A ‘ghost’ takes to council house.
By Ray King.
Heavy footsteps marched across the floor of a council house bedroom early today… but the room was empty. Downstairs 18-year-old Bob Stoker, who had been helping friends move into the house in Cavendish Road, Kirkholt, Rochdale, got more and more scared.
A scraping noise in the corner would be followed by the sound of footsteps – then more scraping. It went on for more than an hour, thud, thud, scrape, scrape, and in the end Bob lost his nerve. “I just couldn’t take any more,” he said, today. “I ran to the vicarage across the road but couldn’t raise anybody, then I rang the police. The policeman heard the noises too, but there was just no explanation. I’d never been so scared in my life.”
The incident went down officially on the message pad at Rochdale Police Station as “suspected poltergeist.”
The house’s new tenant, Mr Tony Dean, was out when things began to go thump in the night, but he said today: “I feel a bit apprehensive about sleeping there now.”
Meanwhile, Rochdale police had a strange manifestation of their own last night. At midnight all the lift[s] began to operate in their new HQ under construction, going up and down for an hour. A site engineer said: “We have no definite explanation, but dust could have affected the electricity contact points.”
Manchester Evening News, 20th October 1971.