for those who had rejected him.
The barricades at the vicarage were the final stage of this process. After two decades of isolation and perceived hostility, Densham’s loneliness likely curdled into paranoia. He developed a siege mentality, believing the outside world, and specifically the people of Warleggan, were a direct threat. He boarded up his vicarage windows and piled furniture against the doors not just to keep people out, but to create a physical barrier that mirrored the psychological wall he had built around himself years before. His fortress was the sad, logical conclusion for a man who had lost his faith, not in God, but in humanity itself.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
