The Handsel Witches and the Haunted Trees of Grovely Wood

I’m lucky enough to live in south Wiltshire, a beautiful part of the world with rolling hills and surrounding chalkland with the medieval city of Salisbury at it’s heart. If you venture just west of Salisbury, you’ll come to the small village of Wilton, on the outskirts of which is the ancient Grovely Wood. You can drive out, about 10 minutes from Salisbury, park in the small car park and follow the old, beech-lined Roman road all the way through the woods. If you can go during the week rather than the weekend, you’ll most likely have the walk all to yourself. The walk is wonderful and peaceful, but venture further and just off the main Roman thoroughfare, through the thick trees, you’ll encounter a local legend, one that served as inspiration to my short story Of Ivy and Teeth within my short story collection Epiphany and More.

The Handsel Trees are three large, imposing beech trees growing in small clearings just off the main path. You’ll easily notice them. They’re far larger and clearly far older than all of the other trees around them, colourful ribbons will be hanging off their branches and small offerings will be left at their base and in the hollows of their trunks. According to local folklore, these trees mark the graves of the Handsel Sisters, four sisters of Danish descent who lived together on the very edge of the village of Wilton. The story goes back to the early 1700s, when a smallpox plague swept through the village, killing more than 130 villagers. Frightened and desperate for someone to blame, the villagers fixated on four newcomer sisters, the Handsels, who had recently settled in the area. Rumours of witchcraft quickly spread, and it wasn’t long before the villagers, scared and desperate, formed the conclusion that the sisters must have cursed the village with the disease.

One night, a mob of villagers dragged the Handsel sisters from their home, into Grovely Wood. The sisters were accused of witchcraft and consorting with the devil. They were given no trial or chance to plead innocence. Instead, they were violently bludgeoned to death with farm tools. The mob then hastily buried each sister in a separate, unmarked grave deep in the forest, spacing the burials far apart. Even in death, the villagers wanted the alleged witches kept apart. If the sisters were separated, it was thought they couldn’t conspire from beyond the grave to take vengeance or work further dark magic against those who killed them.

As the legend then tells, four mysterious beech trees suddenly grew, each one directly on top of each of the sisters’ graves. Over the centuries that followed, these “witch trees” have thrived becoming the huge, gnarled trees we can still visit today. Three of the original four beech trees still stand, each encircled at the base by a ring of logs and branches. Some believe these rings act as a protective circle where if you step inside, you can be drawn closer to the spirits of the sisters without being harmed.

The Handsel sisters are said to still haunt Grovely Wood, bound to the trees that grew from their graves. There have been anecdotal accounts of ghostly sightings reported in this part of the forest, where hazy female figures have been seen leaning against the massive trunks or standing just at the edge of sight between the trees. Others have heard the sound of women’s voices or laughter when no one else is nearby. Local lore even claims that if you speak to the Handsel sisters’ spirits, they may even answer you or lay a hand on your shoulder.

Personally, I’ve never experienced such things whenever I’ve visited the trees, which I’ve done several times now, both alone and with my family and friends. There’s no doubt it’s an eerie, unsettling place, especially when you’re alone due to the silence and stillness of the forest. It’s a good hour’s walk from the car park to find the trees so it certainly has a sense of remoteness to it which fuels the deep sense of unease! It’s such a beautiful place, full of atmosphere and nature.

Origins of the Grovely Witch Legend

So where does this particular local story come from? Is there any truth to the story of the Handsel sisters and their brutal demise? Like most folklore tales, trying to parse how much is rooted in real events versus embellishment of generations of imagination is a hard thing to do. On the surface, certain details do align with historical fact. Wilton’s smallpox epidemic of 1737 was very real. Parish records show 32 burials that year due to a virulent smallpox outbreak. This would have been a terrifying crisis for a small 18th-century community. It’s not hard to imagine panic setting in and villagers seeking a scapegoat. Blaming witches for disease fits the patterns of earlier witch hunts, and even though England’s official witch trials had ceased by the 1730s, fear and superstition was still common in folk beliefs.

There are no known records of the Handsel sisters in local archives, church registers, or genealogical databases. However, it’s still possible that the sisters might still have existed but that their name was either distorted over time or that their story was never documented because they lived on society’s fringe. It is also known that South Wiltshire did have pockets of people with Danish ancestry. Even centuries earlier, red-haired people in nearby villages were nicknamed “Danes”. So, the idea of a little enclave of Danish sisters in 1730s is plausible. In times of plague, communities often fell back on xenophobia and scapegoating. Outsiders or those seen as “different” made easy targets for witchcraft accusations.

It is also very possible that the Grovely witch legend may have arisen long after the supposed events were said to have taken place. Grovely Wood has a section historically known as “Four Sisters. This name is documented surprisingly early. Researchers found that “Four Sisters” was already marked on maps as far back as the mid-16th century, pre-dating the witch story, so it’s possible that “Four Sisters” originally referred to something like this and later generations, noticing the four very distinctive beeches in that part of the woods, may have concocted the witch legend to explain the name and the atmosphere the location evoked. This is a common pattern in folklore. An evocative place-name or landmark inspires a backstory to make sense of it. The “witches’ trees” of Grovely might then be an etiological myth, a story told to give meaning to the mysterious Four Sisters of the wood.

For those wanting to believe the truth of the story, it’s difficult to ignore that fact that the story only seems to surface in written sources in recent decades. There’s no mention of Grovely witch executions in older historical accounts or 19th-century folklore collections that we know of. It’s a story that possibly gained traction via word-of-mouth, then snowballed once it hit the internet age. The story’s details are remarkably consistent across tellings, suggesting a single source or recent codification rather than a lot of divergent old variants.

For me, whatever the historical fact maybe, it doesn’t change that fact that the location is beautiful and one that I enjoy visiting. I also feel it shouldn’t change any sense of spirituality from the place. The offerings and ribbons left on the tree mean something very tangible to the people who visit and long may that be the case. If you get the chance to visit, please do, you won’t be disappointed.