Can We Explain The Poltergeist?

A transcript of the short documentary programme here on YouTube. Dr A R George Owen, author of the book of the same name, presents some witnesses of poltergeists, including the doctor involved in the Sauchie case (which is described more fully in his book). Dr Owen also later led the 'Philip Experiment'.

It's so refreshing to watch something that isn't a hammed-up 'paranormal extravaganza' - but this is 1965 and not 2020. People just recount their stories while sitting in their living rooms. There are no silly reconstructions and no screaming. ARG Owen stays overnight in one of the houses and literally nothing happens. 

Presenter: Do you believe in ghosts? No? Well perhaps not. But then a week ago, neither did the Howells family, who live in this house in Rhondda [jump in film]... Martia, 20, her 25 year old husband David, and their two young children, are convinced that the house has been invaded by a poltergeist. Mrs Howells describes what’s happened, on Monday afternoon.

Mrs Howells: Well it was about five o’clock in the evening and I’d just poured my little girl a cup of tea in my mother’s room. I went up back to the kitchen, as I came up this bottle came flying towards  me. And of course I shut the door to protect myself. I opened it again and I seen this other bottle. So I just picked up the children and ran out the house. As I ran out my husband was coming down the street here, and he ran straight in the house, and by the time he got in the there all of the place was turned upside down.

Dr George Owens (Trinity College Cambridge): A strange word, ‘poltergeist’ – it comes from old German folklore. It means a noisy spirit. In fact it’s just one of the many European words for ‘things that go bump in the night’. Our ancestors thought of the poltergeist as something just akin to the spirits of nature that haunt meadow and field and make noises in the mines. In fact their idea of the poltergeist was very like that of the modern child’s conception of an elf or goblin. 

In one very famous case 300 years ago – in the house of John Mompesson, the squire of Tidworth, on Salisbury Plain, people heard the beating of a drum. “For an hour together it would beat Roundheads and Cuckolds, and several other points of war, as well as any drummer. After this they would hear a scratching under the children’s beds, as if by something that had iron talons.”

Voiceover: It would turn with mighty violence and applied itself wholly to my youngest children, whose bedsteads it would beat, when there has been many of strangers as well as ourselves present in the room, that we did expect that at every blow expect they would have fallen into pieces. Then it will run under the bedsteads and scratch, as if it had iron talons. And then heave up the children and the bed, and follow them from room to room, and come to none else but them.

ARGO: In 1695 on this site where the Divinity School now stands, there was a house where a poltergeist was raging. ‘There came by Mr Isaac Newton, a very learned man, fellow of Trinity College, and seeing several scholars about the door – “Oh ye fools” says he, “Will you never have any witch? Know ye not that all such things are mere cheats and impostures? Fie Fie, go home for shame!” And he would not go in.’ 

            Superstition had to give way to scepticism. Scepticism seems natural in these scientific times, symbolised so well by the sweeping curves of the great dome of New Hall, calculated I sincerely trust according to Newtonian mechanics to withstand the pull of gravity. But do the scientists really know all the forces that there are in nature? When I was young they admitted of only two: magnetism and gravity. Now they tell us there are two more: the atomic forces of the strong and the weak interaction. All this must I think make the layman ask – is this the lot, or are there not other powers at work in the universe? 

But the scientists are right in requiring us only to believe in things for which there is real evidence. Evidence on poltergeists has not been easy to collect. For the reason that poltergeist outbreaks actually occur far more rarely than even the uncommon crime of murder. But statistics do disclose two odd and curious facts. It seems that in every afflicted household the strange happenings tend to be mysteriously connected with just one member of the family. This person is usually a young person, someone in the age group 11 years up to 21 years old. And here perhaps we ought to pause for thought. Perhaps it really is all trickery. Perhaps it really is the type of mischief that a young lad - like that - might be wanting to get up to. However, what of this housewife, 22 year old Martia Howells of Swansea. She seems to me to be a most sincere and truthful witness.

