A fairly representative example of manifestations reported from time to time at different places in the United States, may be borrowed from the Philadelphia Inquirer of Monday, February 5, 1866. A house in South Fifth Street, Philadelphia, had been occupied for ten years by a family consisting of father, mother and three “young ladies,” their daughters. We also hear of a servant in their employ. There is no mention of any previous disturbance during the tenancy, but suddenly on the night of February 1, 1866, the three girls who occupied one bedroom, were awakened by a clatter, caused, as they found, by their brushes, combs and other toilet appliances having been thrown on the floor. Much bewildered, they replaced them, but after an interval the same thing happened a second time; moreover, a looking-glass which hung against the wall “jumped” from the nail into a corner and was there shattered to pieces. They fetched their father from his bed, but he was unable to discover anything which would account for the phenomenon.
Of the next morning nothing much is recorded, save that a saucer flew off the breakfast table and was broken. But in the evening a perfect stampede set in among the chimney ornaments, with the most disastrous results. Not only were there many breakages of vases and small articles, but pictures and mirros began to be involved in the disturbance, so that the family thought it wise to take them down hurriedly and lay them upon the floor in the hope of preventing further damage. No great success, however, attended this manoeuvre. One large looking-glass, “taking a zig-zag flight across the room,” struck the opposite wall and was smashed to atoms. In the end, the victims of this visitation removed such breakable possessions as they most prized to a neighbouring house, where they seem to have remained in security.
The evidence upon which we are asked to believe this story is rather characteristic of what so often happens in such cases. When the matter began to excite attention in the city, Press reporters flocked to the spot, but on their arrival the more violent manifestations were suspended or had already ceased. Speaking of the Sunday afternoon (February 4th), the newspaper from which I am here quoting remarks: “Our reporters visited the house, they heard the strange, unaccountable rumbling noises, but saw nothing in transition through the air. Broken disthes, shattered mirrors, damaged books and the absence of all ornamental furniture, were ample evidence of the strange annoyance to which the dwelling had been subjected.”
The editor, or whoever was responsible for the article in the Inquirer, is careful not to commit himself to any belief in the operation of a supernatural agency. He suspects “some trickery,” while at the same time admitting that nothing of the sort had so far been detected. He jeers at the Spiritualists, and in a later notice remarks that “there are unbelieving heathens who unhesitatingly assert that the Spiritualists are at the bottom of the entire affair, and that they got the exhibition up for the purpose of making spiritualistic capital.” At the same time, he is, perforce, constrained to add: “the family, however, all solemnly aver that they are not Spiritualists themselves, and have not the slightest belief in such nonsense.” That this was, in fact, the case seems to be conclusively proved by the statements of the Inquirer’s own reporters. Evidentially speaking, the most satisfactory piece of testimony in the whole account is contained in the following passage:
“The master and mother of the family being communicants of the Baptist Church, imparted the circumstances of this strange visitation to their pastor, and on Saturday evening that gentleman, accompanied by another clergyman, went to the haunted dwelling to pass the night. With one of these clerical gentlemen, we had a protracted interview. He is a very clear-minded scholar who has received a collegiate training… He assures us that he entered the house with the belief that the inmates were the dupes of trickery and that he left it yesterday morning perplexed in the extreme. Soon after he entered the parlour a hymn book was projected from a table and thrown with violence against the door. With his own hands he picked up the book and replaced it. Before his eyes the volume was seized by an invisible force and for a second time thrown across the room, and a Testament sent to keep it company. Again the books were replaced, and again sent whirling around the room, at times making the entire circuit of the apartment; then they would fly off at a tangent and come to a full stop violently against the walls. Bibles, Testaments and hymn books, were endowed with strange powers of volition {sic} during Saturday night. Both the clergymen present did their best to discover some trick by which the inanimate objects were made to circumnavigate rooms in so mysterious a manner, but in vain, they could discover no clue to these unaccountable movements.”
For the other phenomena we have no better authority than the statements made to the reporters by members of the family; but the incidents related, if untrue, do credit to the liveliness of their imagination. One of the daughters, we are told, on her return from church on the Sunday, had her Bible snatched from her hand with such force as to tear the covers utterly off. “The keys flew out of the locks of the doors; the few remaining dishes threw violent somersaults from shelves to floor.” It was impossible to lay the table for Sunday dinner; the plates jumped off the table, and the hapless family had to eat their meal from their laps. As the servant was washing up some of the few unbroken remnants of the crockery, a tumbler flew up out of the water and struck her forehead with such force that her face was cut as well as bruised. Even the bread seemed endowed with life and went spinning in eccentric paths over the dining-room table. We are told finally that the inmates of the house were driven to distraction by the crowds of would-be visitors who besieged them, that a posse of police had to be stationed before the door to keep them out, also that it was found necessary to remove two or three of the ladies to other quarters, “their nervous system having been utterly shattered by the excitements of the last few days.”
Extravagant as are the incidents recorded above, one finds it difficult to suggest any plausible explanation for the concoction of such a narrative. It is incredible that the whole story can be a joke. The street in Philadelphia is named, even if the number of the house, “at the urgent request of the family,” was suppressed in the communications first published regarding it. The fact that pictures and other more fragile property were removed elsewhere and that some of the occupants were forced in the end to quit the scene of turmoil can hardly be an invention. But such drastic measures are not usually resorted to by a middle-class family – they kept a “small dry-goods store” – without grave cause. There do not seem to have been any mischievous children concerned in this case and no motive can well be imagined for seeking notoriety at the expense of much inconvenience and a considerable destruction of property. Lastly, the inmates, being pious Protestants and strongly opposed to Spiritualism, are not in the least likely to have been familiar with poltergeist phenomena. In fact, before 1866, very little had been printed on the subject. Nevertheless, the manifestations they describe are in striking accord with those which have since been recorded by a multitude of other witnesses in every part of the world.
In ‘Some early American poltergeists’, by Herbert Thurston, In ‘The Month’, December 1934.