This is episode five of the first series. I've tried to make the transcript as accurate as I can. According to Wikipedia it was first broadcast in May 1996. This is such a great episode. Fred looks like he's a bit of a wag. But John and Pat are so straightforward and down to earth, it's hard to disbelieve their testimony.
John, Workshop Owner: Well at first we tried to hide it, we
would never tell anybody outside because it would frighten customers away. Whether
it affected the business, I don’t think so. I don’t think it had any much effect
on the business at all. It affected me. I saw things that I never ever expected
to see in my life happening, and I am pretty sceptic about it all.
Pat, John’s wife: There’s got to be something, somewhere
there’s got to be an explanation, because what I’ve witnessed it’s been
fantastic. I know there are horrible things do happen, but with us it was
amazing. It was happy. It brought a lot of happiness into the shop.
Fred, Mechanic: I believe in god. And if there’s a god there’s
a ghost.
Narrator: David Fontana is professor of psychology at
Cardiff University. He’s also a very prominent figure in paranormal research in
this country. Indeed he is the current President for the Society of Psychical
Research. He has become personally involved in one of the most remarkable series
of paranormal activities ever to have occurred in this country.
David Fontana, Professor of Psychology: I was privileged in
this sense in fact to see so many things over such a long period of time and
even brought a colleague of mine along so we had two people watching what was
happening. She also was able to see a number of these phenomena. And we were
quite certain there was no trickery involved, there was no question of this.
Narrator: These events have taken place in Cardiff over the
last five or six years. They may involve a spirit a presence a persona - it’s
difficult to know what word to use - which seems to have a child-like playful
personality. Formally he’s called the Cardiff poltergeist, that is to say, a
disembodied spirit. But tfo those who’ve come in contact with him, he’s known
affectionately as Pete. And they do seem to feel a genuine affection for Pete.
He is if you like the ET of the spirit world: playful, mischievous, whimsical,
friendly.
John, Workshop Owner: One day I think it was Ian was
standing at the bench, and something hit him on the chest if I remember right
and it dropped on the floor. He picked it up and just threw it back into one of
the corners of the room. And immediately, a missile of some sort, I think it
was the same thing, came straight back at him, and hit the wall behind his
head. So he looked at me and I looked at him, and he picked up another missile
and he just threw it back again. And instantly back it came again. And this
became a regular - he played with it then for ten minutes, fifteen minutes. But
this became a regular item and many people threw stones into that corner, or
nuts and bolts, and nine times out of ten they had something back.
Pat: Well John said to me, he said, “You let me know if you
see anything odd or you know, strange.” So I said “Right.” Well the next thing,
as he said that, I heard “ping… ping.” and John looked at me and said “That’s
the start of it.” Well I said “What is it?” and he said, “Believe it or not, it’s
stones.” And I said, “Well where is it coming from?” and he said, “Well come
into the workshop and I’ll show you.” And we went to the workshop and he
pointed out a certain part of the workshop and it was up in the corner and he
said “Pick up a stone and throw it.” Well I picked up the stone, and as I threw
it, one came hurling straight back at me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
I said “I say”. He said, “Look on the wall.” So I looked on the wall and John
had all these on a rack, all these different size spanners. He said “Look at
the spanners.” One spanner was swinging back and forth, then another was
swinging back and forth, and before I realised, the whole lot was swinging back
and forth. So I just started laughing and I said, “John,” I said, “We’ve got
something strange in this place.” He said “I know,” he said, “That’s what I’ve
been telling you.” But he said, “For a long time it happened in the other
building but I thought it was the boys fooling around.”
John: There was an office upstairs above us, and one day a
paper clip landed on the bench. So Richard picked it up and he said “That’s a
bit mean, Pete, have you got any more?” With that, a whole box of paperclips
landed on the fire, BANG. Never bounced, just ‘Bang.’ So we just look at one
another, and Richard says “What about some paper to go with it?” And down
behind us floats a sheet of paper. When we look at it, it’s a stationery order.
So I went and saw the chap upstairs, and I said “Is this yours?” And he says, “It’s
my stationery order, I made it out this morning.” And I said “Are these your
box of clips?” “Well,” he said, “They’re the same ones we use.” So where they
came from or how they got from his office to my workshop I don’t know.
