Mrs Esther Horlock has put up for five years with the knocking on doors and windows of her council home. She said yesterday: “Sometimes I get so mad I swear at him or shout ‘Come in, knocker, there’s a cup of tea waiting.’ My family has kept watch with the lights out, and although we’ve heard banging we have not seen a soul near the house.”
The vicar, the Rev. Rex Holyhead, siad: “I intend to search into the matter to see if I can help.”
The People, 15th October 1972.
Phantom knocker baffles police.
Police probing the case of the “phantom knocker” have given up the ghost. Now a priest has been called in to try and solve the mysterious loud hand rapping on the doors of a council house. For 50-year-old housewife Mrs Esther Horlock believes her four-bed council home in Amethyst [Road] Somerford, near Christchurch, Hants, is haunted. “There can be no other explanation,” she said. “I’m so terrified I won’t answer the door at night.”
Whenever she has answered the knock at her back door nobody has been there. At first Mrs Horlock and her family thought it was probably a practical joker or a crank. “It has been going on for five years – but only during the winter months between the hours of 8.00 p.m. and midnight,” she said. Several times she has called the police and on occasions officers have kept an all-night vigil inside the house waiting to pounce on the phantom knocker.
“Once when they were here there was a knock on the back door and a policeman rushed round the back but found nobody there,” said Mrs Horlock. “In a bid to catch the culprit I have sprinkled flour on the paths, flower beds and doorsteps. But after the banging no footprints were left.”
A police spokesman at Christchurch said: “We are totally baffled. We have done all we can to solve the mystery and now we feel there is nothing more we can do.” The Rev. Rex Holyhead, resident priest at St. Mary’s Church, Somerford, said: “I have promised to look into the matter. If I find the knocking is being caused by some strange spook I shall take the appropriate action, which probably means exorcising the place.”
Evening News (London), 27th October 1972.