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Hello and welcome to Beats Battlefield.
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I hope you're enjoying these little tidbits of terror in this advent calendar of horror.
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I've heard so many different little stories that have come through, and a lot of the stuff has come from various other haunted podcasts that I listen to regularly.
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How Haunted, Eerie Essex, and also Weird and the Wade.
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Just some of the amazing podcasts you can hear, and hopefully one day I'll get myself up to that level.
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But in How Haunted, Rob Kirkle visited Shepton Mallet Prison.
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Now, this is a place that I've got on my bucket list that one night I'm gonna stay there, because today it's a hotel, and you can stay amongst the cells, as well as visits its wonderful museum.
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But one day I will get there.
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But on a tour of there, Rob spoke about several military ghosts that haunt the prison to this day.
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It was one of the heights of Victorian prisons, and then throughout the 20th century, it would serve several different purposes, including holding the Cray twins, and also during the Second World War, it would be a place where, firstly, the Magna Carta would be held in safety behind its big thick walls, and then when the Americans turned up late, it'd be used to hold American troops, and then eventually there would be 18 executions of American GIs in this place.
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There was also the hanging of an Australian soldier just after the First World War.
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But he told the tale of Captain William Rill.
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Now, of course, I had to do some research.
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Allegedly, the captain had jumped off the roof, and his last words were get back, which apparently in the yard today you can still hear the shouting of that soldier in his last moments.
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But I wanted to see what the real story was, and of course, with the years of research I've been doing, I tried to hunt it out.
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But I couldn't find any Captain William Third Rill on the Commonwealth Wargrave site.
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Now some of you may think, well, first of all, why would you find a prisoner on a war memorial?
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And also, if a soldier killed himself, would he be entitled Commonwealth Wargrave?
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And up and down the country, thanks to the British Newspaper Archives, I found several cases of soldiers who came home on leave and would sadly take their own lives.
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Of course, the horrors of war never left them.
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But if they were on leave or still on active service, they are indeed entitled to a Commonwealth War grave, and there are hundreds of these stories throughout the country.
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And of course, if you are executed in a prison or die in prison, you may be buried in the grounds of the said prison.
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For example, during the Second World War, Penterville Prison and also Woolworth Prison would be sites of execution, and the soldiers' remains would remain within those walls.
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But their names are actually still on the Bookwood Memorials to the Missing, and people do challenge this, as why should war heroes be beside the names of murderers?
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But back to Captain William Rill, I couldn't find a single record for him from the Sec from the First World War.
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But thankfully, I've managed to locate his story.
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Now, of course, once you get to a certain rank in the British Army, you get to keep your title, and Captain William Rill did.
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He was a surgeon, and after he left the army, things started to go a bit sideways for him.
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He got caught speeding at the grand sum of 20 miles an hour in 1907, and after he left the army, he managed to procure a sword which he would attack his doctor with, and then he would be placed in Shepard Manon prison.
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He was incarcerated during the First World War and was in one of the special wings, known as D Wing, if you visit the site today.
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Somehow he'd managed to reach the roof of the prison, and in April 1917 he threw himself off the roof and landed to his death.
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This is one of several military ghosts that you can find on the site, and the next episode will cover the Americans at Shepard Mallet.