The Paranormal

Unwelcome Guests

Poltergeists, so often mischievous and malicious, represent one of the most frightening paranormal manifestations. The problem is that we cannot understand them and their frenetic activity, and the ferocious power they so frequently unleash. With the apparition, for example, we can often point to its history. We can say, for example, this is the ghost of a nun who was walled, of a smuggler who fell of a cliff, of a couple devoted to their own home and who cannot drag themselves away. But poltergeists are more difficult. Their origins and what it is that they are about are mystifying and frequently frightening, as the case of the Bromley poltergeist described in another part demonstrates.

The Theatre Royal at Margate was long troubled by poltergeist activity. Indeed, this troublesome and irritating ghost has been held responsible for the theatre's closure. Some attributed the activity to Sarah Thorne, the theatre's most successful manager, or to an actor who had been replaced and who purchased a seat in a box where he killed himself during a performance. Or was it some other anonymous and spiteful spirit?

Whatever it was, bolted emergency doors; unbolted locked doors after the audiences had left; turned out emergency lights; switched on main lighting during the night; moved scenery and props; turned lights on and off; and shuffled and thudded about the building when it was all but empty. From time to time there were even severe icy blasts in the warmest and most comfortable parts of the building. Such is the sometimes ungovernable and irrational power of the poltergeist.

There are certainly fundamental questions which exercise the minds of those who study the paranormal. Why, do students ask, do poltergeists make so many childish, spiteful, sometimes dangerous attacks? Is it because they are so often the outcome of children's or adolescents' anxieties? Is it because at other times they stem from obsessions and compulsions of older persons? Are we dealing here with repression or other deep-seated emotions?

Does some subconscious and abnormal element of the personality promote some physical force? Does the presence in a house of some innocent person or other, a child, say, stir something into action? But why are two different families affected when in turn they occupy the same property? Is there some paranormal violence in the very substance of the dwelling, set off by certain personalities?

Or are there random intelligences, possibly human, probably non-human, which like vampires, feed off the living and their disjointed emotions? Certainly this is the explanation, incredible though it may seem, favoured by some of the experts in the field. But these are speculations about an extremely complex problem.

What strikes one about the following cases is the very ordinariness of the families involved. Take the Maxteds, a couple with four children, living in the 1960s at 16 Waterdales in Northfleet. They were terrified by weird banging and scraping noises in the night; by doors which were unaccountably found to be locked or unlocked; by lights which were switched off and on. Small wonder that they asked the council to rehouse them, which they did in in February 1965.

Before they moved in, the Maxteds' successors, a young tugboat engineer, Eric Essex, and his wife Margaret, were warned by the council officers that there had been some unnerving events in the house but the couple were only too glad to find council accommodation. And in any case, they probably thought their predecessors had made a fuss about nothing. All the same, at their request a local clergyman came to bless the house. No harm in taking precautions, they must have thought, especially as they had two very young children. The Rev Alan Gordon of All Saints, using the Ancient Order of Blessing, said a prayer in each room and made the sign of the cross using holy water.

But within eighteen months Eric and Margaret Essex were frantically applying for a transfer. To be fair, that had over the months dismissed odd sounds and smells, shrugged their shoulders at the tapping noises and footsteps. But the uneasy atmosphere had become increasingly worrying. Most of the sounds appeared to come from the front bedroom which they had abandoned and now used as a storeroom, rarely entering it save when absolutely necessary. But they had tried to stick it out.

Then, one Sunday night in August 1966, at the end of a week when the smell in the house became overpowering, Eric Essex got out of bed when he thought he heard someone walking up and down the hall. He investigated but finding nothing, returned to bed and fell asleep. Some time later he woke again and heard a high-pitched whistling sound.

'I opened my eyes,' he said, 'and saw an orange pink sort of mist surrounding the figure of a woman standing close to my bed. As far as I could see she had no head. One thing I can clearly remember is that she was wearing a large sash. The whole of the bed was shaking violently. I tried to speak but I just couldn't. All I could do was to lie there until the thing moved off in the direction of the bedroom door where it finally disappeared.'

At last, somewhat recovered, he woke his wife who had slept undisturbed through the whole incident. Within minutes they and the children were on their way to relatives. And they had no intention of going back to 16 Waterdales.

If the council were not immediately sympathetic, then others certainly confirmed the stories of the Essexes and the Maxteds. Next door at number fourteen, Mrs Margaret Harrison told of how she had heard noises and had talked to Mr and Mrs Essex about them. She was certain that there was something genuinely wrong at the neighbouring house. Her five year old son had sometimes wakened up crying and screaming for no apparent reason. One night when Mrs Harrison had gone to his room he had been 'absolutely frozen to the touch.' Eventually, she had refused to stay in the house alone when her husband was working in Scotland, and had taken her children to stay with relatives. After his experience, Eric Essex recalled something similar to what Mrs Harrison had mentioned: 'My left arm, the one nearest to the apparition, was absolutely frozen, and it stayed cold for the rest of the day.'

Mrs Diane Alice, who had formerly lived at 14 Waterdales, admitted that she had been frightened when awakened at three o'clock by what sounded like footsteps from next door. But hen she had recalled that council officials had explained some years earlier that ceilings put in the roofs of the houses when they were rebuilt after the bombing in WW2 would exaggerate any sound. Once over her fright, she decided that the noise must have come from birds in the roof. But now she was inclined to doubt that conclusion.