Narrator: There are countless stories of Pete playing games
like that with anything lying around. He is obsessed with stones.
John: Every day, and this went on for five years, almost
every day, one period of time you could ask for money. Just give us money,
Pete! And pennies, two pence pieces, five pence pieces, and pound coins on
occasions used to come. Never fifty pence, I don’t know why. Mainly pennies and
two pennies. And in one hour we, I, collected sixty eight pence in an hour,
just saying “Send me some more money, send me some more money.” And it would
appear from nowhere, just dropping around you in different parts of the
workshop.
Fred: Now we’d been here two years, and on average we’re getting
about five pound a month, pound coins, that’s an average mind, sometimes it
could be more sometimes it could be less. Now the last time that we ever had
any was yesterday. I remember once I was drinking a cup of tea after washing
the dishes I’m looking out the window and there’s a pound coin in the cup,
plop! And the noise on the cup, my wife said “What’s that?!” And I said, “We’re
rich again!”
Allan, Salesman: Once Fred started getting this money, you
know money was being planted on his windscreen, and he was finding money. We
all felt, why should Fred be the only one that gets the money, we only get pennies
and Fred gets fivers, sort of thing. So we found that whatever journey we took,
I mean there was a bookmakers just round the corner and from time to time
people would pop round there and perhaps have a bet, and there was a television
in the canteen where they could watch the race, like. And we would walk round
to the bookies and perhaps catch up with Fred and talk to him on the way back,
and we’d all be looking on the floor as we went, not finding anything at all,
and suddenly on the way back Fred would say “Oh look at that!” and there’d be a
fiver laying up against the wall. We all said “Why is it Fred?” We’d just
looked there and there was nothing there, and Fred looks there, and there it
is.
Narrator: Pete it seems even liked to play with children’s
toys. Sometimes with destructive results.
John: We were talking to one of our customers and the next
day she brought in a Rubik Cube and some other toys. One of the items actually
was an Action Man. And the next day we put them on the… she said “Let him play
with these.” So we put them on the shelf for him to play with. And the next day
we came in, and the Action Man, the head was ripped off and it was all in
pieces on the floor.
Pat: The Rubik Cube, it used to love the Rubik Cube. You
never actually saw it happen, but we put it up in the corner and one of the
reps would be there, and we’d say “Right now, we’ll have a go at the Rubik
Cube,” see if we could do it ourselves, first. Not one of us could do it. Then
we had like a code, B for Blue and so forth like, and we’d be in the coffee
room having a cup of coffee, and we’d mess it all up, and within seconds,
somebody would look, and it’d be all done. Amazing, absolutely amazing.
Allan: We then decided to write down the sequence of the
nine facing squares, B for Blue, O for Orange, R for Red, G for Green, that
sort of thing. And write down the sequence. And because it was a sort of pile
of lawnmowers stretched out across, anyone would physically have to climb over
to get to this Rubik Cube, it would take someone quite some time to do it. But
every time we changed this sequence it would always finish up with blue,
orange, yellow across the top, which we interpreted as B, O, Y: boy.
Narrator: But what is quite remarkable, is the kind of
expression which people use who’ve had encounters with Pete. There’s profound
affection, even love. It’s almost as if he’s become a household pet.
Pat: I used to write to it, and I asked it… we named it
Pete, why I don’t know, Pete came into our heads. So I used to write to it
every day, on a bit of paper, ask its name. Is it John, is it Allan and so forth.
And I would leave it till the following morning. When I’d come in, there’d be ‘NO’
written right across the page. I even asked it to do my football coupon one
week! And there were all these big crosses all the way down, you couldn’t send
it. It was like a child, you know.
Fred: I remember once I was doing the washing up. I do the
washing up in my house believe it or not! My wife does the polishing and the
ironing, and I do the washing up. And I’m washing the dishes and I’m looking
out through the front window, which looks down the street. I’ve come to the
last plate, as you might say, washed that. My hands are soaking wet. And
splash! There’s an orange come from nowhere, straight into the bowl of water, I’m
covered from head to foot in soapsuds. Now we cannot have an orange in our
house. Pete, as we call him, does not like oranges. You can have tangerines,
apples, pears, bananas, anything. But an orange, no.
