In 1893 the household of Senor Eduardo Leandro Ballard, the Government inspector of forests in the Sierra of Jacarepagua, near Rio, was subject to continuous annoyance by the fall of stones, and other strange incidents, not referable to ordinary human agency. At the time, the house, situated in the forest, was full of people, seven or eight young men occupying a long narrow dormitory in the upper storey, while other members of the family passed the night on the ground floor. At the foot of the staircase that led to the room above, was a door opening into the dining-room.
Nearly all the disturbances took place in the upper apartment, the door and windows of which were kept closed during the night time. This lithobolia, or stone-throwing, was first noticed between the hours of 11 p.m. and 12 p.m.; but, as the manifestations increased in strength, they exceeded this limit of time more and more until at last they occurred at all hours of the night. At their height they are said to have been frequent for fourteen successive days.
According to the statements of Senor Ballard and his two sons, Eduardo and Alberto, as soon as the young men retired to rest and put out the light, pebbles and bits of mortar, such as might have been picked up outside the house, struck them as they lay in bed, or were heard to roll along the floor. For the first three days this happened only in the dark, the missiles being few and small; but afterwards the pelting took place when lights were burning, and the stones increased so much in size and number that quite a large heap of them could be collected in the morning.
Even when the lads, unable to sleep, sat up all night playing lotto, they were still assailed by the invisible thrower. Yet, in the beginning, no one was disposed to believe that there was anything supernatural in these occurrences. One or other of the young men who slept upstairs was supposed to be amusing himself at the expense of his companions. The occupants of the dormitory suspected each other.
Either as a precaution against trickery, or because they were really frightened, they placed all their beds at one end of the room. At night, before undressing, all submitted to a mutual search; pocekts were turned inside out, and each one seemed anxious to prove that he was not the guilty party. Two of the lads, Senor Guimaraens and Senor Guedes, were more especially regarded with suspicion until it was found that the phenomena occurred in their absence as freely as in their presence.
On their side, Senor Ballard and his eldest son Eduardo, who both scouted the idea of ghostly interference, took steps to discover the supposed trickster. There was no ceiling to the upper room; the roof was, therefore, carefully examined on the outside, and it was found that it was not possible to pass a band under the tiles, none of which showed signs of having been displaced. One moonlight night the work people employed in the forest were secretly placed in a cordon round the house. From the higher ground where they stood they could look down upon the roof and verify that no one threw stones from outside; yet all this time the missiles fell inside the building.
On another occasion Senor Eduardo went upstairs, and having placed all the young men at one end of the dormitory and put out the light, stood facing them with his arms stretched out. In this position, stones coming from behind him – that is, from the unoccupied end of the apartment – whizzed passed his ear without touching him, and having passed over his shoulder, fell at his feet as if they had suddenly changed their direction in the air, or struck against the shutters of the window without injuring any of the persons present.
At that period, a certain Charles Oldham, who had once served as steward on board some vessel and who had the reputation of being a steady and intelligent man, was employed as a kind of factotum in the forest. He came up to Senor Ballard one day, and having remarked that ‘he could not make out what the boys were up to’, asked leave to pass the night with them and find out the truth about the matter. Consent having been obtained, he sat up all night in the upper room and by the aid of a night-light watched closely everything that happened. According to his own statement made next morning to Senor Ballard, he did not once close his eyes, but kept them constantly fixed on the occupants of the beds.
Notwithstanding that no one else was in the apartment, stones were thrown as before, and Charles Oldham, with all his reputed sharpness, was obliged to confess that he could not understand it. This vigilance he maintained on succeeding nights with the same negative result. In like manner, a friend of Senor Ballard’s, Dr Christovani Jose dos Santos, who had laughed heartily at the story of the ghostly disturbances, volunteered to pass a night in the haunted room, confident that he would thus be able to unravel the mystery. When day came, he was an altered man. He showed himself anxious to depart and acknowledged that the alleged occurrences were real; he had no explanation to offer for them, and he did not desire a repetition of his nocturnal experience.
While these uncanny happenings persistently harrassed the household, Dona Joanna, Senor Ballard’s wife, was in a state of ill health and sorely needed rest and tranquility of spirit in order to recover. The young men themselves were without exception depressed and tired out with ceaseless watching and excitement. Senor Ballard’s third son, Jeremias, fell into such a nervous condition that, whenever the manifestations took place, he would be subject to a violent fit of trembling and would seek refuge among his sisters, who were not assailed by the missiles. His system seems to have received permanent injury from these alarms, for down to the date of his death, which occurred from small-pox in 1896, he never regained his former health and elasticity of spirits.
As Senor Ballard points out, it can hardly be supposed that any of the young people, however fond they might be of mystifying others, would, under the circumstances, have carried on this very inconvenient practial joking for such a length of time. Such conduct would, indeed, have shown a want of consideration of which, in his opinion, none of them were capable. All the evidence, therefore, is strongly in favour of the genuineness of these lithobolic phenomena.
Light, 3rd September 1898.