Of course stories like these, wherever they occur, are godsends to the press. In September 1996, Dick Moore and Bill Garland, two very young Kent Messenger reporters, and Malcolm Bennett, an equally young financial accounts clerk, spent a night in the - at the time of writing - empty 16 Waterdales. On going into the house they immediately the heavy musty smell that is most usually associated with properties left vacant over several months. But number sixteen had been empty for only a few days.

They decided to base themselves in the bedroom in which Eric Essex had seen his headless woman. The early part of their watch was uneventful. Then, sometime shortly after midnight, the room temperature suddenly fell. They noted that cigarette smoke swirled in a draught which appeared to exist in the corner of the room where Mr Essex claimed to have seen the apparition. Yet the windows and doors were tightly shut. After a minute or so, the draught went and the cigarette smoke followed its customary course towards the ceiling.

During the next hour the three men heard rustling noises. Then it seemed that something was sliding along the floor although they could see nothing which gave rise to this. When Dick Moore summoned up courage and went to investigate outside the room he heard the sound of creaking floorboards coming from the lower flight of stairs.

After one thirty in the morning there were no further disturbances. Nevertheless, at times what must have seemed an endless night, the men noticed pressure on their eardrums and their faces felt hot, whilst their hands and feet were freezing cold. The report in the newspaper made no attempt to disguise the relief they felt when their night-long vigil came to an end. None of them would have volunteered to have stayed there on his own. Dick Moore wrote: 'Although we did not see anything during the night, from the moment we entered the house I had the feeling we were not entirely alone.'

It was said that during WW2 a man had died from shrapnel wounds almost on the doorstep of 16 Waterdales. But does that explain the headless woman with the sash? Then it has to be recalled that apparitions are distinctly different from poltergeists. It must be asked, therefore, if this property did not house both kinds of manifestation.

The haunting of 16 Waterdales seems inexplicable yet is is similar to so many other hauntings. In 1969, for instance, in a house in Imperial Road, Gillingham, lights switched themselves off and on and furniture moved apparently of its own accord. In Sandgate, the little seaside suburb of Folkestone, there were reports of a shop where pieces of furniture changed their position overnight.

In another case in Northfleet in the same period the groundsman of the Mid Kent Golf Club was driven from his home at 40 Overcliffe after tappings at his bedroom window and the sound of shuffling feet inside the house. In the tense frightening atmosphere he was unable to sleep soundly. Something always seemed to be going on or, perhaps worse still, it seemed as though something unspecified was about to happen. On one occasion he woke and as he sat up in bed he saw the doors of a built-in cupboard opening and shutting of their own will. It was all to much for him. Principally, it was all too much because there was no rationale to what was happening. This was the real problem with poltergeist activity. It defies explanation. It so often defies the laws of nature for things do not move of their own accord.

At Dartford in January 1977, the district council was worried that people would be deterred from from occupying one of its smart semi-detached houses in Ruskin Grove because of 'things that go bump in the night'. A family of six, the Robertsons, had had to be rehoused. And it was especially sad because since they had moved into the house in 1975 the Robertsons had spent a considerable amount on furnishings and decoration. By the late 1976, they were forced to quit. Barry Robertson, a railway guard, said that they had lost everything. They had sold or burned most of the furniture: they could not bear the thought of keeping it.

Strange events had begun almost as soon as they moved in. Although he said nothing to his family, on removal day Barry Robertson saw a blurred outline at the top of stairs. 'It was as if something was looking down the stairs at me,' he said. In the next months three of the children complained of things moving in the night. Claire, the four year old, spoke of a boy, rather like her eleven year old brother Philip, who came to her bedside and touched her face. Nine year old Mark screamed one night and when his parents run into the bedroom he appeared to be pushing something away.

But on other occasions the parents saw bedclothes moving of their own accord; they saw piles of washing moving in the air; there were potatoes thrown from the rack round the kitchen before shooting up to the ceiling. There were times when brass ormaments were knocked of the edge of a wall unit by an ash tray; there was the occasion when the cat went wild trying to get out of the room, and the night when the border collie Bess could not settle but instead growled and barked at the corner of the sitting room. Furniture and ornaments moved for no apparent reason; a rocking horse belonging to the children moved from one side of a bedroom to another while a family friend looked on in horror; and then Mr Robertson's mother refused to continue baby-sitting for them after hearing footsteps upstairs across one of the children's bedrooms. She knew that there was no adult upstairs at the time.

The family was understandably terrified. They called in a local cleric to bless the house and he was satisfied when he left that he had cleared the house of whatever it was that ailed it. 'There is no doubt that the family encountered something strange and frightening,' he said. 'So far as I an concerned whatever was wrong is no longer there. All is well now.'

But after some days the disturbances resumed and the Robertsons were rehoused. Since then the house has been regularly occupied and the tenants have had no sign of any poltergeist activity. Was this then a consequence of some child's inner turmoil? Did the events which frightened each and every member of the family spring consciously from the anxieties of one of its members? Were there at the time unrecognised tensions within the family? Or was it some unfettered intelligence who chose at random to batton onto an unsuspecting family?