The affair lasted for fifteen years.
Familiar as it is, we now offer the old story of the hauntings at Epworth, mainly because a full view of the inhabitants, the extraordinary family of Wesley, seems necessary to an understanding of the affair.

The famous and excessively superstitious John Wesley was not present on the occasion.
THE WESLEY GHOST No ghost story is more celebrated than that of Old Jeffrey, the spirit so named by Emily Wesley, which disturbed the Rectory at Epworth, chiefly in the December of 1716 and the spring of 1717.

Yet the vagueness of the human mind has led many people, especially journalists, to suppose that the haunted house was that, not of Samuel Wesley, but of his son John Wesley, the founder of the Wesleyan Methodists.

For the better intelligence of the tale, we must know who the inmates of the Epworth Rectory were, and the nature of their characters and pursuits.

The rector was the Rev.Samuel Wesley, born in 1662, the son of a clergyman banished from his living on "Black Bartholomew Day," 1666.