Mrs Howells: It was about three days after we moved into Rhondda Street, my husband and I went to bed, and we woke up feeling as if somebody was choking us. My husband he opened the windows and went downstairs to see if any gas had been left on, but nothing like that had happened. So we went to bed, we thought no more of that. Then my husband always locks the doors before going to bed, and one night I had to go downstairs and the door was open. So I locked it, went back to bed and told him he didn’t lock the door, but he said he had. Then when we went downstairs in the morning the door was open again. These things happen over a period of months. Then one afternoon I was having tea with my mother in her room, and it was on the Monday, and she said that she had to go across the shop, so I said alright I said I’m going back to my room now to do a bit of work. So as I went out the children come down the passage behind me, and I opened the door of my room, and I seen a bottle rise off the mantelpiece. I thought I was seeing things. I seen the bottle coming towards me so I shut the door to protect myself, and the bottle smashed against the back of the door. So I opened the door again, and I seen another bottle rising off the mantelpiece. So I just shut the door and picked up my children, and went and waited on the doorstep for my mother to come home. So she came back and I told her what had happened. So she said to me, ‘Don’t be so daft,’ she said. So we went back into the room and by that time all my furniture was upside down. So I waited on the doorstep again until my husband came home from work, and well we didn’t say nothing about it to anybody, we just cleaned up the mess. 

So then Tuesday, nothing happened strange at all. It was on the Wednesday when my little girl was in nursery school. It was about five to three, my mother was out in my room so I said to her that I’d better go out and find one and catch the bus. So she said alright I’ll get the knitting from my room and come back in here with the baby. Alright, I said. So I went to get the bus for school, and when I come back my mother was on the doorstep so I asked her what was the matter and she said the same things had happened again. That all my furniture was upside down. So we both went in to have a look, so I could see that my room was in the same kind of a mess, so we went out the back kitchen to see if anything had been touched out there. Well that was alright, nothing had been touched. So we went back, we went upstairs then to see if anything had been touched upstairs. And upstairs was alright. So I said come on wait on the doorstep for my husband to come home again. So we waited, we didn’t hear no sound of anything at all. 

So when he came home I said that my room was in the same kind of mess. And then we went on to the kitchen, and my gas stove was all turned up, well we didn’t hear any sound of anything. Then we went upstairs to go to see if the bedrooms were alright, and we couldn’t open the bedroom door. So my husband said that he thinks that we better call the police. So I told him, I was crying and I said, we better not call the police because we couldn’t tell them our furniture was flying about by itself! Well anyway he called the police and the police had to force the bedroom door to get in. And my big double bed was on top of the baby’s cot behind the door. And well he always used to go to bed in the afternoon and I don’t know why I didn’t put him then. And if he’d have been in it he would have been killed.

ARGO: I don’t think there was any trickery there. But we can do better than this. At Sauchie in Scotland, a few years back, a little girl of 11 years old, Virginia Campbell, was the centre of intense poltergeist activity observed by many reliable witnesses, including the family physician, Dr William Logan. He was called into the case because at school her teacher had seen a desk rise and float about 2 inches above the ground. Dr Logan recalls some of his experiences of five years ago.

Dr Logan: My first involvement with the Virginia Campbell poltergeist was in the evening of Saturday 26^th of November 1961. I was called to the house because of the incidents and happenings that had been taking there during that night, and as it turned out, on previous nights. When I arrived at the house the householders were in a state of excitement and tension, and informed me that there had been knockings and noises and pieces of furniture being moved, and that something odd was going on. So I went up to see the child, who was lying in bed looking fairly relaxed despite all this commotion that had been going on, and I asked her to try and forget as much as possible that I was in the room beside her. After I had been in the room for about, oh, ten or fifteen minutes, I noticed that one of the pillows beside Virginia was beginning to move in a rather unusual fashion. If you can imagine Virginia lying with her head on this pillow here, and another pillow beside her, and this pillow started to turn in a rotatory fashion, thus. In addition I noticed round about the same time or shortly afterwards, that there was an impression or indentation beginning to occur as if something was either pulling from inside or pushing, but there was no obvious physical force bringing this movement about. 

I checked thoroughly that Virginia herself was in no position to bring about these odd movements, both by observation and by checking her position of her hands and feet. Furthermore there was no other person close enough to Virginia or the pillow to bring this about. I waited for a little while, and only one other phenomenon occurred and this was a puckering of the bedclothes. Now again, if you can try and imagine this piece of cloth as part of the coverlet on Virginia’s bed, the bedclothes appeared to be pulled up and pulled towards Virginia, as if some force was trying to pull this coverlet. One of the noises was a very characteristic sawing sound (he draws his fingernail over the material several times). The other noise that was present was a knocking, tapping noise similar to this (he flicks the arm of the chair repeatedly, fast). After a short while we decided to go home thinking that perhaps Virginia would settle down and go to sleep once we had left. Just as we were going out the door a very unusual thing happened. Or it seemed unusual at the time. That was that the noises, the knockings, seemed to take on a character, in that they became extremely hurried and agitated, as if something was trying to get us to stay in the room or attract the attention to the child in the bed. The noises became as I said agitated, something like this (he flicks faster). And that is the end of my own personal contact with these phenomena, but I have been given permission to read extracts from a diary that I suggested a close relative of the child should keep, shortly after the events started.

