Esoteric Kent – Come to the dark side (of winter)
Columnist Anna Willatt, aka Esoteric Isle, talks to The Poisoners’ Cabinet about Kent’s historic true crimes
Sinead Hanna - The Poisoner’s Cabinet - @sineadhannacraic
These articles always start with an esoteric question. This time, why are we obsessed with spooky stories and staring into the face of our own mortality in the bleak midwinter? Bring the naked flame of your Dickensian candle closer and gather round - it’s time to peer into the shadows.
I’ll level with you - I’m a bit of a scaredy-cat, so I needed to bring in the big guns for this one. Enter Canterbury-based spooky-content creator Sinead Hanna, one half of the brilliant The Poisoners’ Cabinet podcast, “a weekly historical true crime show with a comedic twist”. The podcast was conjured up by Sinead and her co-host Nick Gordon while sat at the bar at The Falstaff, and curious libations play a crucial role in the show. But more on that later. We’ve got a mystery to solve!
As someone (@esotericisle) who loves all things terrifying, I wasn’t surprised to find Sinead had the answer: “It’s a wonderful time of year for spooky stuff. The other world is the ultimate escapism and where the fascination with death came from. The Victorians were especially obsessed. At the time, a lot of people were just dying - consumption, cholera outbreaks, people poisoning each other, as we have discovered on the podcast, and various conflicts. Confronted with death and their own mortality, the coping mechanism was a reverence for death. The spooky media we consume helps us access our fear, to get in touch with the darker side of life.”
This perspective feels strangely logical. Thinking about where we are in the year, we are in the darkness and nature has died right back. “Exactly,” says Sinead, “the stage is set, really, for a very spooky time and appreciating all things macabre in the darkest half of the year. The biggest link, and a huge Kent link, of course, is Dickens with the first ghost story set in winter - A Christmas Carol.”
With the stage set, it’s only fair that Sinead shares some spooky Kent stories and, with The Poisoners’ Cabinet, we are spoilt for choice. As Sinead explains, “we dive into historic true crime - poisonings, macabre murders and captivating, weird crimes”. And, boy, does Kent have some weird crimes, from the never-solved Seal Chart murder (1908) through historic murders in Faversham (Thomas Arden 1551 and Dr Lyddon 1980) to the gruesome Brides in the Bath Murders perpetrated by serial killer George Smith (1915).
“One of our favourites is from Hythe and a classic case of poisoning. It’s a story of a woman, Susannah Lott, who ended up being burned at the stake. Oh Susannah! Bad lady accused of killing her husband and everything!”
In a nutshell, Susannah’s employer, Benjamin, falls for her and beseeches her to marry him, which she refuses many times. However, our Susannah falls for “a rogue, a reprobate and a smuggler. They get it into their heads that if she does marry old man Benjamin, then they can take his money”.
“The lover gets very impatient about trying to poison the old man. Within 12 hours of them getting married, he’s tapping his wrist. On their wedding night, Susannah and her husband go back to the house and she just goes upstairs to tend to her lover, who no one knows is her lover… The three of them head to a pub for a drink and order a nice glass of bumbo (rum, sugar, spices and milk) - quite seasonal! But that’s where they slip in the arsenic! Old man Benjamin is sitting there, saying ‘My bumbo tastes weird. It tastes hot!’. And they’re like ‘No, no, no, it’s fine. Get more of it down you. That’s just the cinnamon…’”
Yikes, I’ll be thinking twice about the cinnamon in my tipples from now on!
Tipples play an important role on the podcast and the show starts with making a cocktail, inspired by a secret ingredient from that week’s story. Now your blood is running cold, reader, let’s wrap with a recommended libation from Sinead to bring you back to the land of the living.
“I would recommend one of the great cocktails of all time that I discovered through the podcast. The Red Hook (rye/Maraschino liqueur /red vermouth). We had this on Episode 20, when we told the brilliant story of Mike Malloy, an Irishman that some gangsters tried to kill with alcohol in NYC. You can’t do that to an Irishman. You know?! It’s a hilarious story of a man who defied every attempt to be murdered because he had an iron constitution.”
Cheers to that!
Box out
Explore Sinead Hanna’s creepy book and film recommendations, at www.youtube.com/@sineadhannacraic or @sineadhannacraic on Instagram and TikTok
Listen to spooky tales and conjure up delicious cocktails with www.thepoisonerscabinet.com
For spooky stories and events, subscribe to the free newsletter at substack.com/@esotericisle
