It all began when flying crockery hit the wall…
Flying crockery started all the trouble. It came whirling across the room and crashed in splinters against the lean-to kitchen wall of an old cottage at Oakfield Road, Frome. Workmen from Chippenham had been tearing down a row of cottages last Friday in clearing a site for a new road and council houses. Built in 1870, the cottages, their beams riddled with dry rot and falling into decay, had been empty for about two years.
Mr Leslie Mitchell, one of the workmen, tells how he and a workmate were coming through from the main portion of a cottage into what was the old kitchen when a piece of crockery smashed on the wall beside them. They thought it was another workmate, hiding in a large slate tank, having a joke on them. But the tank was empty. No one else was there.
The joke wore thin when a wooden box suddenly appeared to be following them across the empty room. Then another piece of crockery crashed against the wall near them. Mr Mitchell says he and his companion made a leap through the open window for the garden. A colleague, working outside, convinced them that he had not been enjoying a private “Aunt Sally” joke at their expense.
Then, later, more crockery took to flight, tattered curtains suddenly pulled across a window, shutters in another closed – all, seemingly, without a human hand to help them.
Talk to the men about it. Spooks, ghosts, wrathful poltergeists – they will agree that something supernatural was behind those old-fashioned guided missiles. They are not easily frightened, but they felt they would willingly let someone else finish the demolition work.
The Frome Urban Council’s surveyor, Mr C G P Lewis, was told what had happened. On Monday he and two assistants went along to the site. They found nothing. Our representative also had a look round, but there were no repeat performances. The photographer’s film failed to record any ghostly images.
There is a report that a grandmother of a Frome woman who formerly lived in the end house several times told of having seen a “ghost,” but no one, apparently, believed her.
Somerset Standard, 1st March 1963.
