In April 1860, a girl named Bess was born in a small Gloucestershire settlement above Minchinhampton. By twenty she was working as a milliner in Willesden, shaping silk and straw and ribbon alongside her sisters. By twenty-five she had married a law clerk named Henry, and by thirty-one she had two small boys and a modest suburban home in north London. An ordinary life, by any measure.

But in January 1896, one of her sons fell dangerously ill with what the hospital records describe as ScF - almost certainly scarlet fever - and Bess nursed him through it, night after night, alone. The boy survived. Bess did not recover. Within months she had stopped eating, stopped sleeping, and started hearing voices she could not silence. By February 1897, she was sitting in front of two doctors telling them she had been transformed into Satan, that she had been twice in hell, and that there was no hope and no salvation.

She was admitted to Bethlem Royal Hospital, transferred to Holloway Sanatorium, then to St Luke's Hospital on Old Street. She never came home. She died there in January 1900, aged thirty-nine, during a wave of influenza that swept through London. No newspaper reported her death. No obituary was written.

This is her story, told through the records that survived her.