Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (24 page)

“Something turns them off.”

“You mean
someone
turns them off.
Why don’t you lock the cupboard door?”

“We do, but it doesn’t make any difference.”

But after this incident, the poltergeist decided to allow them to spend a quiet evening.
They all retired to bed early.
It was necessary to rearrange the beds—Jean, Diane and Aunt Maude moved into Phillip’s bedroom, Phillip moved into Diane’s, and Joe Pritchard occupied his own bed.

Jean Pritchard had only just climbed into bed when the disturbances began.
The reading lamp rose into the air, sailed slowly across the room, and out through the door.

Then they saw something moving around the door—a closer look showed that it was the four small bulbs that produced the glow effect on the electric fire downstairs.
Two of them were now dancing around the top of the door, and the other two near the bottom.

Then they saw the hands.
For a moment, they were petrified.
One enormous hand appeared over the top of the door, while the other was near the bottom of the door, about six inches from the floor.
A closer look showed that they were Aunt Maude’s fur gloves.
Whatever—or whoever—was wearing them must have had enormous arms, since there was a stretch of well over six feet between the top glove and the lower one.

Aunt Maude, who was of an evangelical disposition—in fact, a member of the Salvation Army—pointed accusingly at the gloves and said sternly: “Get away.
You’re evil!” She picked up one of her boots and flung it at the door.
The gloves vanished.
Jean Pritchard, in spite of her nervousness, could not resist saying: “Do you still think it’s the kids doing it?” Then the gloves reappeared—floating into the bedroom.
One of them seemed to be beckoning to them, as if trying to persuade them to follow it.
“None of us moved,” said Jean Pritchard later, “we were too scared.” Then the glove clenched into a fist, and shook threateningly in Aunt Maude’s direction.
Aunt Maude responded by bursting into “Onward Christian Soldiers.” At this, the gloves began to conduct her singing, beating in time.
Jean Pritchard admits that she had to smile.
Then the gloves vanished again.
And Aunt Maude said decisively: “You’ve got the devil in this house.”

None of them had much sleep that night.
When Aunt Maude left the next morning—saying that she wouldn’t stay there again for £20,000—her gloves were nowhere to be seen.
Jean Pritchard later found them in the bottom of the cupboard.
She returned them to Aunt Maude, but Aunt Maude refused to touch them.
She carried them into the garden with coal tongs, and burned them with paraffin on the rubbish heap.

Soon after this, the poltergeist displayed a new and interesting ability which is found only in a rare minority of cases—“interpenetration of matter.” One evening, as the Pritchards were sitting in the lounge, an egg floated in through the door, poised itself very carefully in the air, then fell on the floor.
As it exploded, the room filled with a delicious scent that Mrs.
Pritchard compared to a garden full of flowers.
(Only Phillip found it heavy and cloying.) When another egg floated into the room, Jean Pritchard rushed to the refrigerator, took out all the eggs, and put them into a wooden box.
She then sat defiantly on the lid, convinced that, on this occasion at least, she’d got the better of the poltergeist.
When another egg materialized in mid-air, and exploded like a scent bomb, she jumped up and looked into the box.
One egg was missing.
She sat down on it again; a moment later another egg exploded.
It went on until all the eggs lay broken in the middle of the room, and the wooden box was empty.
Yet Mrs.
Pritchard had sat firmly on its lid throughout.
Mr.
Nobody could dematerialize solid objects—or perhaps move them into another dimension and then back into our own.

There seems to be no doubt that “Fred” possessed his own juvenile and rather destructive sense of humor.
Perhaps because Mrs.
Pritchard is so obviously a tidy person, the ghost seemed to take an unending delight in making messes.
When Jean went to the larder one day, she found that the tea and sugar packets had been emptied, and their contents carefully mixed up together.
At four o’clock one morning, after they had been kept awake for hours by the thunderous banging, she went out of the bedroom to discover that the door handles had been smeared with jam and festooned with lavatory paper.
All the way down the stairs, there was a mixture of marmalade and mustard.
Joe Pritchard advised her to come back to bed and deal with it in the morning.
But Jean Pritchard is a typical Yorkshire housewife; she filled a bucket with hot water, and tidied up the mess before she went back to bed.
It is an interesting thought that if Jean Pritchard had been an indifferent housewife who could ignore untidiness, “Fred” might have given up a great deal sooner.

Vic Kelly, who was a Catholic, continued to feel that exorcism might be the answer.
So after the Pritchards had spent a particularly restless night, he decided to approach his own priest, Father Hudson.
The priest seemed to be slightly better informed about mischievous sprites than his Church of England colleagues, and pointed out that exorcism was no infallible cure for poltergeists—it might even make them worse.
Besides, Father Hudson would also have to approach his bishop for permission.
He had, nevertheless, an alternative suggestion.
There was nothing to prevent Vic Kelly from sprinkling the house with holy water and saying a few prayers as he did so.
If the thing could be exorcised, a layman could probably do the job as well as a priest.

Armed with a bottle of holy water, Vic hurried to the Pritchards’ house.
Jean Pritchard’s feelings were ambivalent; she knew the poltergeist was likely to resent an attempt to evict it.
But when Vic had gone to the trouble of getting the holy water, it seemed unfair not to let him try.

