Family living in fear.
By Bob Riches.
A grandmother and her family are living in fear as a spate of mysterious events haunts them. A distraught Mrs Ellen Cook (68) and her daughter, Audrey Parker, are now desperately seeking council help to rid themselves of what they claim could be a poltergeist. And local vicar, the Rev. Harry Catchpole, was called in this week to say prayers at the home, 5 Windsor Place, Great Cornard.
The family says that on Monday and Tuesday: An infra red grill fell off a shelf, narrowly missing 16-year-old grandson Alan who was washing up. A yucca plant flew off a table. A chest of drawers moved from a bedroom wall. A china cupboard toppled and smashed the front. And, literally, things went bump in the night.
Mrs Cook told the Free Press on Tuesday: “Last night at 11 o’clock all the lights suddenly went on and we couldn’t turn them off. then I was laying in bed and I felt it move. I could hear heavy breathing. It was terrible, honestly. I’ve been here three and a half years and nothing like this has happened before.”
Mrs Parker said: “I am worried to death. Whatever it is it seems to follow Alan. Everything happened in one day. I was on the phone to the council when he screamed. The infra red grill had come off the shelf. God knows what would have happened if it had hit him. I wish the council could do something for us.”
Alan himself said he saw a clock fall from the wall while he was sitting in the lounge. “I couldn’t get myself to touch it.”
And neighbour Mrs Elizabeth Thomas, who lives next door at number six, told us: “I heard the bed going. I heard it all, the crashing of the cabinet and the clock. It was weird.”
Mr Catchpole, the vicar of St Andrew’s, confirmed that he went tot he house and said some prayers. “There certainly seemed to be manifestations there,” he said yesterday. “The things that they described would suggest a poltergeist.”
Babergh District Council’s chief housing officer, Mr Ivan Armstrong, said the situation would be investigated if it was reported to him. “Matters of this kind are very delicate,” he added.
A distraught Ellen Cook is comforted by her daughter Audrey Parker and grandson Alan as she surveys the chaos in the kitchen.
Suffolk and Essex Free Press, 8th May 1986.