Hollingbourne Ghost.
Unseen hand that flung coal and potatoes.
Bangs at night.
Following the sensation caused by the announcement that a Shoreham girl, Vera Obbard, was the object of attack of some ghost or spirit who projected showers of rubble at her while living at Hollingbourne, I interviewed her at her parents home in Shoreham, where she has retreated (writes a ‘Sevenoaks Chronicle’ reporter). I did not find the terror-stricken girl I had been led rather to expect, but a bonny eleven year old schoolgirl whom one would take to be nearer thirteen, with dark hair and merry eyes, and a face that was exceptionally ready to break into a smile.
Vera, her mother explained to me, had been staying at Hollingbourne for about fourteen months with her grandparents, Mr and Mrs Sears. Until a few weeks ago she was very happy there, and then odds and ends were continually being thrown at the house where Vera lived by some mysterious hand.
Things left in the garden would disappear, to return in this peculiar way. Occasionally during the night a big bang would come from the back door and disturb the household. Mrs Sears and others were struck by the falling missiles – potatoes, buttons, coal, brick-bats, anything – but although a very thorough search was made more than once, the hand that threw them could not be traced.
The attack seemed to be directed against Vera and it was in order to prevent a nervous breakdown – twice she collapsed at school – that the doctor advised that she should return to Shoreham. There, however, no ghosts seem to have followed her, at any rate there have been no showers of brick-bats or potatoes.
Of the big man with the black beard that Vera is stated to have said she saw, she would say very little, except that he “was tall and had a white beard and not a black one.”
“It was going on for a week before we told anybody about it,” she said. “Things were continually hitting the back door, sometimes at night and then we would find them on the door step in the morning. A lot of coal was thrown, about half a pailful altogether, and it scratched the paint-work. It was not until the things started coming indoors that my grandfather told the police.
“One evening when I was sitting near the back door with my grandmother some pieces of coal came right inside. One afternoon I went to tea at a house two doors away, and while I was inside things were flung at the door of that house. Another day when there were a lot of people outside our house coal and potatoes were thrown just the same, and one person was hit. Of course, they tried to find out who had thrown them, but they could not.”
In reply to my question Vera admitted that she “was very frightened and was glad to get away to Shoreham.”
Since Vera left Hollingbourne, however, the coal throwing has ceased and has not followed her to Shoreham. No definite explanation has yet been found, some attributing the episode to a practical joker, others, more fancifully minded, to some spirit influence directed against the girl.
Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, 31st October 1930.