She noted down very carefully in her own words – by the way, this, erm, diary has never been published or read in any form before to the public, erm, and she was very kind in allowing me to read some extracts from it tonight.

I would like to read the first the description of the first night on which the phenomena started. It’s dated Tuesday 22^nd of November 1960. At about 10.30 pm Margaret and Virginia were lying in bed. There was a noise like a ball bouncing on the floor. I looked under the beds in the room but couldn’t see anything. No sooner had I left the room when it started again. Margaret and Virgina went downstairs thinking that perhaps a mouse was under the bed, for a brush. The thing seemed to follow them down the stairs. 

Her friend had just been visiting the house, and after he left, I quote: ‘An apple jumped out of the dish. Virginia ate it. I went away to the phone. Virginia was in the house with dad. He said while I was away an apple came out of the dish three times. The pot came off the cabinet and hit Virginia on the nose. It settled on the chair just before I came back.’

Again we read: ‘A piece of chocolate jumped off the sideboard. Also a pencil. A brillo pad came out of the kitchen into the living room. The light went on twice. Virginia was using the cleaner. It went off and the rubber flew off the handle. There was a knocking under the table. Virginia gave three knocks. Then there were three knocks back.’

Later she says: ‘Nothing happened this day. There was knocking on the table at dinner time. Someone was punching the girls in bed.’

And on another occasion: ‘The top of the hot water bag was open, and there was scraping… The girls were getting pinched sore… Virginia’s leg was getting tickled. There has been writing on the girls faces for the past three nights… Virginia’s lips went bright red three times, and there was a noise like a ball bouncing.’ 

Incidentally this ‘bright red’ description, really, as far as I can make out, what she really intended to express, was that Virginia’s lips appeared to glow bright red, and this she saw herself.

‘The bed cover turned red. It was a green cover. There was a noise like somebody walking across the floor… There was knocking on the bed, also on the mattress.’

And on occasions she writes ‘All went well during the past two weeks’. And she goes on again, ‘there was a lot of knocking on the bed this morning. Virginia was getting nipped.’

Until we get to the last statement in the book, in which she simply states , it’s dated Sunday 23^rd of April 1961: ‘There was a knocking on the cupboard door.’

ARGO: The Sauchie poltergeist case is to my mind a wonderfully diagnostic one. A living person, Virginia Campbell, was for some weeks at no wish of her own, the centre of a mysterious force. This force was fitful and capricious; sometimes it moved solid objects. At other times it produced strange sounds. Here is a tape recording made by Dr Logan. (A shriek. Four fast knocks. Five knocks. Three knocks.)

But, unlike the good people of Tidworth, I do not think that it was a demon or a goblin or yet a disembodied spirit. I think it was a force. A force admittedly unknown to orthodox science, but yet a force proceeding in some way from Virginia herself. Until recently, in fact until two weeks ago, I thought of the Sauchie poltergeist case as the very pattern and type of all poltergeist cases. Now I have to tell you that I am beginning to think that there may be yet another kind of case of this sort: in some ways different, and in some ways akin to the old notion of the haunted house. And so I am going to ask you to come with me (in spirit of course!) to North Fleet in Kent. 

This is 16 Waterdales, Northfleet Kent. Built about 30 years ago, it seems a perfectly normal house, and not the kind we would expect to be haunted. But four years ago a young couple, Mr and Mrs Maxstead, moved in. Quite often when Mr and Mrs Maxtead were sitting downstairs in their sitting room, which is beneath where I am now, they would hear the sound of footsteps crossing the floor here in this room. Although in fact it was at the time absolutely empty. Another thing which puzzled them a great deal was that a strange smell permeated the house. An unpleasant chemical kind of smell, it came and went mysteriously. But the Maxteads stuck it out despite all their troubles and bewilderment until finally Mrs Maxwell [sic] saw a strange apparition. She awoke in the middle of the night - in fact just about the time it is now! She saw coming towards her what seemed to be the figure of a little girl about six years old. But as the vision advanced, it grew strangely taller and taller until it turned into a figure seen in profile and rather indistinct, but bending over her in an uncanny kind of way. After this, not unnaturally, the Maxsteads thought that enough was perhaps enough, and they moved out. But the house, though empty, was not at peace, as Mrs Margaret Harrison, who lives next door, can tell us.

