The bell disturbance at James Ashwell’s Rose Hill household in Chesterfield reached Edward Moor while he was investigating the Bealings Bells in 1834. It seemed to offer striking parallels: bells reportedly rang without an observed pull, disconnection did not settle every reported occurrence and suspicion fell on someone in the house. Yet the printed account also contains a correction and a significant gap in the promised evidence.
Those qualifications matter. The surviving chapter is a combination of letters and Moor’s later recollections, not the complete contemporary history Ashwell had once intended to send him. It is possible to describe a distinct Chesterfield incident without pretending that its exact dates, every test or its cause are securely established.
The correspondence and the missing account
Moor printed letters from W. Felkin dated 15 and 27 March 1834, correspondence with Ashwell and a later letter dated 1 March 1841. He also recalled conversations held in 1834. These different layers give the story a source trail, but they do not have equal proximity to the observations themselves.
Ashwell had promised a fuller written account in 1834. Moor explained that this expectation affected his own note-taking: he did not record everything at the time because he anticipated the detailed narrative. When he sought it again in 1841, Ashwell’s literary commitments prevented him from supplying it. The book therefore contains material reconstructed after an interval of about seven years.
A promised document is not evidence of what its unreceived contents would have proved. The absence of that fuller account leaves the reader dependent on the letters actually printed and on Moor’s recollection of conversation. This limitation is particularly important for mechanical tests, where small differences in arrangement can change what an observation means.
When did it happen?
The disturbance was already in the past when Felkin wrote in March 1834. The letters place it roughly eighteen months to two years earlier. Moor’s own later recollection offered a looser estimate and suggested a date around 1830. These are estimates, not a consistently documented start and finish.
This article therefore describes the period as before March 1834 and leaves the precise incident years unassigned. The dated 1834 and 1841 letters are evidence about when people wrote, not automatic incident dates. An apparently precise year on a map filter would conceal rather than resolve the disagreement in the source.
The reported ringing
Felkin described bells sounding separately and an unusual restriction on the hours: the reported activity did not begin before about five in the morning or continue after about eleven at night. This was information he relayed about the household, rather than a complete log showing that every day had been observed over an identical span.
The accounts included bells ringing after wires had been cut and a bell that appeared to resume oscillation after being held and released. Another reported test involved introducing a bell without its normal wire connection; it was said to ring within about half an hour. Shutter bells in locked rooms also entered the narrative. Each is a claim about a particular arrangement and should not be collapsed into a general assertion that every bell rang under every possible form of isolation.
The apparent importance of these reports is straightforward. If a bell normally depends on a pull-wire, removing that connection challenges the simplest explanation of an unnoticed pull at the other end. It does not by itself exclude direct contact, an alternative connection, movement of a support or an error about precisely which sound came from which bell. The printed material does not provide a full installation plan or a continuous record of custody and observation.
The correction about the loose bell
One especially dramatic version concerned a bell said to have rung while lying loose in a closet. Moor’s own printed correction changes the picture. The bell had remained quiet for weeks while on a shelf. The reported ringing came after it had been mounted on an iron shaft placed between a batten and the wall.
That is not a trivial change of wording. A loose object lying on a shelf and a bell supported by a shaft have different mechanical relationships to the surrounding structure. The correction does not establish the cause of the later movement, but it removes the stronger claim that the bell rang in the same circumstances while simply lying loose. A responsible retelling must carry the correction forward with the story.
The passage also shows why multiple repetitions of an anecdote are not equivalent to independent corroboration. If later accounts repeat the earlier loose-bell version without the footnote, their agreement may reflect the same uncorrected description. The original volume allows the reader to see the revision and judge the claim in its qualified form.
Suspicion within the house
A governess became the subject of suspicion. Felkin’s correspondence did not support every detail of the gossip about the timing of the activity. Moor also investigated a suggestion that the same person had been connected with another bell disturbance and found that proposed identification did not stand.
Correcting that supposed link does not establish that every member of the household was incapable of interference. It establishes the narrower point that this particular argument about the same person connecting two cases was unsound. Nor does the remaining suspicion amount to evidence sufficient to accuse the governess of producing the noises.
Charles Babbage appears in Moor’s recollection of conversation about the affair. The reviewed passage does not make him an on-site investigator at Rose Hill. A famous person hearing or discussing a case should not be promoted into a witness to its physical tests. His name adds historical interest to the correspondence without supplying observations that the source does not record.
Repairs and an undemonstrated cause
The material mentions the prospect that work on the house might reveal something relevant. It does not report a subsequently discovered apparatus or a diagnosed structural fault. An investigation hoped for is different from an investigation completed, and a possible opportunity to find a cause is different from an actual finding.
There is consequently no firm basis here for an electrical, structural, fraudulent or supernatural solution. The source records people trying to understand unusual behaviour in a household bell system, with incomplete information about how the observations were controlled. Its value lies in preserving the claims, the attempts at testing them and some candid limits in the record.
Assessment and map location
The classification is Insufficient evidence. The letters and recollections contain specific observations and reported tests, but the full contemporary narrative was not supplied, the exact incident years remain uncertain and one important loose-bell claim was corrected. No demonstrated cause is recorded in the material reviewed.
The map pin is an approximate Chesterfield town-centre reference at the photographed Market Place area. It is not an identification of Ashwell’s private home, a historical bell position or a visitor destination for the case. The market photograph supplies town context only, and no public-access designation is attached to the household setting.
Sources and further reading
The original source trail is preserved in Edward Moor, Bealings Bells (1841), Chesterfield correspondence and commentary, pp. 45–59. Read the letters, the later recollections and the loose-bell correction together. The date of the volume should not be confused with the disturbance, which had already occurred before the March 1834 correspondence. Source checked 13 November 2026.