Mysterious flights of bottles.
A despatch in the New York World on the 24th of June says –
An old brick house on Four-and-a-Half street and Missouri avenue is said to be haunted. The building, a three-storey structure, is occupied by a coloured man named Pendleton and his family. The house is kept as a hotel, but at present there are very few guests in it. A few days ago the inmates were startled at sounds indicating a crash of glassware outside. They rushed out and were greeted with a shower of beer and soda water bottles, pieces of lead pipe and other missiles, apparently hurled from the other side of the house. In the rear is a high brick fence, over which it would be practically impossible for any one to climb.
Going through the building to see where the missiles came from, no one could be found, and almost immediately the shower of bottles began to fall from the other side. This has been repeated at intervals since, even in the daytime.
Other curious things have happened in the house. Pendleton has repeatedly gathered up many of the bottles and deposited them inside in an empty room, and locked the door. He declares that in some mysterious way they are taken from the room and made to resume their flight over the building. [why weren’t they broken?]
Quite a crowd of excited coloured people gathered around the place to-day, and the ghost, or whatever it was, gave a special exhibition of bottle-throwing. Pendleton, with a countenance betraying fear and anxiety, picked up a piece of iron gaspipe and said – “See dis hyar? Well, it’s been ober dis house moen twenty times, fus one way, den the udder. I tuk dis (the gas pipe) and dis hyar (another piece of iron), and I put dem in my room and lock de do’. Fo’ God, by de time I get outen da house agin dey bofe cum a-flying ober agin! Dey was gone from de room, but de do’ was still locked. I went in dare to see. We bin watchin’ de top of de house, an’ on bofe sides, an’ still de bottles keep on flyin’.”
The top of the house can only be reached by a ladder from the attic of Pendleton’s house through a trap in the roof. All of the bottles in Pendleton’s place were destroyed, but the bottle-throwing continued last night. Early this morning several of the family were in a room on the first floor, when suddenly several gallons of water came through a hole in the ceiling and floor above, through which a stove-pipe projected in cold weather. Pendleton vowed there was no water in the upper room. He says no outsider could have gotten into the upper room.
The flying missiles have been seen by numerous individuals, and the general opinion is that some person must have concealed himself upon the roof. But, as Pendleton maintains, it is hard to explain how any person intent upon fun or revenge could have got to the roof and how he could have procured the bottles in such numbers from the lower floors without being seen. Many in the vicinity have made up their minds that the house is “haunted.”
Dublin Evening Telegraph, 5th July 1887.