Fontelautus Dennis

In the early years of the last century Exmouth was becoming popular as a fashionable town. Large houses were springing up along Bicton Street, one of the first of them being Belmont House, occupied by the Reverend Jonas Dennis, a prebendary of the Royal Collegiate Church of St Mary in Exeter Castle, for which appointment he received an annual stipend of £213s 4d. This was the only church appointment he ever held, and as he boasted he had refused to marry a young lady with a fortune of £50,000, because he disapproved of her principles, we must assume he had an adequate private income; he later married Juliana Susannah Shore who brought in a mere ten pounds. Apparently they produced four daughters, and then a son, Fontelautus, who was baptised in 1824.

The holder of this appalling name appears to have suffered a long illness following a fall in which he injured his head; according to his father he became possessed, though it sounds much more like water on the brain, and died in 1826. His father wrote a little book that year on the case.

The night the child died the body was taken up to an attic room to prevent the sorrowing mother from seeing it. The door had an unglazed window open to the staircase, and the coffin lid was screwed down. During the first night, the nursemaid lying below heard Fontelautus' voice clearly for about half an hour: 'his vocal tones were particularly winning, coaxing and caressing'. His sister Maria heard him, and also his mother who was sitting in the drawing-room. This continued for several days and nights. At another time, Maria, during five minutes, saw the apparition of her brother's hand stretching out of the room-window where his body lay. These constant alarms began to convince everyone that the baby was still alive, and when Fontelautus was buried in the garden, the four sisters who had acted as bearers were convinced that they had helped to bury him alive.

During the following month, tension mounted. The cook declared that, 'sitting one night in the kitchen, she saw a headless figure enter the door from the court, and that passing through the kitchen into the pantry, it then suddenly vanished.' Due to this and the agony of mind on the part of the sister, Maria, the body was exhumed and the head was removed and dissected to confirm the cause of death. Afterwards it was reburied, presumably in the garden again, and that seems to have settled the matter to everyone's satisfaction. But the extraordinary affair was long remembered by the neighbours, and a generation later Belmont House still had the reputation of being haunted, which is hardly surprising.

The reverend prebendary himself died elsewhere in 1846, aged 71.