Amelia Fenner

**Amelia ‘Amy’ Fenner** (1933-2018) was a British practising witch involved with a number of covens in the mid to late 20th century.

## Early Life

Amy Fenner was born in Whitechapel, London in 1933. She lost her parents at an early age: her father was an RAF pilot who was shot down and killed in the Battle of Britain, and her mother died shortly after the end of World War II. She was the youngest of three sisters. They were evacuated to Somerset during the Blitz and after losing their mother, all three girls were placed in a children’s home.

## Joining the New Forest Coven

While her sisters got married and moved away, Fenner instead chose to return to the peaceful existence of the countryside she’d enjoyed as a child evacuee. Moving to Hampshire, she began working in a stables and it was a friend she met there who introduced her to Joseph Curwen’s New Forest Coven in the late 1950s. Now in her mid-20s, Fenner was originally interested in the coven because of the promise of alcohol and recreational drugs, and she had no interest in the nudist, sex magic aspects of the gatherings. However, Curwen tricked her into drinking a cup of tea spiked with hallucinogenic mushrooms and she soon fully engaged with all the coven’s rituals.

As a young woman, Fenner was of particular interest to Curwen as he was, at the time, the living vessel for the spirit of Ipqu-Aya - a Mesopotamian sorcerer from around the 600s BCE. Keen to ensure a continuity of vessels for the Ipqu-Aya spirit, a key focus of Curwen’s at this time was to father children with a number of women.

Curwen’s original plan had involved impregnating Caroline Hughes and Eliza Tillinghast, both members of the influential Tillinghast family. However, once they were pregnant, Godfrey Tillinghast (Caroline’s husband and Eliza’s brother) made a power play to take control of the Ipqu-Aya bloodline. In 1962, with only a week between Hughes’ and the Tillinghasts’ hasty departure from the coven, and the start of raids by the police in earnest, Curwen quickly turned to Fenner to produce yet another potential vessel, this time outside the reach of the Tillinghast family.

After being impregnated, Fenner was abandoned when the police raids forced Curwen to disappear. Fenner never saw Curwen again but, more pressingly, she was pregnant out-of-wedlock in the 1960s.

## Moving to Winchester

The New Forest Coven struggled on after Curwen left but eventually disbanded as, in Fenner’s words, it had become “a rudderless ship”. She and a friend settled in with a group of Wiccans in Winchester as Fenner’s pregnancy continued.

It is unclear whether Fenner was unaware of the importance of her baby’s heritage or not, but she decided not to keep it. In 1963, she successfully gave birth to a baby girl but left it on the steps of a hospital in Winchester. The baby was given the name Destiny by the nurses at the hospital but it appears that mother and daughter never met or kept track of each other.

## Starting afresh in Suffolk

Unsurprisingly, after leaving her baby at a Winchester hospital, Fenner quickly moved on and away from her existence in Hampshire. Only a few years later, in the mid-1960s, she moved to Suffolk. Her experience in the New Forest and with Joseph Curwen had in no way dampened her interest in magic and witchcraft, and soon after arriving in the town of Rendlesham, her interests in the occult piqued the interest of teenager, Henry Akeley.

By the 1970s, Fenner, with Akeley’s help, established her own Suffolk Coven which included Akeley’s friend, Walter Brown, as well as Thomas Marston and Tania Radcliffe. Over the decade, Fenner inculcated an interest in Babalon and the *Necronomicon*. Unfortunately, Fenner’s experiences with Curwen meant she leaned heavily into the use of psychoactive drugs with her younger followers, which at least for Henry Akeley, led to a decades-long substance abuse problem.

## The Rendlesham Forest Incident

Fenner’s Suffolk coven continued for well over a decade and on Christmas Day in 1980 they attempted the Babalon Working ritual in Rendlesham Forest. This was only partially successful but got the attention of a local US Air Force base as well as local newspapers. Ultimately, Fenner’s coven was responsible for an event that became known as the Rendlesham Forest Incident and is, according to ufologist Dean Perry, “considered to be the British Roswell. It's one of the most famous, most credible and longest-lasting UFO encounters we have.”

The consequences of the ritual were far-reaching and the vague nature of the event meant they couldn’t agree on what they had seen or its significance. Fenner left the coven and Suffolk soon after this incident, and like Curwen and his New Forest coven, this abandonment by their leader led to the disbanding of the group. The friendship between Akeley and Brown soured, Radcliffe moved to Dunwich having adopted Fenner’s obsession with the *Necronomicon*, and Marston suffered a complete mental breakdown as a result of his experiences during the ritual. Whether by accident or some encouragement by Fenner, Marston relocated to Providence, Rhode Island (a location with strong connections to the Tillinghast family and the Ipqu-Aya cult) and coincidentally became a patient of psychiatrist, Dr Jonathan Willett.

A tragic pattern would later emerge amongst those members of the coven involved in the Rendlesham Forest Incident: Thomas Marston, Tania Radcliffe and Walter Brown would all commit suicide in circumstances arguably connected to the ritual. However, the person for whom the Babalon ritual had the biggest impact was Henry Akeley himself who apparently was semi-successfully possessed by Nyarlathotep, something that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

## Later Life and Death

It’s unknown what Fenner did after the events in Suffolk but by 2018 she was living in a care home in Barnet, just outside London. She was tracked down by Dr. Eleanor Peck and interviewed about her connection to the New Forest Coven by podcaster Matthew Heawood. At 85 years old, Fenner was described by one of her carers as “sprightly, considering… And she's all there and all. Sharp as a tack.”

She was happy to rely to Heawood the history of her early experiences with the occult and Joseph Curwen but it would only be later, after Fenner’s passing, that Heawood and his colleague, Kennedy Fisher, would connect her with the Rendlesham Forest Incident and Henry Akeley.

Soon after being interviewed by Heawood, Amelia Fenner died in her care home around the end of 2018 in potentially suspicious circumstances. While nothing could be proven, Heawood implied on his podcast, The Mystery Machine, that an associate of Sir Godfrey Tillinghast might have been involved in murdering Fenner and making it look like natural causes. The exact motivation for this is unclear but the timing of Amelia’s death was suspiciously close to Heawood and Fisher’s investigation that uncovered the existence of Fenner’s abandoned child, Destiny, and thus another branch of the Ipqu-Aya bloodline.

Before going to interview Fenner, Heawood was given a warning by Peck, who had also interviewed the occultist. Peck pointed out that while Amelia enjoyed telling stories about her exploits in the world of the occult, much of what she said should be taken with some scepticism as “most of these people are much better at lying than they are at magic.” While the various investigations of Heawood and Fisher actually proved the truth of a lot of what Fenner had described, Peck’s warning is perhaps still relevant. Fenner, in her later years, appeared to have been engaged in a certain amount of self-deception, neither acknowledging the victimisation she experienced at the hands of Joseph Curwen nor, one suspects, accepting her role in the irreparable damage done to the lives of a number of young followers in her Suffolk coven.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 TCoCDW: ”Episode 4”
2. ↑ TCoCDW: ”Episode 7”
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 TCoCDW: ”Episode 10”
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 TWiD: “Episode 2”
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 TWiD: “Episode 1”
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 TWiD: “Episode 4”
7. ↑ TWiD: “Episode 3”
8. ↑ TWiD: “Episode 7”
9. ↑ TWiD: “Episode 8”
10. ↑ TCoCDW: ”Episode 9”