Illustration by Corey Brickley

I Bought a Witches’ Prison

In 2005, Vanessa Mitchell moved into her dream home, a former medieval jail where England’s witches waited to hang and burn. When paranormal phenomena forced her to flee, she became convinced it was possessed by evil spirits. This is her true story.

St. Osyth is a cursèd little village in the county of Essex, 83 miles east of London, at the edge of the North Sea. The town’s 4,600 souls live in medieval cottages arranged around a 12th Century monastery, and in cheap mobile homes that the British call caravans. St. Osyth’s exact origins remain a mystery, and over the centuries its townsfolk have survived floods, invasions, and monsters both imagined and real. In fact, every page of its wretched history is soused in the supernatural.

The village is named after the granddaughter of England’s last Pagan king. According to legend, Osyth was beheaded by Danish Vikings but managed to walk to the nunnery carrying her severed skull in her hands. In 1171…