14.9: The Ghost of Hammersmith

On the night of tuesday, January 3rd of 1804, 29 year old excise officer Francis Smith came face to face with the ghost and in an act of justice, shot down the white figure in the dead of night, determined to free Hammersmith from the ghost’s reign of terror once and for all. What Smith didn’t realize was that he didn’t kill the ghost at all, but instead killed 32 year old bricklayer Thomas Millwood. This resulted in a murder trial that would set a legal precedent in the UK involving self-defense that remained unsettled for almost two hundred years.