Margaret Harrison: The noise started off in the hall first, then it came like a – well you can’t very well describe it, it was like a child’s ball falling down the stairs. And it was, it was, a sound it was going (she smacks her hands four times) like that all the way down the stairs, you know. And then it sort of shot, the sound shot up into the bedroom to where I was, and it was like a scratching noise, you know, under the bed. And it sort of, as if it was bonking up the bed. But it wasn’t just in one part of the bed, you know it was all over underneath. And it was sort of scratching all the time, you know, but it wasn’t a sort of a clawing noise, it was like this all the time (she scrabbles about continually with her fingers on the arm of the chair), you know, under the bed. 

ARGO: Although Mrs Harrison lives next door, her bedroom is in actual fact above the stairway of number 16. After the Maxteads, Mr and Mrs Essex moved into the house. They too were persecuted. They also heard footsteps in the bedroom when no one was there. But also noise of furniture moving. They too had a strange smell seeping through the house, but this time it was that of something old and musty rather than something chemical. Then one night Mr Essex was awakened by a strange whistling noise in his ears. He discovered his bed was being shaken. Indeed, it was being lifted up. Beside the bed the weirdest of phantoms was forming itself. It glowed with a pinkish orange light. It was transparent at the edges, but queerest and most peculiar of all, it was in the form of a woman without a head. 

Well, I’ve spent now some six hours or so in the house at night. Nothing has so far happened. But I propose to stay on here until dawn – hoping, waiting for something to turn up. 

ARGO: Well, the dawn did come, and nothing happened to me. I was not unduly disappointed because these things are notorious wayward and fitful. However Northfleet did leave me with an unanswered question. Is it possible that sometimes a place and the people in it can conspire together to generate a poltergeist energy? One big question hangs over the whole subject – why is it that some people and not others can be a centre for the poltergeist force? We know a little about this – we know that they tend to be young, are more likely to be girls than boys. We know that they are basically healthy, indeed rather intelligent but possibly a trifle highly strung. Stress, it seems and emotional tension, can act as triggers helping to set off the manifestation. But clearly this cannot possibly be all, or otherwise poltergeists would afflict every home in the land. One thing is certain: these stories have happy endings. The effects are short-lived. Virginia Campbell today is a normal, happy and charming teenager. 

What is the origin of the poltergeist force? I wish I knew. I regret I cannot tell you. All I know is that it exists. Why has it stayed unrecognised for so long? Perhaps it’s because of the great variability of poltergeist cases. A milk bottle flew up, said Mrs Howells. An apple rose out of the dish, said Dr Logan. There were noises galore at Sauchie, and yet everything happened in complete silence at Swansea. Yet, where sounds did happen, it’s very striking how similar they were – the scratchings and the bouncings: long ago at Tidworth, and in our own time at Northfleet and in Scotland. I think myself, that although its physics and its mode of application is mysterious and obscure, the poltergeist force itself has its origin in living human beings, and not in ghosts or hauntings. However, the Northfleet case remains very puzzling to me, and something of an exception to my theoretical scheme. There the poltergeist activity, the physical phenomena, were all it seems attached to the house and not to the particular people in it. Just what influence it is and what awoke it to activity at 16 Waterdales, and why it has brooded over the house these four years past, is something that is going to remain for the time being, unknown.

Ghost Hunters: The Case of the Gorton Poltergeist

I enjoyed this episode actually. It's largely people looking pissed off and slightly frightened about the freaky things allegedly going on in their houses. It's rather fun to see Maurice Grosse at the end too. I think when I saw it years ago I was more cynical and suspected it was all to do with wanting a different house. But I didn't feel like that this time. Even if I suspect there's a bit of exaggeration going on.

I didn't even feel that annoyed about the medium (at least she screwed her face up at the mention of the local ghost club, as though she suspected they weren't helping much) and we didn't have to see her in action. She just showed the traces of domestic violence in one of the houses, which was an interesting sight. Do poltergeists cause violence or does violence cause poltergeists? -it's a bit of a chicken and egg. Having said that there didn't seem to be any young people or tensions in the Cardiff garage case, which is also featured one of the Ghosthunters episodes. When I can summon the money I will be getting Tony Cornell's book on the subject.

