Samuel Johnson, known throughout Gawsworth as Maggoty, was a playwright, dancing-master, and court jester who died in 1773, most likely the last professional jester in England. Eccentric to the end, he composed the lengthy inscription on his own tombstone and arranged to be buried not in the village churchyard but in a small wood nearby, which now carries his name. There is a tradition that anyone who walks three times around the grave will cause the ghost to appear, and that Johnson may have chosen unconsecrated ground precisely to test the belief that those buried outside the church cannot rest.
Whether by design or not, he seems to have succeeded. A twentieth-century sexton reported meeting him one moonlit night on a white horse, and followed him through the wood toward the grave, arriving just in time to hear the gravestone thud back into place. A winter visitor, encountering a prancing figure in tight breeches, a motley coat, and a cowl hung with bells, approached the spot where the form had been and found the snow completely undisturbed. A servant of the Richards family, a trusted man described as not given to flights of imagination, saw something bounding about near the grave on a bright summer afternoon and went to investigate; when he reached the spot, it was empty, and bitterly cold in a way he could not account for. He never visited the wood alone again.
