Anybody who’s stepped up to the challenge of cooking Christmas lunch for family and friends has felt that same pang of anxiety: Am I going to give everyone food poisoning?

If the year is 1879 and you’re twenty-year-old Mary Lloyd of Boakley Farm near Malmesbury, the answer is an emphatic yes: yes, you are about to create a new ghost of Christmas Present by accidentally snuffing your own stepmother with a very bad batch of horseradish indeed.

Fortunately, Mary’s other siblings had better places to be on the 25th of December 1879, reducing the potential death toll by leaving just Mary, her father Robert, and her stepmother Maria to tuck into a hearty Christmas lunch of roast beef.

Around midday, stepmother Maria made a fatal blunder by asking Mary to fetch some horseradish. Mary obliged, unwittingly digging up not only horseradish but also aconite, otherwise known as monkshood, wolfsbane, or the chuckle-worthy devil’s helmet. This didn’t shape up at all well for the Lloyd family, because monkshood is very poisonous indeed.

“I think I’ll skip the After Eight mints, thanks…”

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The Lloyds sat down to eat at 12:30pm and by 1:15pm, Maria Lloyd had decided to have a lie down because she was feeling giddy — reassuring everyone that she’d be fine in a minute. She wasn’t. Shortly afterwards the vomiting began, and then she lost consciousness. Robert Lloyd gave himself a strong dose of mustard — not to tick off another classic beef accompaniment, but to induce vomiting.

“Is there a doctor in the (farm)house?”

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A doctor was sent for — but unfortunately, he was probably having Christmas lunch as well. By the time Dr. Richard Kinneir arrived at 6:00pm, Maria Lloyd had expired. At the inquest he noted, “I examined the body. There were no marks on it, but I noticed a peculiar pallid appearance of the face and body, and there was no stiffness or rigidity of the muscles, indicating special action of monkshood or aconite, which it appears she had eaten for dinner, in mistake for horseradish. The husband and daughter-in-law [sic] had eaten of the same, and both suffered from poisonous effects, which were counteracted by my medical treatment, and it is my opinion that deceased accidentally died from eating monkshood or aconite.”

The incident at Boakley Farm made the national news, appearing in The Daily News and The Daily Telegraph.

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