Vic scattered a few drops of water in each room, starting with the kitchen, and leaving the lounge—Mr.
Nobody’s favorite haunt—until last.
When he came downstairs, he went into the lounge, performed his rite of exorcism, and re-capped the bottle, which was now almost empty.
Jean Pritchard asked: “Did Father Hudson say how long it would be before we’d know it worked?” As she spoke, an enormous crash sounded from above their heads.
Jean said: “Never mind.
It didn’t.” Then she noticed the water.
It was trickling down the walls in little streams, from the level of the ceiling.
It was apparently the ghost’s way of indicating that he was indifferent to holy water.

That night, nobody got much sleep.
The drumming went on until five in the morning.
Furniture overturned, the bedclothes were snatched off repeatedly, and Diane was thrown out of bed several times.
The next day they were all dizzy from lack of sleep, and Diane stayed home from school.
In the early afternoon, she managed to snatch a few hours sleep on the settee.

Having allowed her to recuperate, the poltergeist proceeded to indicate that he had still not forgiven the attempt to make him feel unwelcome.
As Diane stood by the kitchen fireplace, combing her hair in front of the mirror, Jean Pritchard noticed that the table drawer was gently sliding out.
Then it shot across the room, and hit Diane in the small of the back, making her gasp.
At the same time, she experienced the familiar sensation in her solar plexus—the “sinking feeling” that seemed to indicate that something was about to happen.

In the center of the mantelpiece there was a brass crucifix with an image of the crucified Christ.
As Diane stood in the middle of the room, this suddenly leapt from the shelf, and stuck against her back.
It behaved as if it were made of iron and Diane was a magnet.
Diane looked in the kitchen mirror to see what had struck her, and tried to pull it off.
It was impossible.
She began to feel panic-stricken.
“Get it off me!”

Mrs.
Pritchard tugged at it, but it might have been glued on.
Diane rushed into the hallway, feeling as she was wrestling with some impalpable force that surrounded her.
Something fell on to the floor—not the crucifix, but the image of Jesus.
At the other end of the hall, the cross also fell off against the wall.
Suddenly, Diane was free.
When Jean Pritchard raised the back of her blouse, they found a cross-shaped red mark between her shoulder blades; it stayed there for days before it faded.

The attempt at exorcism seems to have inspired “Fred” with a distinctly anti-Christian bias.
On Easter Sunday, Jean Pritchard came downstairs and smelt the flower-like perfume that indicated that the ghost was around.
On all the doors, someone had painted inverted crosses in gold.
In the lounge, there were three more on the wall.
It had been done with considerable precision, as if a stencil had been used, and the lack of brush marks suggested a can of spray paint.
She remembered a can of gold spray paint in the outhouse, and eventually located it—Phillip had been intending to use it on his bicycle.
She tried spraying it on the door, and discovered that it was impossible to reproduce the crosses; the glossy surface of the door made the paint run into globules.
“Fred” had apparently encountered no such difficulty—another evidence of his peculiar power over matter.

Alarmed by this apparent evidence of a demonic intelligence, Jean Pritchard consulted the local vicar.
He came—accompanied by another clergyman—and looked at the crosses, then advised her to leave them there over Easter.
They promised to give further consideration to the matter and said they would be back after the holiday; in fact, neither returned.

“Fred” seemed to take delight in displaying unusual abilities, There was, for example, the curious episode of Mrs.
Holden’s coat.
It was made of white mohair, and one day it disappeared—she had to borrow another coat to go home in.
Weeks later, they found it in the coal shed, sticking out from underneath the coal.
Yet when it was pulled out, it was found to be completely clean.

A friend named Alan Williams called one night, and left his car parked outside.
When he went back to the car, he was surprised to find that the windscreen wipers were working.
This should have been an impossibility, since the car was locked and the ignition turned off.
Suspecting that there might be something wrong with the car’s electrical system, Alan Williams had it checked by a garage the next day.
They could find nothing wrong.

Alan Williams made another interesting observation that night.
When he looked back at the Pritchards’ house, he says it was surrounded by a dim glow of light.
This is confirmed by a neighbor who lived opposite; she looked out of her bedroom window late at night, and observed the same phenomenon; she told Jean about it the next day.
It is tempting to speculate that the effect was either electrical, or was connected in some way with earth magnetism.
Poltergeists—as we have seen—appear to be able to control certain electrical forces.
One of the odder features of this case is that during the period from August 1968 until May 1969, when it vanished, the Pritchards quarterly electricity bills were only half their usual size—about £10 instead of the usual £20.
Jean Pritchard was honest enough to point this out to the electricity board; they said that this was the reading on the meter, and this would therefore be all she would have to pay.
It is possible, of course, that “Fred” simply turned back the electric meter to register less.

Then there was the curious mystery of the keys.
One morning, as Jean Pritchard was kneeling in front of the kitchen fireplace, preparing to clean out the flue, a shower of keys descended down the chimney, some of them hitting her on the head.
She counted them and found there were nineteen in all.
“Fred” had collected every key in the house.
But when they had been sorted out, there was still one rather old-looking key left.
They never identified it, and she still has it.

And now, at this fairly late stage in the manifestations, the poltergeist began to show itself.
Its first appearance seems to have been to Jean and Joe Pritchard.
They were in bed one night when the door opened.
Both looked across the room, and saw a dim figure in the doorway.
Jean Pritchard says that it seemed to be very tall, and had a hood over its head.
When they switched on the bedside light, it vanished.