‘Morose Italian’ driving three families from their homes.
Three families at the Welsh border village of Chirk are appealing to the council to rehouse them because they claim that a “morose Italian” haunts their wooden flats – a hutted prisoner of war camp converted to ease the housing shortage. Psychic research investigators and a medium who visited the flats have stated that there is “something uncanny” about the place. The medium described the manifestation as a “melancholy spirit.”
Experiences described by residents seem to tally with the suggestion that the “spirit” is a dejected character. The “ghost” is mainly confined to one back bedroom in that part of the flats occupied by MRs Rose Verschuren and her three young children. Previous occupants have tried to sleep in the bedroom but most have emerged terrified during the night.
No one has seen a shape but several witnesses speak of hearing peculiar muffled footsteps and the sound of a bed creak in the empty bedroom. No logical explanation for the sounds has been found. Members of the family and friends interested in laying the “ghost” have slept in the haunted room and some awoke to find their limbs numb as if someone unseen was lying across their legs. Another witness, an ex-soldier with battle experience, admitted being “scared stiff” when, while smoking a cigarette to calm his nerves, he sensed that “someone” in the room was begging for the stub.
Elsewhere in the flats taps have been mysteriously turned on during the night.
Birmingham Daily Post, 25th October 1955.
Denbighshire Council House Haunted.
Glasgow, Dec. 30: Mrs Rose Verschuren, who lives in a council house in the Scottish village of Chirk, Denbighshire [sic], told the local authority that she could do nothing about it when she was ordered either to stop annoying her neighbours or get out. For the bangs and other noises they had complained of, she contends, are caused by ghosts.
Spiritualists who have visited her home have assured Mrs Verschuren that she has many kinds of spirits here. Her one consolation is that they added that there were no dangerous ones among them.
A blind man, a Salvation Army woman and another woman who said she was a nurse among prisoners of war during her life are among the phantoms which various witnesses claim to have seen in the house. Paul and James Corrigan, Mrs Verschuren’s two brothers, who live with her, have confirmed each other’s storeis of seeing the nurse, a nun and a bishop.
The local priest has blessed the home in an effort to exorcise the spirits, but, says Mrs Verschuren, “it made no difference.”
Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 31st December 1955.