The penny poltergeist – and the boy.
By Sunday Dispatch Reporter.
In an attempt to rid his 12-year-old son of the poltergeist he believes is following him, Joe Pearcey last night tried to sell four bicycles. Mr Pearcey blames the poltergeist for pennies, spanners, clothes pegs, and knives which fly through the air at his home in Esmond-road, Chiswick, W., when his son David is about.
“I think it has something to do with our new bicycles,” Mr Pearcey told me. “Nothing has been right since I bought them. My boy never goes out on his without an accident. So I’m going to sell them.”
Said Mrs May Pearcey: “I think it’s some sort of warning. Ever since David got his bike he has been having accidents. None of us is going to ride a bike again.”
The strange things that happen when David is around centre mainly on pennies. As he walks through the house he is followed by the clink, clink of coins hitting the floor. I have been in the house when it has happened. But never in the same room. I have heard things but seen nothing.
“It only seems to happen when David is by himself,” said Mrs Pearcey. Now she refuses to sleep in the house.
Weekly Dispatch (London), 22nd July 1956.
Penny-dropping spirit departs.
No more pennies have been materialising at the feet of the boy from South Acton since the parents called in a clergyman to perform an exorcism ceremony. To all appearances, the penny-dropping spirit has beat a retreat. The Rev. SJS Beebee, Vicar of St Michael’s and All Angels, did the job. It was the first time he had performed the ancient ceremony. This week he recounted the experience. “At the time I was at a Boy Scout social. An urgent call came through for me to go to the house. I only had a rough idea of the procedure of the Exorcism Ceremony so I took a small bottle of holy water along in my pocket.”
The penny-haunted boy was sitting on the bed when he arrived and was “obviously frightened.” His parents were trying to find a logical explanation for the pennies – also in the movement of a spanner which hurled itself through the window. Continued Father Beebee: “I sprinkled the boy with holy water and then sprinkled it around his bedroom.” With the parents either sid eof him he said prayers for the boy’s release from the spirit. Then he left. The following morning a Sunday congregation prayed for the boy.
“So far the ceremony is successful,” said the vicar. “But I’m not prepared to say that it has gone for good. But if the trouble does occur again, I’m quite prepared to repeat the service.”
Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush Gazette, 24th August 1956.
Ghosts that throw their weight about.
A coin-throwing poltergeist was recently exorcised from a Chiswick, London home. They are queer things, these ghosts who throw their weight about. One gremlin in London’s East End rumpled beds… another to Lincoln made noises in the attic… another started a “beer bottle polka” in a Blackpool hotel… and one spirit rapped back to an investigator in a little Ulster village. A tough Devon poltergeist rained “demon blows” on a bed giving a servant a black eye, but in Bristol housing authorities were able to “exorcise” an alleged spirit.
You usually think of a ghost as a pallid figure draped in a bed-sheet floating above a tomb, or a veiled apparition trailing, with or without head, down the corridors of some remote, echoing mansion .But there are livelier ghosts know to psychic investigators as poltergeists. Translated from German the name means a row-making spirit. The poltergeist is the apparition that throws its weight about: you never see it in person, but you hear plenty!
An odd poltergeist was reported from the prim London suburb of Chiswick the other day. David Pearcy, a 13-year-old schoolboy, experienced terror when, for no apparent reason, pennies and halfpennies began to fall at his feet from nowhere. The poltergeist was exorcised by a local Anglican priest – with the boy at a secret address far from London – and the trouble ceased.
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Ballymena Weekly Telegraph, 20th December 1956.
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0001706/19561220/030/0003