This is a nice episode to end on. Because yes, I have been obsessive enough to have now completed the entire run of programmes (sad, but true). I do wish there were more series a bit like this. The sensationalist spin on modern programmes is just tedious. I want straightforward anecdotes from people experiencing weird things!

Alan, Housing Officer: There was no refuting it. There were two people that had told me hand on heart they had ghosts– a difficult thing to do.  Approaching people in official positions to say something they could be ridiculed for.

Tony: And all of a sudden, like, I think I said something to her (now I can’t remember exactly what I said) – but all of a sudden I got this big bang – in my ribs, in my back, sort of thing. And it just threw me  - well, a good 12 foot.

Mandy: I actually saw Tony being lifted up from the landing and actually land into the baby’s bedroom. Flat on his face. And I was just screaming.

John: The house takes on a whole new meaning  at night time. In the daytime it’s like a different house. At night time, once it starts to go dark, the atmosphere seems to change altogether.

Vinny: We were sat in the living room one night and we heard a muffled scream, well, more like a cry. When Mandy and myself have gone upstairs we found Chloe, the baby – she was in the cot with a blanket tied round her head.

Pam: The baby was actually waking up at half eleven every night, crying out ‘babba babba’, so she was only just starting to talk then. So I thought I’ve actually had enough of this. So I moved her into the bedroom with me. And at certain times in the night she’d actually wake up, hold her arms out – nothing there – say ‘Ah, babba’ as if something was there. And then one minute I woke up one night, and she’d actually been put behind the headboard.

Narrator: Not far from the centre of Manchester, in the north west of England, there is a typical 70s housing development. Several hundred houses lying very close together, front doors facing one another across narrow streets. People live in one another’s pockets on streets like this, inevitably sharing the details of one another’s lives. It is a most unlikely setting for the paranormal. And yet, several people here are deeply frightened – not, as you might expect, from hooliganism or vandalism, that is not the problem. The fear is of the unexplained and the unpredictable: the paranormal activity that has broken through the everyday pattern of their lives to make them fearful of things outside their normal experience.

Vinny: Chloe’s very frightened, she’s a different child altogether since this has all been going on. She more or less refuses to go upstairs, especially of a night time. In the day time she’s not too bad but of a night time she will not go upstairs. She just stands at the bottom of the stairs screaming.

Mandy: It’s not really helping me what with being pregnant again, the stress of it. It’s getting too much now. I mean I’ve already nearly lost this baby what with everything that’s been going on.

Pam: Tony stayed over, because he wasn’t with me all the time, and he found that at the end of the night, about two o’clock in the morning, he went to actually turn off the television. So he went down on his knees and turned the telly off, then turned the lamp off, and then actually went behind the television and turned it off and plugged it out, and he was in pitch, pitch black then. So he got up and everything came on full blast. The telly came on, the light came on, full blast. So he ran straight up the stairs, got me and said ‘Pam we’ve definitely got a ghost!’

Tony: I was just sat there watching telly. The dog was there mucking about, and then all of a sudden, like, he had a bone in his mouth and it was like someone was pulling on the other end of it, because he was pulling back. Nothing was there.

Narrator: Just round the corner from Pam and Tony, no more than a hundred yards or so away, there are two other families who’ve had their lives disrupted over the past few months by a series of totally unexplained events. There was nothing jokey or light hearted about this, there is no doubt about their fear. When they’re asked to characterise it they talk of a sense of deep foreboding, perhaps associated with a sighting that’s claimed to be of an older man, and several young children seeking help.

Vinny: This house and the house next door was a farmhouse. Now in my hallway, that used to be a ginnell between the farmhouse from room to room. Apparently a  man lived there, and he had so many children captive there, so many years ago, and he, he was a nasty man, he’d done dirty deeds with these children.

Mandy: I saw something out the corner of my eye, and I looked down the hallway and there was just this young girl stood there, she was about seven or eight. She was there for a matter of minutes and then just disappeared as quickly as she’d appeared. I’ve seen a man run through the house, that was not so long ago, and it’s a bit scary.

John: We were watching the telly, and Sandra had gone to bed, and I was asleep on the couch downstairs. And I woke up, and I could hear some whispering. And she’s got two armchairs, and I could hear some whispering from one chair to the other. I couldn’t understand what it said, I couldn’t make it out. But it was definitely somebody whispering to each other.

