WHEN former police officer John Worland heard about the missing remains of condemned witch Ursula Kemp, it was a mystery too juicy to resist.

At the time of her hanging in 1582, Ursula was involved in one of the most infamous witch trials in the country and, amazingly, Shakespeare even references her in the characters of the witches in Macbeth.

However, the mystery that intrigued John was what had happened to Ursula's remains hundreds of years after her death.

"As far as cold cases go this was a very cold case!" laughs John. "“It is a powerful story and I love local history."

Remains believed to be those of Ursula where first unearthed in 1921 exhumation in St Osyth, where Ursula had lived.

They were dug up again in 1963 and bought by the museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall, where the skeleton was exhibited for more than 33 years.

It was then sold onto collector and artist Robert Lenkiewicz and became tied up in his estate after his death in 2002.

"Whoever’s skeleton it was, I felt they had spent far too long above ground and should be returned back to their resting place," says John.

John made it his mission to find out what happened to the remains and to bring them back to Essex to be buried.

He says: "I used to be a police officer in the tech surveillance unit.The skills I gained there were very relevant in my search for the remains. I am used to going back and looking at the original evidence and finding out the truth."

John first heard the story of Ursula Kemp when researching the 2009 film WitchFinder, which he co-produced and directed, based on the Manningtree witch trials led by ‘witchfinder general’ Matthew Hopkins in the 1640s.

He was fascinated by Ursula’s tale. She had made a humble living attending births, wet nursing babies and treating the sick with herbal potions and lotions.

Unfortunately when her services were rejected by pregnant neighbour, Grace Thurlowe, in favour of another ‘midwife,’ an argument ensued.

When the baby went on to die, it was suspected a curse had been placed on the infant. After that villagers began to suspect Ursula could treat or incur sickness and lameness at will and she soon became a prime target for the ‘witch hunter’, landowner and magistrate Brian D’Arcy.

He approached the Head Theatre in 2009 about making a short film and they got a grant from the Heritage Lottery which resulted in the film Ursula Kemp.

John says: "I am not saying Ursula was a particularly nice person. She was involved in a neighbours’ feud and in the two years leading up to the witch allegations, 18 people, including several children, did die in the village. In a community of 300 people that is a significant death toll. There were ‘fevers’ and people ‘languished and died’. Child mortality was horrifically high. Ursula was a handy scape-goat."

At that time there was a great deal of belief in the supernatural at that time and life was governed by how people were supposed to follow religion. People had to revere God and the Devil and his disciples were a very real belief.

What made Ursula's the case extraordinary, and so widely known, was the sheer number of women accused of witchcraft.

“Ursula was told if she confessed she would be treated leniently,” says John. "So she pointed the finger first at fellow St Osyth resident Elizabeth Bennett and eventually 12 other women were eventually implicated in her ‘witchcraft’."

“Normally, around this time, there were be about four prosecutions a year in Essex for witchcraft, so the numbers involved in St Osyth were really quite exceptional,” he says. “Overall, Essex leads the way in witch trials. "

In Hopkins’ time (the 1640s) there were 112 executions for witchcraft - of which 82 were in Essex.”

John spent years going through archives both locally and nationally, consulting experts and interviewing others with knowledge of the case. He uncovered the original parchment document, written in Latin, convicting Ursula and condemning her to death after her 1582 trial.

"Much to my amazement the trial documents are still there. I found them on parchment, all written in Latin, in the National Archives in Kew. Reading the words was an amazing moment for me because it dawned on me the last time they had been read was at the trial when Ursula and Elizabeth were condemned to death."

"That archive threw up a couple of anomalies and made me realise that much of what had been written about the case previously was not quite right."

What troubled John was how much the myth of Ursula had got tangled up with the truth about what happened.

"People had readily accepted that the skeleton was Ursula. A sort of mass hysteria. From the original discovery in 1921, no one had conducted a proper examination of the bones. Several,people including a local historian published material confirming that it was Ursula and even created stories to state that Ursula had a spinal deformity, purely based on the 1921 photograph which looks as though the spine is bent but in fact is just natural settlement.

"The people I spoke to who had seen the skeleton in 1963 were adamant that it had nails driven through the bones but the 1921 photo doesn't show this. I could also find no evidence that this was a normal practice. The contemporary account of Ursula Kemp only stated that she suffered from occasional "lameness" no evidence of spinal abnormality."

The gaol calendar showed that some of the convicted victims were returned to Colchester castle gaol after the trial but not Ursula, so why was her body in St Osyth and why on earth was the skeleton buried behind a house.

"Convicted felons who were hanged would have been thrown into a communal pit near to the place of execution, or sometimes buried at a crossroads outside the confines of a town or village. That is still an unanswered question why were the skeletons there behind 37 mill street? Why were they buried in a north/south orientation?

"Three further skeletons were found at the same site in 1966. They were examined by a pathologist at Essex county hospital but there is no record of his findings! The site is nowhere near a churchyard or the priory. It is likely that those later skeletons were disposed of as clinical waste."

When John finally located the remains he had to spend many hours negotiating to have her remains released by the trustees of Lenkiewizc's estate. From then he began to explore the process of what he and many others believe is the right end to Ursula's journey, a peaceful reburial back in St Osyth.

In co-operation with St Osyth Parish Council, a plot with a north-south orientation was located in unconsecrated land and on April 15th with both Pagan and Christian representatives present, the skeleton of 'Ursula' was finally laid to rest as a poignant and symbolic gesture for her and her fellow accused.

“The documentary puts a lot of things right that were wrong,” he says. “I don’t have every answer but I am happy with that.”

With the help of carbon dating and the input of experts John can prove that the remains reburied last year are those originally exhumed from St Osyth in 1921, they are the bones of a 16th Century St Osyth resident but probably not those of Ursula Kemp.

'Ursula' was finally laid to rest as a poignant and symbolic gesture for her and her fellow accused.

"I drove home with the remains in a willow casket in the back of the car and the casket stayed in my home for six months while I negotiated to get the remains buried. People might find it odd that I had the remains of person in my home and wonder if I was spooked by it. I wasn't, dead people don't scare me, living people do."

For more details visit www.ursulakemp.co.uk.