In November 1960, in a rural Scottish village called Sauchie, 11-year-old Virginia Campbell began to hear a strange noise whenever she went to bed. It had been a time of massive upheaval for the child; her parents were undergoing some financial difficulty and so had to accept jobs far from their hometown. Rather than take Virginia with them, they had installed her in the care of her aunt in Sauchie, where she would remain and go to school until her parents were in a better position to look after her again. It was a strange new house in a strange new location; she would have to start a new school, make new friends and adjust to life without her parents.
And now, this. It began as a dull, repetitive sound, ‘like a bouncing ball’, in the bedroom, but there seemed to be no visible cause. Virginia slept in the same room as her cousin, Margaret, and they found the noise followed them one night when they went downstairs to tell Margaret’s parents. The noises continued, and other strange phenomena began to occur. A few days later, Virginia was sitting quietly in the living room. The sideboard next to her suddenly sprang forwards a centimetre or two, then moved back again on its own accord. Then a solid, sturdy chest of drawers full of linen rocked and seemed to glide across the floor – a full 45cm (18in) – before coming to rest again. The little house in Sauchie seemed alive with an unseen extra guest, one who banged and thumped the walls and seemed especially adept at moving hefty pieces of furniture.
Whatever was causing the strange events was stalking Virginia. At school, her teacher, Miss Stewart, watched in horror as an unoccupied desk behind Virginia rose a centimetre off the floor and then came back down again, slightly askew from its original position.
Local news caught wind of the sensational phenomena that surrounded this little newcomer to Sauchie. It was dubbed a ‘poltergeist’, a German term meaning ‘noisy ghost’, and, in the second half of the twentieth century, it was the sort of quirky story that sent journalists wild.
Trevor C. Hall, who had a hand in the controversial take-down of Harry Price, The Haunting of Borley Rectory, read the newspaper articles with profound interest. He sent some clippings to his friend, Dr A. R. G. Owen, who was one of the overseers of the 1970s Philip Experiment in Toronto. All the characters in the history of ghost hunting seem to become linked in one way or another. Owen’s interest was piqued; he had been working with the Toronto Society for Psychical Research on poltergeist phenomena, which seemed not only to be the fashionable research topic among ghost hunters, but was also becoming increasingly reported both in the media and to psychical research societies.
Owen travelled to Sauchie to make his own inquiries, and soon became embroiled in the battle between Virginia and the poltergeist that trailed her like a shadow. He was not so much interested in the poltergeist itself, however; his attention was focused on Virginia.
Poltergeists have been recorded for millennia, and are characterised by loud noises, movement and levitation of objects by unseen hands, and the throwing of stones and other small items. One of the first ghost stories involved poltergeist phenomena, and dates back to ancient Rome; stones were said to be thrown inside a house, and the property was condemned. In 1575, in a rented house in Tours, France, the new tenant, M. Gilles Bolacre, soon found himself being terrorised by a noisy ghost. He appealed to the local tribunal that the house was not fit for human habitation and that his contract with the landowner should be revoked, which was granted by the court. But over the years, and especially with the development of ghost hunting and psychical research, poltergeists have been understood as something quite separate from hauntings. As we’ve already seen, haunted houses and bog-standard ghosts have a lingering, intangible quality to them; they repeat their actions over and over, sometimes as blissfully unaware of the living as sleepwalkers. They are said to move as though in a dream state, and some researchers even consider them to be echoes replayed by the very fabric of buildings themselves. Ghosts may be ‘living’ versions of the dead, but they are still very much dead. Poltergeists are a different story altogether. Poltergeists are wholly alive. They are tempestuous, they respond in real time to events or statements, seem to latch on to and obsess over one particular person within the house, and, moreover, only seem to get stronger whereas the ghost only ever seems to fade with the passing of time.
Stone throwing, or lithobolia, is a particular form of poltergeist activity that seemed particularly rife during the height of European imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are numerous cases of wealthy white families, living and making their fortunes in colonised countries, who were terrified out of their homes by supernatural forces. In 1937, in Johannesburg, the Ricks family home began to be pelted with stones – around 80 in total fell on the roof and in the courtyard, and, interestingly, some of the stones weren’t geologically local. The Ricks family had the police watch over them, and when they tried to seek shelter elsewhere they found that the poltergeist followed them; the phenomena only ceased when they hid in a hotel. They blamed the children’s nanny, an 11-year-old girl of Creole descent, and dismissed her.