Sandra: A couple of weeks after that my daughter went to bed, I went up not long after, and she came to my bedroom about five minutes after I went to bed, shouting that a cold feeling from her ankles up her body went through her, and she couldn’t speak. As if she was paralysed, she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t move.

Vinny: I was in bed one night, I woke up, it was about half past three in the morning. And as I’ve looked towards the bedroom door I saw the figure of a little girl. She looked quite like solid to look at. I’ve tried to wake Mandy up. But as I’ve woke Mandy up to show her this little girl, she’d gone. And I’ve actually seen baking trays come flying off the top of my cooker. Now in the living room we have plates on the wall. The other night they started rattling, these plates, so I’ve had to take the plates off the wall. You know, noises and banging. It’s pretty scary, it does get a bit scary.

Narrator: What do you do when you’re confronted with the unexplained in this way? Something totally outside the bounds of normal experience. It takes courage, great courage, even to mention it to a friend or neighbour. But that’s what these people eventually did when they became frightened for the their children’s safety. They turned first of all to the church, to a priest. Not, they would say, to very much effect.

Sandra: I got in touch with the vicar and the vicar came here to talk to me. And he tried to have an explanation for everything that was happening. He just tried to make me feel better.

Pam: I went to see the priest at the local church, and erm, he said I’ll pay you a visit. And anyway he came round, and he was fobbing me off saying there’s nothing, anything happening there. I mean I’ll come back and see, but that was the last I heard. So when I came back, I came back with Tony’s mum, the dog, and the baby. So we sent the dog in first hoping the dog would pick something up. And the dog went in and was sniffing round like an idiot. And then I went in, because he was too scared to go in. And the house, it was like it’d been ransacked, there was pillows all over the floor, cushions all over the floor – it was a tip.

Narrator: Next in line of authority lies the Housing Officer: the man responsible for all the day to day [hassle?] on the estate. At first he also was inclined to brush it aside. But as he says himself, he couldn’t. He was forced to confront it as a reality, as several families came to him clearly frightened and needing help.

Alan, Housing Officer:  I was quite amazed to find the church didn’t really want to know. The local vicar wouldn’t deal with it. Well he dealt with it in a bit of an offhand way and more or less dismissed it. And I thought, if the vicar’s dismissed it what am I supposed to do, you know? I took as much detail as I could, promised to get back to her. She wasn’t on the phone so it was always going to be awkward. But I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Erm, I left it at that, it was just a note on a piece of paper left on my desk. But within a week I found myself going through exactly the same interview with another family, who live about 50 yards away but around the corner. Now this family, I interviewed them as a complete family, I was quite amazed that they’d all come in, giving one another support. I then realised I’d spoken to this woman’s neighbour, a long time before, certainly before the first interview, it was about three or four weeks ago. A very agitated girl who simply wanted to move. She wanted to get out the house. She gave all sorts of irrational reasons, because there was no way of proving what she was saying. She was saying the most incredible things about the attitude of her neighbours towards her. Being victimised, being attacked. And she couldn’t produce evidence of it, there were no police reports forthcoming, so… I actually just left that on file. But I was actually a bit worried that it was just next door to this woman who now says she’s got ghosts. So I just took a chance. I asked her to be discrete, I asked her to go to her neighbour, as her neighbour, and say ‘we’re having some strange problems, are you experiencing anything?’ But I said, try not to give the game away, don’t be precise about what’s happening. And she left, she left with that. And the next day I was going about my work, and she appeared. This is Sandra. She appeared in the doorway and she was gesticulating that she wanted to speak to me. So I went over to speak to her, and took her into an interview room, and she said ‘Yes!’ And I said ‘Yes what?’  She said – ‘She’s got ghosts.’ And I couldn’t believe that. Now I’ve got three families and one hadn’t disclosed, and wanted to move. My belief in the situation was total now.

Narrator: So what exactly is going on here, and how unusual is it on a modern housing estate. When we began to research these questions we found to our surprise that events like it seem to occur right across the country. Alan’s counterpart, for example, housing officer in Brixton, South London, was Harry Cleverley.

