Mystery sobbing sounds in a semi-detached Barnsley home.
By Andrew MacKenzie.
A week after he had moved into his house at Harbrough Hill Road, Barnsley, Yorkshire, in August 1965, Mr Michael White, aged 24, a glassworker, was sitting in the front room with his wife, Helga, and their ten-year-old son Garry when they heard knockings on the wall behind a china cabinet. The force of the knocks was enough to make the objects in the china cabinet rattle.
Behind this solid wall there were stairs. Upstairs the White’s two other children, Steven, aged four, and Michelle, aged eleven months, were sleeping. Mr and Mrs White did not attach undue importance to the knocks, but they signalled the start of a series of strange events which lasted ten weeks and which resulted in Mrs White’s becoming afraid to be left alone in the house in the evening.
On November 1, Mr White went to the housing office in Barnsley Town and asked for the family to be moved to another house. The story of the disturbances came to light when Mr White called at the Barnsley office of the Sheffield Morning Telegraph and asked if there was anyone in Barnsley who could tell him how to “get shut of” a poltergeist.
Mr and Mrs White were interviewed at their home by Mr Donald Chamberlain of the Morning Telegraph staff, and it was his account of the disturbances in the Morning Telegraph of November 2 that made me decide to go to Barnsley from London as soon as possible in the hope that the outbreak was still in progress. However, the disturbances stopped about that time, but I still wanted to see Mr and Mrs White and to get their own account of what had happened in the house. I felt that it was impossible to form any tentative conclusions about the case until I had seen the people who had reported it and inspected the house and the neighbourhood.
Mr Chamberlain kindly agreed to get what answers he could to a six-page questionnaire I had sent him. This involved him in inquiries at the Town Hall in Barnsley, at the National Coal board offices, at the White’s home and among neighbours. Before I went to Barnsley I studied an Ordnance Survey map with a scale of 25.344 inches to the mile which showed the section of the town where the house stood. Answers to the questionnaire revealed that there were old coal workings 200 yards and 500 yards below the house which had last been worked in the 1930s. A nearby drift main (a mine in which coal is taken from a hillside) had been worked out about the same time.
I arrived in Barnsley in the evening of Saturday, November 2. Mr Chamberlain told me about the effects mining had had on Barnsley. He said that about 20,000,000 tons of coal was in the process of being taken from under the town, that it was common for houses only ten years old to be riddled with cracks, and that subsidence was so bad in some parts of the town that many end houses in terraces had to be shored up.
Harbrough Hill Road has a gradient of one in ten. The Whites’ semi detached house, the second house from the corner with Denton Street, is a solidly-built building about 30 years old, stone fronted and with brick walls at the side and back. I could not see any cracks in the walls of the house or any signs of the effects of subsidence in the house or in the back garden. Mr and Mrs White had not kept any list of the events in the house. They said they had taken over the tenancy on August 2, had moved into th ehouse on August 11, and the first disturbance was a week later, probably on August 17.
Most of the disturbances consisted of strange noises. Mr and Mrs White differed about the frequency of them. Mr White thought they had occurred every day, his wife every other day. Some time after the disturbances had started Mr White was in the bath upstairs (the bathroom is near the wall of the open side of the house) when he heard four loud slow knocks on the bathroom door. He immediately got out of the bath, dressed, and looked outside, but no one was there. When he went downstairs Mrs White told him that the children had been running around but they had not been upstairs. She had not heard any knocks.
Another time they were in the kitchen, which is at the back of the house, when Mr White and Garry heard knocks on the top of the wooden sideboard but Mrs White did not hear these sounds. Once, at tea-time, Mrs White had heard knocks running up and down the side of the wall, but when she looked outside she could not see anyone who could have caused the sounds. Garry said that he had also heard the knocks. The sound of footsteps was also heard at times.
Early in October Mrs White was in the kitchen when she heard the sound of sobbing coming from upstairs. She knew that no member of the family was there. The sound was described by her as “something between crying and howling” and was heard two or three times.
However, the disturbances were not confined to noises. One evening, when Mr White was at work and the two small children were asleep upstairs, Mrs White and Garry were in the front room when they both saw the door handle turn.
Three strange incidents occurred in the kitchen. One was when the family was sitting at the tea table. Steven reached for his knife but it wriggled away from his hand, moved round a sugar bowl directly in its path, and came to a stop 21 inches from the boy. The table was covered by a plastic tablecloth. The second, and most alarming of the three incidents, happened when Garry was kneeling on a stool and washing pots in the sink to help his mother, who was feeling ill. At the time Mrs White was lying down on the couch on the opposite side of the room and her husband was offering brandy to her. He heard a gurgling sound, looked round, and saw that Garry’s face was in the water and that he was gripping the front of the sink with both hands. Mr White promptly pulled the boy’s head out of the water. Garry supported his father’s account of this incident and told me that “something was pushing on the back of my neck.” He readily admitted that he had been frightened at the time.
