Half a house haunted.
Ghostly rappings.
Half a house at Bow – the lower half – is reputed to be haunted in consequence of a nightly performance of ghostly rappings. In the top half of the house lives a man whose presence is said to inspire the rappings. Three hundred people stood last night in Sherwood-street watching the house. Some had stood there before – the rappings started 12 nights ago; some had even been in the house. But nobody was allowed inside last night.
Lights glowed in the first-floor windows; all was dark below. A woman who had spent two hours – from 11 pm till 1 am – in a room on the ground floor, said: “You may feel plucky when you go in, but you’re not plucky when you come out. It’s no laughing matter. I laughed before the knocking started, but then the tune was changed. There was no more joking. I wouldn’t like to be in there again.”
A Sherwood-street resident said that the rappings were only heard in the room in which the occupier of the house happened to be. “The back room where he sleeps in the place it is heard most,” he said, “but it travles from room to room as he goes. Sometimes there are five raps, sometimes seven and sometimes twelve – but never more than twelve. Sometimes a window-pane is rapped and sometimes the frame. Why, you can hear it in the backyard.” The man added that he took no notice of the rappings until his brother-in-law – a policeman – visited the house. “He was mystified,” said the resident.
Daily News (London), 17th February 1931.