A plethora of poltergeists

Things that go bump in the night have long haunted the popular imagination, writes Tina White.

‘Aman and his wife who have lived for five years in a house at Bethnal Green, one of the most populous and unghostly parts of East London, are leaving it because they declare it is haunted, states a writer in the Daily Mail.’’

This item in Wellington’s

Evening Post on March 28, 1938, was just one of many poltergeistthemed newspaper articles of the time – the 1930s and 1940s seemed particularly fruitful for spooks.

In the London case, the family ‘‘heard, they say, most unearthly shrieks and moans, and chairs, have, it seems, overturned themselves . . . the report says that the eerie noises began soon after the death of the wife of another occupant of the house. Crockery transported itself from dresser to table; bedclothes were scattered as though by a violent wind; locked doors unbolted themselves.’’

The writer of this story ended by telling a similar tale of a cottage racked by unearthly events, but revealing that a mischievous small boy in the home had been responsible all along.

Often, news stories of weird occurrences were linked to an exotic locale – making them even more shiver-inducing. A Dunstan

Times piece on November 16, 1931, whisked the readers away to India, ‘‘the land of inexplicable mysteries’’.

A former deputy collector in Tellicherry (now known as Thalassery) was so bothered by mischievous ghosts who threw dirt into his food, set fire to his pillow, threw large stones through his rooms, and caused cashbox keys to vanish, that at last he ‘‘abandoned his large and newly built house to the hobgoblins’’.

By 1940, the supposed spirits behind these activities were being

called ‘‘poltergeister’’, from the German for ‘‘rattle or racket’’, as the New Zealand Herald informed its readers in September that year via an interview with Harry Price, the ‘‘well-known authority on such matters’’. Price’s greatest investigation had been at Borley Rectory in Suffolk, dubbed the most haunted house in Britain.

In another context, Price told the Herald, rather startlingly, that it was ‘‘those mischievous, gamesome and rather lovable stone-throwing, furniture-moving, window-smashing, china-breaking and noisesome ghosts that are to me, the most intriguing’’.

That year, even famed literary light Sacheverell Sitwell wrote a 400-page book about poltergeists, described by the Herald as delightful and entertaining.

Within living memory, a muchpublicised stone-throwing mystery in Brooklyn, Wellington, hit the headlines over several days in 1963.

It started with a rain of small stones and pennies bombarding the Ohiro Guest Home for several hours from 9.30pm on March 24, terrifying the owners and their 15 boarders.

A dozen windows were smashed; the area was scoured by 12 policemen and about 20 helpers, but nothing turned up. The attack continued the following night until 1am; on the third night the Evening

Post mentioned the word ‘‘poltergeist’’, echoing some public sentiments.

An intensive search, with police dogs, of hills overlooking the lodge was again unsuccessful. Suggestions the culprit was someone with a catapult went nowhere. Later, it was rumoured that a Ma¯ ori cleansing ritual had been performed. Suddenly, the rain of stones stopped. The whole incident remains unexplained.

In Palmerston North’s old Carlton Hotel, late at night on July 23, 1998, a cleaner named ‘‘Jazz’’ Hayes, working late, heard a woman screaming upstairs. He telephoned the police, but nothing was found. Later (as Hays told the late city archivist Ian Matheson) he saw a white-clad woman and child in the hotel lift, but they ‘‘faded

‘‘Those mischievous, gamesome and rather lovable stone-throwing, furniture-moving, window-smashing, chinabreaking and noisesome ghosts ... are to me, the most intriguing.’’ Harry Price

away’’. The Carlton has since been completely reinvented and renamed, and so far nothing untoward has happened there.

A few years on, in another former city hotel, now a complex of shops and offices, the occupants of one office thought they might have a poltergeist after experiencing unexplained noises in empty rooms. Eventually, they ‘‘called someone in’’ to fix the problem, and all was peaceful again. This story didn’t make the news.

From March 21, 2016, a Havelock North woman, Violet Wheeler, 75, was terrorised by almost two months of regular stone-throwing on the roof of her retirement flat – and not small stones, but large river rocks. Hawke’s Bay Today covered the incidents, which left Wheeler too terrified to leave her home. The community rallied around her, and finally two teenagers were arrested.

The jury’s still out on the whys and wherefores of poltergeists. As I was once told: ‘‘I think I might have a ghost in my home. But if I ever said that out loud, no one would ever buy my house.’’