RESORTING to witchcraft to find your spouse may seem a little desperate.

But in 1613 there was no such thing as speed dating, so for Nicholas Jackson it was apparently the only option.

The frustrated bachelor paid two male witches to conjure him up a wife, in a bizarre graveyard "ritual".

When no woman materialised he promptly launched a court battle to sue the pair - who denied they had ever met him.

The Cheshire man's plight was among the region's own "tales from the crypt" as told by leading historians, writers and archivists at an afternoon of Hallowe'en talks in Liverpool.

Among them, historian Dr Julie-Marie Strange has spent several years exploring the Victorian obsession with the macabre, which she says was fuelled by high levels of disease and death.

Her talk: Mortality and Ritual in Liverpool, the first of four at the city's Metropolitan Cathedral on Saturday, was based on her book Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain c1870-1914.

The research examines the lives of paupers buried in often overcrowded and unmarked graves at St James's cemetery behind Liverpool Cathedral, Anfield cemetery, and the former Necropolis in West Derby.

She also trawled the archives of the Liveprool parish of Guardians and the former Necropolis at Low Hill, which was closed in the early 20th century after residents complained the stench of rotting flesh was causing disease.

She followed the trail of the city's medical officer for health Dr Edward Hope, who visited slum homes to rescue typhus sufferers.

He found dying children without food or medicine, corpses kept in houses where people were living, and witnessed celebrations of the dead through wakes in people's homes.

Dr Strange said Dr Hope's diaries revealed a "great capacity for humanity and love" among the city's poorest.

She said: "The poor are usually regarded as a resilient underclass by historians, who tend to focus on the middle classes.

"But we have uncovered some stories of families showing real love and compassion as well as strength in the face of real hardship, which has been difficult to pin down in the past as their graves are so often unmarked."

She added: "We have explored the shame and stigma of the pauper burial where bodies were cast into overcrowded and anonymous graves and contrast them with the impoverished funerals of the working classes and the exuberant behaviour of the high spirited youths who used burial grounds as a play area.

"This research demonstrates that encountering death in the archives can be moving and curious but that also it certainly is never dull."

Also among the speakers were Kate Hallett, archivist at the Liverpool record office, and Paul Newman, archivist and expert in wills at the Cheshire record office.

He found the last will and testament of John Milton's wife, which included two original copies of his book Paradise Lost, among a list of the entire contents of their Nantwich home, after her death in 1727. The afternoon, entitled Death in the Archives, was organised by Dr Caroline Williams, of the centre for archive studies at the University of Liverpool.

She said: "The Celts believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth on the eve of October 31 as the autumn turned to winter.

"It is therefore apt that we can now share with the public some of the stories of the deceased, brought to life through the archives.

"Some of the tales we have uncovered reveal a great deal about the history of British beliefs, values and aspirations, as well as how society has changed and progressed."

Mr Newman talked about Nicholas Jackson and also about an unusal will left by William Saunders, who left £30 to his illegitimate daughter on condition her husband did not have any say in how she spent it, after he died in 1614.

Mr Newman said: "In the 17th century, women didn't have any rights to their own posessions, so it was his way of protecting his daughter's inheritance.

"It's about the minutiae of people's lives, because wills contain inventories of every posession in a home, it is a really useful tool for social history.

"There are 130,000 wills in Cheshire dating back to 1540 so we have been able to build up a real picture of what people's lives were like."