Ghost Children Of Bedern

-by Javier Ortega
Bedern, York. Mid-19th century. The “York Industrial Ragged School” was the place where hundreds of orphan children where rounded up and kept against their will. Forced to work in squalid conditions, many of them died shortly after their arrival to the “school”. Currently, local residents know this building to harbor the souls of the misfortunate children that perished there.
In those days, the church had hired George Pimm as the local Schoolmaster. Pimm’s job was to clear the streets of orphans, waifs and strays. Placing them in the set institutions like the “Ragged School”.
The local church of course paid Pimm for each child he housed. Pimm, seeing a greedy opportunity in this, would use the children as workers. Having the children work in farms, local places and even as chimney sweepers.

The Ragged School was a slave camp. The children lived in complete squalor. Disease and starvation were the causes of death in the school. It was not a good business position to have a child die in your care if you were Pimm, for the church would reduce or not pay some of your allowance you’d received for caring for these kids. So what did a greedy Pimm resort to?

Pimm would not report the constant deaths of the children to the church in order to keep his allowance and not have his place condemned. Pimm started to hid the bodies in and around his school. For months he’d get away with the heedless disposal of the bodies. As the months passed, Pimm himself could not stand the stench of decay of all the corpses around in his building.

George Pimm began to suffer from paranoia. Something that was brought upon by his own guilty conscience. Pimm then started to report a strange atmosphere around the school. He claimed he could hear noises – wailing, tapping and scratching, and turned to alcohol for comfort.

Pimm started to tell others of the noises he had heard at the school, but, of course, no-one believed him. They blamed the drink. Before long his ramblings reached the church and they decided to investigate. They were horrified by the state of the school and closed it down.

George Pimm was believed to be mad and taken to the lunatic asylum, where he stayed for the rest of his life, which wasn’t long. After four months of incarceration, he hung himself. In a suicide note he complained of the wailings and screams of the dead children that tortured him in his cell.