Spooky goings on.
Sitting quietly in their lounge in Reading, pensioner Mrs Adams and her daughter Pauline were not to know that after 18 months of terror they would be forced out by an invisible aggressor. The year was 1979. The pest was a poltergeist and it all began with an unexplained movement of the furniture. The story is told in the book Modern Mysteries of Britain, written by Janet and Colin Bord, regular feature writers for the magazine Fortean Times (FT). FT was set up 24 years ago and has recorded many strange sightings in the south of England including ghosts and out of place animals such as big cats.
Mrs Adams’ experience stands out because she had to put up with what seemed to be a particularly violent poltergeist in her house for more than a year. FT joint editor Paul Sieveking said: “With poltergeist, often there is a young teenager in the house and some kind of energy from them is causing things to whizz around. But not every case involves an adolescent.”
The case in Reading did not. The poltergeist began breaking large objects like televisions and radios and threw cups and glasses at the two women in the house. Money was shredded, the electricity supply mysteriously cut off and gas leaked and cleared up without human intervention. When Mrs Adams’ grandson, Stephen, visited the house, his clothes reportedly flew off his body without tearing and reappered one by one on top of a door. People were injured, including Mrs Adams who was struck on the head with a medicine box. A priest and mediums failed to stop the incidents happening and the family was eventually forced to flee.
Reading Evening Post, 16th August 1996.
Mrs Adams with a sample of the crockery broken by the poltergeist at her home in Reading.
… the Reading (Berkshire) poltergeist which began in late 1979 and continued for eighteen months, a case well worth describing in more detail here. The victims were Mrs Adams, in her eighties, and her fifty-year-old daughter Pauline. It began with the movement of furniture and often the breaking of objects, sometimes quite large, like television sets and radios (several of each being destroyed). Poltergeists are not usually so violent and destructive as this one. When the two women sat downstairs they were often bombarded with china and glassware. All their crockery was smashed in this way, though fortunately neither of them was hurt. Even furniture was smashed. The electricity would go off for no reason, clocks would stop, the bathroom flooded without reason, there was a gas leak which could not be traced and later cleared up spontaneously, and the poltergeist even destroyed or dematerialized pound notes – Pauline’s holiday savings were shredded and she lost £50 this way.
Other people also experienced the poltergeist activity, among them Mrs Adams’s seventeen-year-old grandson Stephen. One day he was standing in the living-room when his clothes flew off his body and disappeared, leaving him dressed only in his underpants. Not knowing what to do, they asked ‘it’ to return the garments, which it did. They reappeared one by one on top of the door. Stephen commented, ‘I had to unbutton all the shirt buttons and unlace the shoes before I could put them on. They had disappeared all buttoned and laced up, just as I was wearing them.’
Other items had disappeared over the months, including seven pairs of Pauline’s shoes – and thirteen of the missing shoes reappeared immediately after Stephen’s clothes, falling one by one over the door. The fourteenth shoe is still missing. The dematerialisation of items in this way reminds us of the cases of teleportation described in Chapter 15. This is one phenomenon that is definitely not acceptable to science – but it seems to happen nevertheless. There are many other examples in poltergeist lore.
Poltergeists rarely injure people physically, only frighten them. As noted before, the Reading poltergeist was particularly violent, and did cause injury on several occasions. A friend of the family was hit on the head by a packet of butter from her shopping basket, and on another occasion her husband was struck on the forehead by a house number which flew off the doorpost as he was about to photograph it. It originally belonged to the next house, but had removed itself to the Adamses’ door, making their number 121 into 1231; and he was trying to photograph it as evidence, but the poltergeist obviously did not approve. Worst of all, Mrs Adams herself was struck on the head by a small medicine tablet box, and the wound needed two stitches.
The Adamses called in a priest to perform an exorcism, which worked temporarily, but the phenomena soon began again. They also called in mediums, who again had only limited success in quietening things down. Finally they moved into a new flat to escape their tormentor.
Modern Mysteries of Britain, by J and C Bord (1987).