The third strange happening concerned two saucepans which Mrs White was carrying from the pantry, one in each hand, when she felt them “pulled” from her hands by some strong force. They flew about nine feet. One hit Mr White on the back of the head as he was kneeling by the sideboard, and the other fell about six feet away from him by the door which led to the stairs and was parallel to where he was kneeling.
What are we to make of this account of the disturbances given by Mr and Mrs White? I knew before I went to the house that the neighbours on either side had not heard any strange sounds, that the previous occupier of the house had not reported any disturbances, that the council had never had complaints about strange noises or happenings from anyone else in Harbrough Hill Road, and that nothing unusual had happened when visitors were in the Whites’ home.
The family’s three-bedroomed house had recently been acquired by the council and was scheduled for demolition at some time in the future from eighteen months onwards so that the road could be widened.
I thought that possibly the noises which had so worried and puzzled the family had come from underground, the sounds having been conducted upwards by the pipes on the outside of the house. I was unable to establish whether the drift mine was abandoned before or after the houses in Harbrough Hill Road were built. No one on the staff of the National Coal Board knew if there was a shaft from the abandoned drift mine under the house. However, I thought I should take into account the fact that there were signs that the drift mine had been worked within a hundred yards or so of the Whites’ house on the opposite side of the road, and that the Barnsley Main and Monk Bretton pits were still being worked in the vicinity.
The sounds made by the movement of water underground conducted through pipes to the house above could, I thought, explain at least some of the noises described as footsteps and knockings. I tried to reproduce the sounds the family had described by knocking on the pipes and the door at the side of the house while Mr White listened upstairs, but he declared that the sounds he had heard did not resemble my knocks.
I took the knife which Steven had used at tea and placed it on the table, which I shook vigorously, but I was unable to make the knife move. Unfortunately, the plastic tablecloth which had been on the table when the boy’s knife wriggled away had since been burned by Mrs White, so it was not possible to reproduce exactly the conditions that applied at the time of the occurrence which, even if it was trivial, was still puzzling.
Now we have to consider the credibility of Mr and Mrs White as witnesses. There were some discrepancies in the story they told me and Mr Chamberlain’s report in the Morning Telegraph but, on the whole, they impressed me as being good witnesses. They differed from each other when they were relating an event and this, to me, was proof that their accounts had not been rehearsed. I do not think that Mr and Mrs White would have told a story in the hearing of their son about what was supposed to have happened to him without running the risk of contradiction from him. Garry seemed to me to be an intelligent boy and obviously, was not frightened of his parents. Not only did he not contradict the story about the incident of the ducking in the sink but he supported it.
Finally, we have to ask: Could the events described by Mr and Mrs White, and supported by their son, really have happened? Here I find the best proof of all for their story. Mr and Mrs White professed to know nothing about what had happened in other poltergeist-type outbreaks. I cannot believe they had spent days at local libraries “mugging up” old poltergeist tales before producing their own.
I suggest, therefore, that the sobbing sounds heard were cuased by underground water. I could not gain any information locally about the underground streams but it could be expected that water would gather in disused shafts or fissured in a hill where there had been much mining.
Now we may consider the strange incident at the sink. What probably happened was that Garry White was not pushed but that the sink came towards him. The tremor of the building at Barnsley was probably due to the movement of earth in the hillside through subsidence. Another possible explanation, however, is that the movement of the building tilted the stool on which Garry was kneeling forward. The sink was nearly full. I think that the boy, so astonished by what had happened to him that he could not move, grasped the sink with both hands as his face went under water. It was then that his father pulled him away from the sink.
It is significant I feel that so many of the disturbances at Barnsley centred round the kitchen. The two rooms in any house where there are more pipes than in any other part are the kitchen and the bathroom. It is more than a coincidence, I believe, that in so many “Haunted” houses noises are heard more frequently in the bathroom than in any other room and that the “ghost” or “poltergeist” so frequently “haunts” these two rooms. However, this is obviously only a partial explanation for the location of the phenomena of the poltergeist type. Poltergeist cases were reported long before the invention of modern plumbing.
For the reasons which are given here I accept that the events in the home of Mr and Mrs White occurred more or less as they had described them and they must have had a very worrying time.
“The Unexplained” by Andrew McKenzie [sic] is published by Arthur Barker Ltd. at 25s.
Liverpool Daily Post (Welsh Edition), 9th February 1967.