Narrator: A disembodied spirit, a poltergeist that people
love, is pretty weird. But what has to be weirdest of all is that this
disembodied spirit appears to have intelligence. It can learn, and adapt to
changes in its environment.
David Fontana: Another feature of this case was the
poltergeist (for want of a better term) appeared to have been intelligent and
to respond to requests for various different objects. In fact John says it
seems to have been able to find things like spanners and screwdrivers quicker
than he could in workshop. He’d ask for them and they’d clatter onto the
workbench beside him.
John: One particular day I thought we’d see how intelligent
it is. And I picked up a stone and threw it into the corner, and I did get one
straight back. Then I tried another stone, and I pretended to throw the stone,
and I didn’t throw it. And it came back! But the next time I did it again,
pretended to throw it, and it never threw. So it learnt from that slight little
test, that it did learn from what was going on.
Fred: Over the years that we were there, playing, I should
say playing because we used to play with it. We used to say “Pete, throw a
pound coin,” whatever, and we found that it was very intelligent. If you wanted
a plug, we would say a plug, an electric plug that you plug an iron in with or
something. But he would throw you a spark plug. In other words he would
associate ‘plug’ as being a spark plug. And he was amazing, he’d throw you anything
you asked for really. “You must make a note of this,” and he’d throw you a pen.
Silly things, like “Stop messing about, Pete, we’ve got to get this together,”
and he’d throw you a staple. You know, this sort of thing he would associate with
what we were speaking.
Pat: It was so good, I said “My Pete, you’re so clever.
There’s one thing you can’t do or get for me,” I said, “and that’s a Rolls
Royce.” And as I said that, at my feet, and John was my witness, a Rolls Royce
keyring landed at my feet, with ‘R R’ on it. You know, amazing.
Narrator: Pete, the playful poltergeist, first made his
presence felt, in all places, a lawnmower repair shop, in a shed in Cardiff. At
one stage Pete became totally addicted with these little lawnmower carburettor plates.
He just couldn’t resist playing all kinds of tricks with them.
John: Well he went through a period of floats. Floats like
this used to appear, and disappear. You’d put them down on a surface and in ten
minutes it’d be gone, and you’d usually find them stuck up in the ceiling, or
they’d come back. And then so we started playing with them, and putting them in
certain positions. One particular day as we were locking up we put one in a
position where we could all see it, to see if it would be gone the next morning
when we came in. And we locked the door, got in the car, the four of us, and
went up the road. We stopped at a shop for one of the chaps to get some
cigarettes, Fred, he went in the shop, and as he came out, he was as white as a
sheet. And I said “What’s wrong” and he said “Look,” and he opened his hand,
and there was change in there, money, and a float, like that. And he said “It’s
got to be the one from the shop.” And I said “No I don’t think so.” And he
said, “Let’s go back and check.” So we went back to check and we opened the
shop, and we pushed the door, and there’s nothing where the float was when we
left it, only a matter of ten minutes earlier.
Pat: And this one morning I noticed it first actually, we
went in, and I happened to look at the ceiling, and I thought “What’s that
stuck in the ceiling?” And there is no way, because we had people trying to do
it, there was no way you could push that into the ceiling tiles. Anyway we took
it down, and there was a five pound note, all screwed up, stuck on the end and
then stuck in the ceiling. And we had this for a week and we’d have a bit of
fun with it, we’d say, who’s turn next?
Fred: Well my wife and I locked up the shop bout five o’clock
one evening, a beautiful summer’s evening, and we drove home, and we got so
far, and I said “We must get some grub, because we’re hungry.” So we called
into Safeways on the Cowbridge Road in Cardiff. And I was a bit black with dirt
from repairing lawnmowers, and I’m sat in the car and I’m tapping the wheel,
and the car’s to the music. With that,
there’s a chap next to me, and he’s doing the same, because he must have the
same music on. And my window’s open, on my side, and my wife’s gone into
Safeways to buy some food. And I look up into the sky and there’s this black
mass. Something like a black piece of rag coming towards me. It came through my
window, hit the passenger window, my window was open. And five different
floats, all on the floor of the car.
Pat: I’d made a sponge. The same thing happened to my sister
in law one Sunday. John was talking about lawnmowers and so forth, and I couldn’t
believe it. And on the table - I’d made a sponge, it was on the cake stand and
everything, and when I turned around there was a carburettor float stuck in the
middle of it. And the same thing had happened to my sister in law, so she had
the same experience.
