Ghostly ‘replay’ of a World War II raid
EIGHTY years ago, in the middle of the Second World War, around 6,000 men were thrown against the shores of France to test the new German defences of the “Atlantic Wall”.
Over half of them were killed, wounded or captured before the force retreated that day.
It was a disaster, but the lessons that were learned enabled the D-day invasions of 1944.
There is something else about the Dieppe Raid that became big news though, as local historians Richard Pursehouse and Ben Cunliffe discovered.
Two Midland women who were sisters-in-law, went to stay at Puys outside the town of Dieppe in 1951. Europe was open again, battered and bruised as it was, and northern France must have seemed as good
a place as any to start the British fondness for a holiday across the Channel.
They stayed in a guesthouse, formerly used as living quarters for the German garrison there. Their room faced the sea, but they couldn’t see the beach there due to the steep hill being in the way.
Then, early in the morning, it began. One of the women heard a distant noise which “started suddenly and sounded like a storm getting up at sea”. Not an uncommon sound by the sea – but this one was accompanied by the noise of battle.
Their account was shared with investigators from the Society for Psychical Research, which has been researching psychic and paranormal events for 140 years. They described their three-hour ordeal as sounding “like a broadcast from America”, coming “in unmistakable waves of sound”.
They could make out separate sounds of cries, guns, landing craft and dive-bombing – the sounds that those Allied soldiers would have heard nine years earlier. On several occasions, the two women heard the loud “crunch” of a shell landing at the same time.
The volume of the “battle” grew, until at 4.50am it suddenly stopped. Nobody else in the guesthouse seemed to have been woken up by the cacophony.
Some 17 minutes later, it started again, louder than before. And it continued, ebbing and flowing like the sea itself, until it finally petered out at around 6.55am.
The investigators found that their account of the sounds matched up closely with the events of the Dieppe Raid. For example, the initial distant noises could have been the Allies’ accidental encounter with a German convoy, Canadian landing craft reached Puys at the same time as the first “restart” of the sounds of battle,
and the RAF attacked ground targets and skirmished with the Luftwaffe throughout.
One woman was a naval nurse during the war, and both had lived through it, so the investigators concluded that they would know what things like dive bombers sounded like. Both had read about the doomed operation in the papers at the time and seen a little information in a guidebook, but neither would have had a detailed timeline of the battle, nor did they know exactly where the events of 1942 took place.
Alternative explanations from local people included a dredging boat in the harbour, low flying civilian planes, and an unusually high tide. The dredger was later found to not be active at the time of the event.
The paranormal theory that most
closely matches these events is “stone tape theory” – the idea that emotional and intense events can be imprinted onto objects and places, and replayed under the right conditions.
It could also be a variant of psychometry, the belief that you can feel events of the past by touching an object or place associated with it.
The investigators concluded that they probably weren’t making it up. Both women were “well-balanced individuals”, seemed to have no desire for a paranormal experience, and as the noises didn’t wake anyone else it would have been supernatural.
Is there a haunted battlefield on the shores of Normandy? If you believe the investigators and these anonymous women, go and try a Puys guesthouse for yourself.