The Paranormal

The Bromley Poltergeist

One of the most sensational of all poltergeist cases, significant for its curious location, its duration and its violence, occurred in Bromley, north Kent. It is further remarkable in that the three men who were subject to such a prolonged and alarming series of attacks, decided to keep an account of the events and these, along with the records made during investigations carried out by members of the Society for Psychical Research, make for fascinating reading.

The disturbances occurred over an unusually prolonged two-year period on the Grove Park allotments, mainly in two sheds of the Kentish Garden Guild which was run by three men. This was no mammoth business enterprise. The two adjoining sheds with their corrugated iron roofs and their barbed wire fences, were perhaps typical of what one might expect of such a small enterprise set on waste ground among housing estates.

Alfred Taylor, a seventy eight year old pensioner keeping himself active, used to order whatever was necessary each Thursday, and on Sunday mornings he and his two colleagues, Tony Elms and Clifford Jewiss, sold the various items to other allotment holders. It was on one of those Sunday mornings, 26th April 1973, that the first curious incident occurred.

This was a day on which Taylor felt that Elms was upset about something. It is worth bearing that in mind. But of course there was never anything to tie the fifty year old Elms (or, indeed either of the others) into the disturbances, nothing to suggest with any sense of certainty that his mental or psychic state gave some kind of impetus to the succession of incredible happenings at Grove Park.

What happened was out of the blue. The men were in the trading shed when some powder suddenly hit the ceiling. They all looked at it. Kids up to some mischief? Some sort of prank? That was certainly Clifford Jewiss's first thought. Then a small pewter jug on a cupboard shelf suddenly shot across the floor. Even then no one quite took in what was happening. You can buy all sorts of tricks in joke shops. But after Jewiss picked up the jug and put in a box with a plastic lid they had cause to think again. For the jug was on the floor once more, and the lid of the box was still in place. matter cannot pass through matter. Anybody knows that. But the jug ...?

Over the following weeks there was a succession of inexplicable happenings. Out of the bin of Growmore fertilizer came fountains of pellets, hitting the ceiling, sometimes showering onto customers. On one occasion a seven pound weight sailed off scales and round Alf Taylor's head.

Sometimes all manner of items left there places one after another, though no one ever saw them take off. But they watched them, in Taylor's words, 'going round the hut like skittles.' None of the men could understand what was really happening. They tried sometimes to persuade themselves that they were victims of some kind of elaborate hoax, but they could not really be convinced of this for the whole exhibition was too complex to be the result of human agency. Objects were acting as though they had a life of their own.

And this was so damaging to business. It was proving to be extremely costly. Bottles were unscrewed and their contents were poured out on the floor of the shed. The taps of tubs of liquid Maxicrop were turned on. More than one hundredweight of Growmore was lost from the storage bins and remarkably it seemed as if human hands had scooped them out, for on the surface of the remaining pellets in one of the tubs there were the impressions of fingers. But no one could easily get at the bins without being seen. How could these be human hands.

It was too, the general nuisance, the rather spiteful nature of some of the tricks, that upset the men. Money was taken from one of their cars and later coins fell from the ceiling. Other coins fastened inside plastic bags fell out of their own accord. When Tony Elms was about to drink coffee out of a mug the contents escaped somehow and were replaced with fertilizer.

Elms was a frequent target. He was to say later: 'It frightened me. I've seen a half-ton bag of fertilizer move. The whole building would shake sometimes. Money would fly about and I've seen seven pound bags of fertilizer move from the shelf and hit customers.' There was an occasion when the men had to abandon business before one o'clock in the afternoon, the usual closing time, because the objects were moving as fast as they were replaced.

One of the customers, pensioner George Bentley, recalled: 'One time some money disappeared and the next thing I knew a ten pence coin fell into a cup of tea I was drinking. Another time, I went into the shed to buy a seven pound bag of Growmore. I asked for it and I saw it left off the shelf, float across and burst open on the counter. There were some right queer goings on and a lot of us saw them.'

The success of the business was undoubtedly imperilled by the manic activities of the poltergeist. Something had to be done. It was Elms who asked the advice of an unspecified group of either churchmen or white magicians. Following their advice he carried out a DIY exorcism alone in the darkness of one of the sheds. Outside, the others could hear bangings so loud that they feared the walls would collapse. Nine times the heavy iron door swung open as if subjected to massive blows. At the end, Tony Elms came out, his head cut and his hand heavily bruised.