John: And floats became the order of the day for this thing
to play with. It just played around until it got tired of them, and in the end
it went onto something else, usually keys. Something different, it changed its
whole thing, it said “I’m fed up of that, let’s go onto something else.”
Narrator: Nowadays it appears Pete has moved in with John’s
brother in law, Fred, who also used to work in the lawnmower repair shop. Fred
is now retired. He’s the only person who claims actually to have seen Pete.
Fred: He was a little boy, dressed in 1940s clothes. And no
figure, or face, you could see the outline, and he had a sort of cub cap on his
head. And you could see the outline, of his hands, his face, and yet you couldn’t
put a face to him. But he was sat on sort of a fixture where we kept spare
parts for lawnmowers. Now he looked out of proportion to me. His body compared
to his size, his head should have been in the ceiling. It’s hard to explain but
he looked really out of proportion. Now this happened several times, I should
say four, five times I’ve seen Pete the poltergeist. Now I remember once, now
John was doing a lawnmower, doing the engine of the lawnmower, and there was a
nut he could not get undone. So he said “Come on over here, Fred, give us a
hand.” So I held the lawnmower while he was getting the old spanner on it and
really trying to get this nut undone. And I said “Don’t look up now John, but
Pete is behind you on the shelf.” With that, John went slowly back to look, and
it must have been half a house brick, just come down and it just smashed on the
lawnmower. It frightened us. In fact we went out for a smoke afterwards, it was
that frightening. Another time I was locking up the shop, and Pete was in our
little canteen where we used to have cups of tea, and he was waving to me, just
one hand up. No hand, but you could tell he was waving because the sleeve was
moving. And I was walking slowly because I was on my own and I was frightened.
And I said, “Come on now Pete, I’ve got to go home.” And he’s just vanished.
Vanished completely.
Narrator: As we have seen, this story totally defies
rational explanation. It leaves us with some stark choices. Either we
disbelieve the range of witnesses, or we have some immensely complex questions
to answer. Science doesn’t have a great deal to say to help us.
John Fontana: Science is very powerful, very accurate, very
precise, within its own areas of definition. But there are mysteries in the
world still, there are things we don’t understand, and the good scientist keeps
an open mind about these, explores them and then tries to draw some kind of
conclusions from them.
Archie Roy, Professor of Astronomy: Science, has been found
wanting, although I have to say that in a sense most scientists have not even
considered whether paranormal phenomena exist or not. They have simply assumed
it doesn’t. And their opinions in fact are worthless. They have not studied the
subject. But even when those scientists who have done so, who have spent
decades studying it, like Professor William James, or Professor Sir Oliver Lodge
- their understanding has been very very limited. And it could be, you see,
that if our 21st Century civilisation survives, and if there are
still scientists around, it may be that they will have to realise that the
understanding of human personality in its non-physical, material aspects, is
totally beyond our understanding. Beyond the methods of science as it operates
now. That doesn’t mean that there will not be an answer. But it will be
something that we cannot envisage now. But then at the beginning of the 20th
Century, everything in physics, in a sense, had to be rethought, because of
Einstein and Bequerel and radioactivity and relativity and quantum mechanics.
Narrator: So science is struggling to grapple with issues
and phenomena which it really is not yet equipped to tackle. It isn’t that
science can reject them or prove them to be irrational. A childlike
intelligence like Pete the poltergeist is simply beyond the bounds of
scientific competence. But there is no denying the response of people who claim
to have interacted with it. They claim to have been interacting with an
essentially human spirit.
John: I realised that I was seeing something that was…
something that other people would never be able to see. And for a while, I felt
very privileged. And then later on, I became very blasé about it. And I think
by the time it went, I was glad to see it go. And I don’t think I’d like to see
him back.
Pat: I’m one of these people, I never ever believed in
anything, ever. I’ve got to actually see things to believe it. But after what I’ve
witnessed, I don’t know, I feel honoured.
Fred: I find that when you talk about it, things happen. You
could go away after making this programme, and I can be inundated with pound
coins, even a fiver, a tenner. Whatever Pete decides to give me, he will give
me. Which is uncanny. But I’m not sorry, I’m privileged.