‘Poltergeist’ riddle of boy’s hospital room.
From Laurence Wilkinson: Rome.
Doctors and students of the occult have been studying the strange goings-on in the sick room of a nine-year-old Sardinian boy. The trouble started in August when Eugenio Loi was admitted to Nuoro hospital, in the heart of Sardinia’s bandit country. Eugenio was thought to be dying of hepatitis but after treatment his condition improved. And it was then that stranage things began to happen in the little room where Eugenio was kept in isolation.
Water started oozing through the floor – but there were no water pipes which could have burst and the cement under the floor tiles was bone dry. After the fourth ‘flooding’ doctors sprayed talcum powder on the floor to see if Eugenio was getting out of bed and throwing water on the floor from the wash basin. But once again the water came up – with NO footprints.
Nurses were ordered to spy on Eugenio, but he was not seen to leave his bed before the floor flooded for the sixth time. Baffled, the doctors called in an expert on the occult. But he too was stuck for an answer. He did, however, establish that Eugneio had never before been associated with manifestations of seemingly poltergeist origin.
Eugenio was moved to another room without a wash-basin – but still the water surged up from the floor. The water was soaked up and taken away for analysis. It turned out to be water of about the same chemical content as in the hospital taps.
Eugenio’s parents refused to have the boy visited by a priest who would have been willing to exorcise any devil he thought might possess the boy.
The news of what was happening in the hospital aroused such curiosity and gossip among local people that the parents, worried about the gossiping, discharged Eugenio from hospital. Having been assured he was over the worst stage of his hepatitis, they took the little boy home to Barisado, near Nuoro.
From all over Sardinia people are coming to Eugenio’s home hoping to receive a blessing from the boy with the ‘magical powers.’ Today the door is locked to everybody except a local doctor, who will look after Eugenio while he convalesces. If the water is coming up from the floor today, no one is saying.
Sunday Express, 3rd December 1972.