… Again, at Port Elizabeth, in South Africa, in 1916, the victim was another girl. Her food is reported to have caught fire when she attempted to eat it, and the blankets on her bed burst into flames. Milk was poured on her from the ceiling. In both cases the Poltergeist played its pranks in broad daylight – in the same way as it does at Swanton.
Leeds Mercury, 8th September 1919.
Poltergeist disturbances in South Africa.
From Mr Henry Glasse, a South African gentleman who has on one or two previous occasions communicated with this journal on matters of psychic interest, we lately received a cutting from the “Eastern Province Herald” (Port Elizabeth) of July 28th last, giving an account of some poltergeist disturbances which were occasioning considerable excitement in the neighbourhood. The story associated with the origin of these disturbances (as gathered by a representative of the paper in question) was, it seems, that the parents of a girl at Kimberley, disapproving of her intimacy with a young Malay, had sent her to Port Elizabeth, and that the disappointed lover had thereupon called to his aid the powers of darkness and cast a spell over the girl. As a consequence she became ill of some mysterious complaint: her food would burst into flame when she attempted to eat; the blankets on her bed would catch fire while she was asleep; jugs and basins jumped off the table and broke on the floor, and stones and other missiles hurtled through the windows. These phenomena were accompanied by sounds as of wind sighing and whistling in at the door and whirling in rapid gyrations in every part of the house.
In a letter accompanying the cutting Mr Glasse stated that he had personally visited and examined the premises and interviewed the tenant (a well-educated and intelligent Indian Mussulman), his brother, and others present, and was impressed with their apparent candour. He does not appear to have witnessed anything abnormal himself, but some of the occurrences these people related to him were confirmed by outsiders. A retired railway official told Mr Glasse that his daughter (the sick girl’s nurse) had seen an egg that had been placed in a cupboard suddenly thrown by invisible agency into the centre of the room, and a saddler living opposite stated that one of his men went with another man into the house and saw a large tin of milk thrown in like manner out of the cupboard. Mr Glasse added as a noteworthy fact that the disturbances had taken place principally, if not altogether, in broad daylight.
We were on the point of putting the foregoing particulars into print when two later copies of the “Herald,” dated respectively July 29th and 31st, reached us. From these we learn that the “Herald’s” representative had received further confirmatory accounts from apparently reputable persons who had been admitted into the house and themselves seen some of the phenomena, such as a chair tumbling over when no one was near, and various objects flying from the mantelpiece and cupboard. On a later visit he found that owing to the annoyance caused by curious crowds besieging the place the occupants had left. He succeeded, however, in tracking the head of the household and some of the other members to another part of the town, but not the sick girl, who had been removed elsewhere.
The man informed him that she was the eldest of three sisters, his nieces, who had been living with his mother at Kimberley till the end of May, when he brought all four to join his wife and children and himself in their home in Port Elizabeth. It was true that the girl had been sought in marriage, and that he (her uncle) had refused his consent, as the young man was not of the same “tribe” as their family, but he did not connect this fact with the subsequent manifestations. Similar manifestations had occurred before – in Kimberley, after the death of the grandfather of the girl. It was about four days after their arrival with their grandmother at their uncle’s house that the new annoyances – which were accompanied by mysterious knockings on the floor – commenced, and a month later that the girl was seized with fainting fits, from which, however, she had since recovered.
He estimated the loss he had sustained from destruction and injury of property at from twenty to twenty-five pounds. He professed his disbelief in any supernatural agency being concerned in the phenomena, but owned that he was absolutely at a loss to account for them.
Light, v36, September 9th 1916.