On 29 July 1797, the London Evening Post reported on the tragic events of a suicide that had taken place four days earlier. The victim was John Atwood, a baker from Upper Bristol Road in Bath, who had attempted to hang himself in the previous month but was prevented by the rope breaking. However, on the fateful day there was to be no redemption. During the course of that day, Atwood ‘had ran after his wife with a knife, swearing he would kill her’, but she was able to pacify him and eventually left him ‘tolerably quiet’ before attending to business in town. While she was away, Atwood ‘shut the maid out of doors, and tied himself up’ to a rafter in his house. During the Coroners’ examination, the maid – Elizabeth Batchelor – provided a witness statement, noting how she ‘perceived frequent symptoms of insanity’ in Atwood for the three months prior to his death and how she believed the victim ‘was at the time of his so hanging himself … not of sound mind but lunatic and distracted’. The Coroners’ jury agreed and it was ultimately decided that Atwood's suicide was the consequence of him ‘not being of sane mind, memory or understanding’. Some newspapers, however, added a twist to this tragedy. The Oracle and Public Advertiser, for instance, declared Atwood had been reading Thomas Paine's Age of Reason on the morning he committed suicide. The victim's desperation was said to be the result of the ‘fumes of intoxication working upon a mind rendered callous by having imbibed such abominable principles’. According to this report, the ‘unhappy derangement of mind’ experienced by Atwood ‘had been occasioned by the fatal impressions made by the perusal of Paine's pernicious doctrine’.

As a trans-Atlantic figure, it seems the capacity for Paine to transfix the minds of men and lead them to perform horrid acts with dreadful endings was not confined to Britain. In Delaware, a physician named Theodore Wilson was allegedly bewitched by Paine in a similar way to Atwood. Wilson was married with two children, but he ‘was infected with the most shameful and uneasy of all diseases, an incurable lust after strange women’.