Similarly, in 1906, the Society for Psychical Research printed a report in their Journal sent to them by an associate member named Mr. Grottendieck from The Netherlands. Grottendieck had been in Sumatra working for a Dutch oil company, and was spending some time off in the jungle accompanied by 50 local people ‘for exploring purposes’. One night, in the camp that consisted of wooden huts covered with large leaves, Grottendieck settled down under his mosquito net. He was suddenly awoken at one o’clock in the morning by something falling down and hitting the ground near his head. Jolting in fright and hurriedly lighting his kerosene lamp, he found a small black pebble. More of these pebbles started to rain from the roof in a ‘parabolic line’. It tells us quite a lot about Mr. Grottendieck’s personality that he rudely woke up an Indonesian boy sleeping in the next room of his hut and sent him outside, in the dead of night, to ‘examine the jungle up to a certain distance’. The boy came back empty-handed, and Grottendieck told him to investigate the rest of the hut while he stayed put.
The stones continued to fall, and when Grottendieck tried to catch one, he found that they changed direction in the air, skirting around his hand. Moreover, while they appeared to fall through the roof, there were no gaps or holes in the leafy canopy.
Grottendieck was getting wound up, and started to suspect the rest of his exploration party were playing a practical joke on him. Insecure at the thought of being the butt of the locals’ joke, he grabbed his rifle and fired five shots at random into the jungle. This obviously startled the boy quite badly, who said the stones were the fault of Satan and ran off, never to be seen by Grottendieck again. Grottendieck interpreted this as the boy being so scared of the poltergeist that he fled; more likely he was terrified of being shot by this raging madman.
As soon as the boy fled for his life, the stones stopped falling. But they littered the ground of Grottendieck’s hut and, picking one up, he found that they were warm to the touch. They didn’t disappear by the morning, meaning he didn’t hallucinate them, and he counted around 20 stones in total. In case Grottendieck’s act of waking up the boy, sending him alone into the dark jungle and then firing a gun madly towards him didn’t tell you everything you needed to know about him, he ends the first part of his report with a particularly flat attempt at comedy: ‘The worst part of this strange fact was that my boy was gone, so that I had to take care of my breakfast myself, and did not get a cup of coffee nor toast!’
The SPR, intrigued (or perhaps bemused), wrote back to Grottendieck to glean further information from him that would help them to draw conclusions about the phenomena. Grottendieck firstly noted that these instances of stone-throwing poltergeists are common in Dutch colonies, and recalled reading about various cases reported frequently in newspapers. In answer to the SPR’s questions, Grottendieck revealed some interesting aspects of the phenomena – it’s odd that he neglected to mention them in his initial report. He insisted that the boy was not the culprit; the stones fell while the boy was in the other room, sleeping, and continued to fall while Grottendieck sent him into the jungle on his own. Pressed on the temperature of the stones, he went into further detail and explained that they were hot – certainly hotter than they should have been if they had simply been held in the hand or in a pocket – and likened them to meteorites. Weirdly, too, he described the way the stones fell slowly, abnormally slowly, as though feather-light, yet they touched the ground with a loud thud as though they had slammed down with violent force.
The SPR, in their criticism of the case, still thought it was likely the boy was causing the phenomena. It certainly explains why he bolted as soon as Grottendieck began firing at the poltergeist – presumably there was something of a language barrier between them, and perhaps the boy thought he would be Grottendieck’s next target when he found out that he was causing the stones to fall. Moreover, three years had passed between the incident and Grottendieck’s report to the SPR. While the idea of the stones feeling hot and seeming to fall down slowly are peculiar details in the case, it may well be that Grottendieck had misremembered and exaggerated certain aspects. The stones were warm to the touch, but in Grottendieck’s fear he may have thought they felt hotter, and remembered it that way; the stones perhaps fell at a normal pace, but having been jolted awake and feeling threatened enough to fire his gun into the dark, Grottendieck may have felt that the moment had slowed down.
What both the Johannesburg and Sumatra cases demonstrate is that poltergeists are taken more as a personal threat than stereotypical ghosts. It’s interesting that both cases, representing hundreds more like them, demonstrate underlying tensions between coloniser and colonised, and these tensions bubble up to the surface in the form of violent phenomena. In these cases particularly, they show, I think, a deep-rooted insecurity and guilt within the minds of imperialists who feel they have incurred the wrath of paranormal forces within a culture they don’t understand. There’s always a sense of being targeted, of being hunted, and of being made to feel vulnerable and powerless in the face of an enemy they cannot control. This, ultimately, is the poltergeist: something faceless, persistent, malevolent and uncontrollable.
