A German Spook.
The mind and the nerves of the village of Dorgelin, in Mecklenburg, are much exercised by a spook which is spooking there at a great rate just now. The manifestations take place in a certain farm-house. Every night slippers, hurled by unseen hands, fly through the air; curtains are, by the same mysterious means, torn down and dragged across the room; chairs, with men sitting in them, are suddenly caught up on high, and then tipped over, spilling their occupiers on to the floor. The room in which the three maid-servants of the house sleep has been chosen by the spook as his favourite playground, and to judge by his doings there he really must be some relation to Miss Florence Marryat’s celebrated “Peter,” or else Peter himself, gone to Germany.
The poor girls got so frightened that they refused to go to bed unless three or four men sat up to watch in an adjoining apartment. But when the maids, driven out of their own room by the ghost’s antics, run for refuge into the room occupied by the watchers, a shower of slippers, pillows, and potatoes follow them, and the most terrible knockings and thumpings are heard, but nothing can be seen.
The perplexed farmer has called in the aid of the head policeman of the village, and also the doctor, to unravel the mystery, and it appears that while the policeman stays in the haunted room there are only very slight manifestations, and while the doctor is there, none at all. But the moment they go out of it the noises begin worse than ever, so that the spook evidently fears science even more than the law. But the mystery still remains a mystery, and Peter, or whoever the spook is, is still undiscovered.
Bognor Regis Observer, 24th April 1895 (and many others).