London Ghost Plays Piano (Organ Effects).
A ghost which has already driven out the lodgers is now driving a widow and her 23-year-old daughter from their home in Golders Green, N.W. For three months they have had no peace and now they are putting up the house for sale. Among other things attributed to the ghost is “unearthly organ music” coming from a piano. “We heard it off and on from 10 o’clock in the morning until four in the afternoon,” said the mother, “and you can’t imagine how beautiful it was.” In despair the mother wrote to Mr Harry Price, honorary secretary of the London University Council for Psychical Investigation, giving details of the “haunting” and asking his help.
Yesterday morning I accompanied him on his first visit (writes a News Chronicle reporter). The house is like a hundred others in Golders Green – pleasant, with large windows, and set in a pretty little garden. The mother, a soldier’s widow, was on the point of tears several times as she told us her story, and the daughter shivered with fear. Nothing abnormal occurred during our visit.
Strange sounds were first noticed two years ago, and gradually worked up to a climax of bangs, falls, knockings, footsteps and sighings which sometimes kept the family up all night. “I am worn out and can’t stand much more of it,” said the mother. “Besides, it is taking my living from me. My lodgers refuse to stay. Last week a new lodger who seemed very happy here went upstairs to fetch something, and when he came down he told me he was leaving at once. He would not tell me the reason as he said I would laugh at him. But I knew what it was. He had seen the ghost.”
She herself saw an apparition move across an upstairs room some time ago, but said nothing of it. Recently the daughter saw it in the same room, and ran in terror to her mother. With no apparent cause, doors have shut and opened and fottsteps gone up and down stairs at all hours. “Hollow knocks” have been heard on doors and walls, and heavy footsteps on the floors of empty rooms. Bedclothes were gently but firmly pulled from the bed of one terried lodger, who was awakened by the movement, and another was disturbed by the sound of someone breathing beside him. Four people have heard the “unearthly organ music coming from the piano.”
A suicide is alleged to have taken place in th ehouse during a previous tenancy. “I know of no haunted house in the Metropolitan district of London,” Mr Price told me, “and suburban cases are extremely rare. London is unhealthy for ghosts. Most hauntings occur north of the Midlands.”
Daily News (London), 18th August 1938.
Weird Happenings In London House.
A London mother and her 23-years-old daughter are being driven out of their house by a “ghost” which has given them no peace for three months. The house is now offered for sale.
In despair her mother wrote to Mr Harry Price, honorary secretary of the London University Council for Psychical Investigation, giving details and asking his help.
A “News-Chronicle” representative accompanied the investigator to the house in Golder’s Green – a pleasant house, full of large windows, and set in a pretty little garden.
The mother, a soldier’s widow, was on the point of tears several times as she told her story, and the daughter shivered with fear in the broad daylight. Nothing abnormal occurred during the visit.
Strange sounds were first noticed two years ago, and gradually worked up to a climax of bangs, falls, knockings, footsteps and sighings, which sometimes kept the family up all night. “I am worn out, and can’t stand much more of it,” declared the mother. “Besides, it is taking my living from me. My lodgers refuse to stay. Last week a new lodger, who seemed very happy here, went upstairs to fetch something. When he came down he told me he was leaving at once. He would not tell me the reason as he said I would laugh at him. But I knew what it was. He had seen the ghost.”
She herself saw an apparition move across an upstairs room some time ago, but said nothing of it. Recently the daughter saw it in the same room, and ran in terror to her mother. With no apparent cause, doors have shut and opened, and footsteps gone up and down stairs at all hours. “Hollow knocks” have been heard on doors and walls, and heavy footsteps on the floors of empty rooms. Bedclothes were gently but firmly pulled from the bed of one terrified lodger, who was waked by the movement, and another was disturbed by the sound of someone breathing beside him.
Trying to snatch some sleep, in the early afternoon recently, the daughter was roused by two thunderous raps and the opening and banging shut of her door. “I rushed outside,” she told me, “but nobody was there.”
Four people have heard unearthly organ music coming from the piano. “We heard it off and on from 10 o’clock in the morning until four in the afternoon, and you can’t imagine how pitiful it was,” said the mother.
A suicide is alleged to have taken place in the house during a previous tenancy.
Derry Journal, 19th August, 1938.