ON A recent visit to the Ross-on-Wye, and a trip out to Ledbury on the Daffodil community bus line, traditional storyteller Tony ‘Monty’ Hirst came across a rather gruesome tale at the town’s Butcher Row House Museum.

As recent events in America show, execution attempts don't always result in the death of the condemned prisoner.

On being hanged for the traditional time in 1736, Thomas Reynolds, of Ledbury, surprised his executioner by pushing open the lid of the coffin he had just been placed in.

Reynolds had been convicted for taking part in an attack on a turnpike in Ledbury on September 20, 1735, a recently erected toll gate that required road users to pay for road usage.

He was upset at the introduction of this new tax, and Reynolds was arrested in the first of two attacks on the turnpikes by large numbers of armed men, disguised in women's clothing and with faces blackened by charcoal.

The local newspaper, dated Friday, August 3, 1736, reported, that the executioner, thinking that foul play had ensued, insisted upon hanging him up again, when the Mob taking a different Turn, cry’d ‘Save his Life’, and it fell upon the poor executioner (who stickled hard for fulfilling the Law) and beat him in a most miserable manner; they carried the prisoner to a House at Acton, where he was put to bed; he vomited three pints of blood, and 'twas believ’d would recover, but on giving him a glass of wine, he died.

Monty the storyteller, who often delves into the Ross Gazette archives for bizarre stories, will be bringing 90 minutes of macabre tales and sinister stories to the Crown & Sceptre, in Ross on Tuesday, November 3, doors at 7pm, £5 on the door.