Hanged Man’s Haunt

Jacob’s Post near Ditchling commemorates a dark story of smuggling, murder and ghosts. Clive Webb recounts the tale of a brutal killing – and a gruesome punishment 

It stands on an overgrown path at the edge of a small wood, hidden from the cars sweeping past on the road between Brighton and Ditchling. Once, travellers would have stopped in wonder at the sight. Some even made their way here as an act of pilgrimage. 

This is Jacob’s Post – or at least the latest of several markers over time to have borne that name. What first stood here was a metal gibbet encasing the decomposing corpse of a murderous criminal, displayed as a public warning of the fate awaiting those who transgressed the law. 

Today the gibbet is long gone but the memorial stands where once a body hanged. This is the tale of the dead man’s crime - and its uncanny aftermath. 

The story begins on the evening of Sunday 26 May 1734 at the Royal Oak Inn. As the late spring day turned to dark, an assailant brutally killed three people at the pub. His first victim was the landlord Richard Miles, stabbed with a sharp knife and the second and third were Miles’s wife Dorothy and their female servant. 

The publican lived long enough to raise the alarm, identifying the murderer as a man known locally as Jacob Harris. A local posse set off in pursuit and by the morning they had closed in on the suspect. 

The trail had taken them to the Cat Inn in West Hoathly, over Turners Hill and on to Selsfield House. Hungry and cold from their nighttime pursuit, the posse asked the owners for some breakfast and waited while a fire was lit. As the smoke swirled upwards there was a sudden crash. Harris, who had been hiding on a ledge of the chimney, became overwhelmed by the fumes and fell at the feet of his pursuers.

Justice was swift and severe. Harris stood trial at Horsham Assizes in August 1734. The court found the defendant guilty of murder and sentenced him to be hanged. 

The gibbet stood at the side of the road where Harris had committed his crimes, his decaying body a deterrent to others tempted by sin until the passing of time and the pecking of birds left only a head inside the gibbet. ‘It is a dismal sight to behold,’ runs the lyric of a local folk ballad. ‘Enough to make a heart of stone run cold.’

Who, though, was Jacob Harris and why did he commit such brutal murders? 

His actual name appears to have been Jacob Hirsch. The alias ‘Jacob Harris’ may have been a means to conceal the fact that he was Jewish. There are claims that the harshness of his fate owed to hostility towards his ethnicity, although there is no record to corroborate this. 

What of the motive for the crime? Hirsch is said to have been a peddler, though contemporary reports list him as a labourer. Whatever his profession, Hirsch was an associate of the smuggling gangs whose tentacles reached across Sussex, and likely, so was Richard Miles. The deadly confrontation between the men may have stemmed from a dispute over the spoils of their clandestine operations. 

Selsfield House, where Hirsch sought sanctuary, was well known as a smuggler’s hideout and we do not know the contents of the strongbox that Hirsch fled the Royal Oak Inn with – but his actions appear more than just a blind act of robbery. 

Hirsch’s afterlife is just as mysterious – his ghost was said to haunt not only the site of the gibbet, but also Selsfield House. 

The gibbets that once stood alongside public highways were long surrounded with superstition. Women in want of a child would touch the hand of the hanged criminal in the belief that it would make them fertile and long after the body was gone, locals would carve pieces off the gibbet post, believing it would cure rheumatism and other ailments. 

There are now houses where the pub once stood, and the original Jacob’s Post has long since succumbed to time and trophy hunters. But anyone with a morbid interest can follow true crime trails across Sussex– there are similar markers memorialising criminals such as Jack Upperton near Arundel, a blue plaque remembering smugglers hanged at Selsey, and the gibbet cage of John Breads in the attic of Rye Town Hall.