But the exorcism - did it work? When the men went back on the Saturday evening to prepare for the next day's sales, the interior of the shed looked 'as if it had been hit by a bomb'. The goods were all thrown off the shelves and circled them in constant motion. All over the walls, on all of the surfaces in the sheds, on chairs, benches, tubs and bins, the sign of the cross was scratched, painted, shaped in drawing pins and drawn. Two large planks (five feet six inches) which had been used to barricade the sheds vanished completely one day. The next day when Taylor and Elms arrived at the allotments, there were the missing planks arranged in the shape of a cross. It seemed a conscious mockery of Tony Elms and his attempt to exorcise the spirit that so plagued him and his colleagues.

Alf Taylor was attacked away from the premises and in the presence of witnesses in his own home. On another occasion he claimed that he was pushed in Bromley Council Offices. So it did seem that whatever it was that was making life such a misery was not solely active in one place.

In late September 1973, Alf Taylor rang the Society for Psychical Research, asking for help. Manfred Cassirer, Chairmen of the Psychical Phenomena Committee, and his wife and fellow researcher, Pauline Runnells, met Taylor in his house at Downham and agreed to visit the site. What they saw convinced them that the men were not making up a story. And why should they? The wretched affair was costing them money.

The researchers paid two visits, one in October 1973 and a second in June 1974. The reason for the interval was the reluctance on the part of the three men to delve further into the mysteries. But on their two visits Manfred Cassirer and Pauline Runnells saw the whole remarkable display of tricks and more. They saw security bolts disappear from a window to be rediscovered inside a car outside. In front of the Tony Elms had a saw rammed down his back and his shirt ripped. As they stood inside the building, it was shaken by what seemed to be s series of angry blows.

The number 1659 - a date? A code? - appeared on a wooden panel, the consequence of automatic writing. It looked to be written in blood, though had it been analysed, perhaps it would have proved to be Maxicrop. And there was more writing and scrawls - a large question make; assorted letters of the alphabet; the name of one of Taylor's friends.

On the second visit there were two particularly notable features. There were the usual instances of teleportation. Nothing was safe. A watering can took off; a bottle of ant killer had to be replaced three times on a shelf; wooden planks fell down; a bottle appeared to be suspended in mid-air; and on a shelf what at first appeared to be the impression of a child's hand changed imperceptibly into a face yet - and this is the eerie part - the actual movements of the change could not be seen. At first it was a hand, then a face. Then from the counter a rectangular brass object stamped MN dropped onto the floor. But what was it? None of the men claimed to have seen it before; none of them could interpret MN. It was as though it had come from another world, another dimension.

Then there was another weird manifestation. Before the two researchers arrived a face, of human proportions, took shape on the counter. Made from two chemicals in the shed, its features, outlined in white sulphite, were like a skull. The eyes, nose and mouth were represented by brown Maxicrop. It could not have been made by any of the men. It required skill as well as speed. None of them had either the ability or the time to fashion so curious a piece of artwork. Then, before the eyes of all five, allotment holder and observers, the face gradually changed, wore away, wasted, and gain no actual movement was seen though all watched its deterioration.

What else? Oh, disappearing car keys; Taylor's missing thermos flask which was found in a carrier bag on Jewiss's motor cycle; four pounds of the day's takings lost; a gardening fork returned to the shed after disappearing; fertilizer instead of coffee appearing in a thermos flask; money found inside plastic bags; Elms pushed violently into Cassirer and later almost choked on a flower bulb sticking out of his mouth. What a memorable couple of visits for Cassirer and Runnells.

The visits of the researchers did not call a halt to the activities of the Bromley poltergeist. But stop they did some months later, just as suddenly as they began. The whole wicked, insanely childish behaviour came to an end. It just came to an abrupt halt. 'It all stopped after work on a new block of garages was finished,' according to George Bentley. But how, why, what was it all about? Was it about anything?

Where did it come from, this vandal, this malicious entity? According to one school of thought, poltergeists have their source in the living, in the very personalities who are under siege, and do not spring from the dead. There is the sense of something hidden in a living personality, something waiting to be triggered. But why did it select Tony Elms more frequently than his two colleagues? Was there something in his subconscious self, in his personality? Was there some hidden story, some concealed anger somewhere, some burning resentment? Was he the source or was he simply the target? Dis this activity emerge from a deep hidden level? Was it some unsuspected turmoil, some unknown disturbance in either of the other men? Certainly, the affair distressed and mystified all of them. Each of the would have been horrified to think himself the source of this frightening and inexplicable activity.

Others say that poltergeists are intelligences on the loose, intelligences perhaps of humans now dead, and that these leech onto the living, feeding on their disturbed emotional lives. From our internal disorders they gain their sustenance. But what a mystery it is. What an unnerving mystery!