Brooke House

The bizarre death at Brooke House

Modern rifle bullets are a very tight fit so that as they pass down the barrel they are gripped by the rifling and emerge spinning. Musket balls, on the other hand, were a relatively loose fit - so loose that they had to be held in place by wadding, otherwise they would roll out when you tilted the musket down!

The result was that muskets could never be fired accurately. The ball would travel down the barrel, bouncing off the sides, and emerge heading to left or right, up or down. It was the purest fluke if they went straight out - yet it did sometimes happen as this story shows.