Ghostly’ moving pictures
And the clock runs on
Spirit’s disapproval of girl’s late hours
Restless nights
Queer black country happenings
Two families in the Black Country are becoming nerve-wracked by what they believe to be the attentions of spirits. In a house in Walsall the visitations are made manifest by weird nocturnal rappings, and in a house in Dudley by the strange conduct of a picture and a kitchen clock. In both cases the assistance of a Spiritualistic medium has been sought.
[…]
Stranger still are the happenings at Dudley, where a young woman named Ames, living with relatives in Stafford-street, is the victim of weird nocturnal experiences. A framed photograph of herself which hangs on a wall of her bedroom will suddenly begin to swing gently on its nail, pendulum fashion, and so continue for a quarter of an hour at a stretch. It has been stopped and adjusted by Miss Ames, only to resume swinging immediately her hands have left it.
A cheap clock which she takes from the kitchen mantelpiece to her bedroom every night also plays strange and unaccountable tricks. On several occasions, after glancing at the clock on waking in the morning she jumped out of bed and dressed hurriedly only to find that the clock had gained exactly one hour during the night. This seemed strange, as it never gained nor lost a minute during the day. One morning she was lying awake with the gas partially on, as was the custom, when she heard a clock downstairs strike two. Turning to her own clock she was just in time to see the hands rushing forward an hour just as if someone was turning them by means of the hands adjustor.
She declares that since then she has kept awake purposely, and has from time to time seen a recurrence of the phenomenon.
The young woman is herself a Spiritualist, and expresses the belief that her spirit “guide,” whose name she understands is Michael, is trying to convey to her his disapproval of the late hours which she invariably keeps (she generally sits up reading until after midnight), and at the same time adjusts the clock in order to ensure that she does not arrive late to work. Nevertheless it has all tended to interfere with her sleep and badly shake her nerves.
Birmingham Weekly Mercury, 28th May 1933.