Who Put Bella Down the Wych Elm? The Wartime Mystery that Still Puzzles the English West Midlands
Graffiti on the Hagley Obelisk, with a different spelling and word choice to the original. Image by David Buttery, via Wikimedia, public domain. Thomas Willets was not feeling good. What should have been a pleasant day spent with friends, hunting for birds’ eggs in the tangle of trees around Hagley Wood had taken a sinister turn. Shaken by what they had seen, Willets and his friends Robert Hart, Ben Farmer, and Fred Payne headed for home, making a solemn pact to tell no one about their adventures that day. They’d been trespassing on the grounds of Hagley Hall, and breathing a word of any of this would mean trouble – big trouble. But as the night wore on, the secret weighed heavily on young Thomas. Unable to keep his peace any longer, the young lad approached his parents. In the hollow of an old elm tree on the Hagley Estate, a sheepish Thomas Willets told his father that evening, he and his friends had found a human skull. Europe was no stranger to death and destruction in April 1943....