Harry Cleverley, Retired Housing Officer: When people were disturbed or frightened and so forth, the majority of housing people just laughed and said they were soft in the head. And I went along and I could sense the atmosphere and I knew that they weren’t. Some were of course. We had some  try it on to get a new flat. Some would come along and say ‘we’re haunted’ and I’d say ‘No you’re not!’ But in a lot of the cases this was true, and the people were terrified. They had no reason to be terrified, but they were. And I used to get called to – not only in my own council, I went up to Nottingham and did some exorcisms up there, friends of mine. And there was a council estate there that was haunted. And the reason was that the previous owner of the land resented the council estate being built on his land. And this is what frequently happens, spirits are still possessive, they’re still materialistic, they think ‘that’s mine, what are they doing on my property.’  And you have to explain to them that it’s no longer your property and you no longer have any need for it. I felt I had a responsibility to these people who were living in the property, and if the property wasn’t up to scratch then we had to do something about it. If the roof had leaked, the councillors would have had to sanction work to be done, and they would have done. But if it’s something like a spiritual thing, they didn’t believe it.

Narrator: The fact is of course that we don’t live in a society that accepts the paranormal as real, so when it does occur, or seem to occur, the natural reaction is to brush it aside and seek any other possible explanation rather than confront it. When we looked into the history of this area we discovered it had been built on a site formerly occupied by rows of Victorian houses which had been built to house the workers in the cotton mills. Before that it appeared to have been church land, partly used for farming, partly as a large burial ground. But there were no clear leads. But if you’re responsible for a modern housing estate where people tell you their houses are haunted, who do you turn to? Alan, in some desperation, turned to the local ghost club.

Kenny, Stockport Ghost Society: The Stockport ghost society became involved in the activity in these houses on this estate in the beginning of June. We was called in by the council because apparently there was three or four houses that were having unnatural activity within their homes, i.e. banging, footsteps, even people sort of walking through the living room or running through the living room. And the council didn’t know what to make of it, they didn’t know who to turn to, so they got in touch with us. So we came down. And the first thing we do, obviously, is interview the tenants. At the end of the interviews we found it really uncanny that all the people were giving the same sort of story. So with the council’s permission and the tenants’ permission, we got a number of people together from the ghost society. We was all sat very quiet one night in this house. I was sat at the back of the room,  one of my colleagues was sat in an armchair facing me. It was very quiet, we had the light subdued but not dark enough as you couldn’t see each other or see the surroundings. I was just sitting, watching, listening – it was very quiet. And then suddenly at the side of my colleague Barbara appeared a fourteen, well appeared a girl, a young girl, that I estimated to be at least fourteen years old. Although she only remained for at least three to four seconds, it was long enough for me to get a description of her, and to write it down. And the description was – yes, she appeared at least fourteen to fifteen, she had long hair, sort of lightish brownish hair, she had a very dull grey long dress on, up to her knees. She had what appeared to be greyish socks on, which didn’t quite come up to her knees and left a gap between the edge of her dress and the top of her socks. And brownish shoes. But whether it was imagination on the shoe side of it, it appeared that she had one shoe that was built up, and gave me the impression that she had one leg longer than the other.

Narrator: Kenny and his group came to a dead end. And as the paranormal activity continued, they turned to a professional psychic medium who had been involved at the estate previously as part of another enquiry. Helen, the medium, immediately claimed that she picked up a sense of evil. She was even prepared to describe it.

Helen, Psychic Medium: I first realised that there was a man here as soon as I walked in, actually. I think I mentioned it to Kenny, who is a member of the Stockport Ghost Club [grimaces]. Then I felt the presence on the stairs and I could see a hooded… a dark… clothes, not a dark person, but a dark entity on the stairs. I feel sort of a…. a religious type person. But I feel he hid behind that. And the real person underneath wasn’t so good. But people came to him because of that.

Narrator: Helen visited to the houses and spoke to the people. She then decided to hold a séance, to provoke an encounter with whatever was causing the disturbances. But the séance was inconclusive. Several people claimed to have sensed the presence of something evil, but there was no direct confrontation, no resolution. By definition, the paranormal is slippery and elusive, it doesn’t correspond to worldly timetables. But there was a clear sense of frustration and violence in the houses.

Helen: It sometimes causes…  bad temper in the people that live in these places [a door is full of holes], it causes them to react with violence and temper.  Er, I think that all three houses have had… little pockets of bad energy like this. I don’t know what to call it. But you find it a lot. It’s also in that other house but has been covered up.

