Blind city woman says ‘It’s eerie’
Switch puzzle scares family.
The Newcastle home of a blind woman and her two children has become a house of fear. Strange, unexplained things keep happening to the electric switches and gas taps. “It all started more than a week ago,” said Mrs Violet Robinson, of Brock Street, Byker. “We came home and found that the lights were off and that the electricity had been switched off at the main.” She said: “We had not touched them previously. Then we found that the radio would not work and the wires had been taken out of the side. Since then, electricity switches were down when we left them up, the gas heater tap was turned off and the plug of the television set suddenly fell out for no reason. On one occasion we discovered that the meter clock was turning when we weren’t using electricity. We traced it to the bedroom where the electric blanket was, but we hadn’t turned it on. My children and I are scared and just cannot think of an explanation for it all,” she added.
Mrs Robinson, who has lived in the council house for two years, called in the police, but they were unable to offer any explanation either. She is so afraid to stay in the house that she has taken the children to relatives and spent one night in a hospital rather than go home. Mrs Robinson said: “We cannot go on imposing in this way on people. I really don’t know where to turn now. It is all so frightening and we are all afraid to stay in the house.”
Her two children, Eunice, aged 12 and James, 13 also told of incidents of gas taps being turned on when they had been left off. They even did their own experiment of leaving the main switch off and going into another room. When they returned it was on – yet no one had been in the room. “I don’t know where all this will end. I only wish some independent witness could come and see what is happening as the authorities I have spoken to seem to think I am imagining everything,” added MRs Robinson.
Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 8th July 1964.