Narrator: So what sorts of explanation can we find for what is going on on the estate – apparitions apparently flitting from one house to another. Constant poltergeist activity, that is to say bursts of unexplained energy moving things around, even apparently throwing a man across a room. There are it seems two main schools of thought on the basis of this kind of activity. One is that it’s generated by the people involved.

Maurice Grosse, Paranormal Investigator: I would say that there are forces at work which we don’t know anything about at all. Maybe one day we will. And how the mind is controlling those forces. Because there’s no doubt about it in my mind anyway, that these forces are controlled by the mind. I am fairly convinced in my experience, that high stress situations cause poltergeist phenomena. Of course they don’t cause it to everybody! Otherwise we’d have poltergeists all over the place. But to certain people, we don’t know why, in certain situations, these high stress situations, they happen. But I would think it’s probably a housing estate that’s overpopulated, people might be having monetary problems, and I think that these conditions are a breeding ground for high stress, which in itself brings on poltergeist phenomena in some cases.

Kenny: Poltergeists will feed on pure energy, it will feed on your fear, it will feed on your electricity in your house. It will feed on your children. The more you fight, the more you row in your house, the more angry you become – he loves it. And it appears that this is what’s happening around here.

Eddie Burks, Psychic Medium:  Because we’re not familiar with them, and they come as an awful shock, we don’t know how to deal with them. And we try to deal with them sometimes by exercising our will against them. But this is futile. A characteristic of evil is the development of the will, in a negative sense. And so any attempt that we normal persons make to negate their effects, we are operating a less practised will.

Narrator: But several distinguished paranormal investigators would argue that poltergeist activity is closely related to spirits or entities, call them what you will, trying to make contact in some way with the living world.

Prof. David Fontana, Society for Psychical Research: It may well be that if your belief system encompasses something like this, if you believe that there’s life after death, that events of this kind would strengthen that belief, because it would seem as though the personality of somebody who’s died that persists for some time after death, and still wants to interact in some way with the living people. Some of these cases are associated with particular houses and people that have lived in the house years ago. And one explanation put forward sometimes is that the person doesn’t realise they’re dead, even, and they’re hanging round the place where they used to live, and they may be  rather disgruntled to find other people  living there in their house. And so they make all sorts of disturbances to try and drive people out. That’s one explanation. It very much depends on your belief system. If you’re a very very hard nosed scientist of course you have to fall back on the idea that people are either fools or liars. But the number of cases that we as a scientific society have gathered over the last century would rather discount that. Because these are not just things that happen to very impressionable people. They’re things that happen to people very much like you and myself, open-minded people who are reasonable witnesses, who know what has happened to them.

Narrator: So what advice might these people give to the people on the estate? Is there anything practical they can do to calm their fears, or break out of the cycle of events?

Maurice Grosse: I would say to the people in Gorton, the best way to tackle this is to tackle it head on. To recognise that phenomena is happening. And that first of all it’s not going to harm you. It looks as if it’s going to harm you, but it won’t harm you. Get interested in what’s happening. Once you’re interested in what’s happening, take the stress out of the situation and you’ll find it’ll start to diminish. But while it is happening, because I don’t believe that in most cases anybody can actually do anything about it except the people themselves involved. Once they reduce that stress situation they will find that the activity will start to go away.

Narrator: Significantly none of the experts rubbished the events, they didn’t question the fact that something was taking place. Nor did they question the reality of the fear. When we visited the houses at night, the families were camping out on their living room floors, afraid to go upstairs. It was almost like a scene shot during the war. And once implanted, fear is difficult to eradicate. Several people simply want to move away.

Sandra: Like before I moved here I could go to bed any time I wanted, one, two, three o’clock in the morning, and I was on my own then. But since I’ve moved here I haven’t been able to do that. I’ve been going to bed about half past eleven because I’ve been too scared to go after that.

Mandy: I’m worried about what’s going to happen to Chloe. With being pregnant as well I’m trying to keep as calm as possible with all the things that are happening, it’s hard to.

Sandra: I want it to all clear up, that’s all I want, so I can get back to normal.

Vinny: We just want to be rehoused, and get out of here, and put it behind us and try to get on with our lives.

Narrator: One family already has moved away, unable to cope with things they can’t see or touch or even begin to explain. Those unexplained events continue.

Tony: Basically you just can’t believe that things you’ve seen in movies and everything could happen to you. You think it’s all far fetched and you just sit down and watch it. Until it happens to you  - then you know there is something out there.