Electric sparks fly for poor Sonia.
by Ray Bryant
Everything that Midas touched turned to gold… but Sonia Maslen is not so lucky. Everything that she touches goes bang, and to prove it she can point to a trail of unintentional destruction over the last year. her unique talent for causing electrical goods to blow up, fall apart or hurl bits off is making life for herself and husband Bill rather expensive, and not a little frustrating.
Three bulbs have burst and a lamp has blown up. Her iron split in half and the radio cassette somehow operates the pause button by itself when she tries to play it. She broke her own twin-tub washing machine and the door handle of her mother’s tumble drier. When she got a new washing machine, the shock absorbers failed, and she got a new refridgerator to replace the one that kept icing up, the door fell off the moment she opened its box. Sonia’s freezer would not work, but when an engineer called at her home in Grovelands Road, Reading, he could find nothing wrong with it.
One colour television blew up, the picture on the next one suffered distortion, the third one can turn the volume up whenever it feels like it, and the black and white set will not work when Sonia tries it. One morning postman Bill Maslen awoke late and blamed Sonia for turning off the alarm on the digital clock, but she swears she did not.
“I don’t want to say we have a poltergeist, but…” Sonia said jokingly. “Sometimes when I walk up the stairs I seem to hear something behind me, though there’s nothing there. “And my 10-month-old son, Scott, goes into the front bedroom and sits laughing like a drain at one particular corner – at nothing.”
Sonia’s abilities, however, do not halt at electrical goods. She has also seen the garnet and diamond in two separate rings shatter. So does she have telekinetic energies? “Let’s just say she’s unlucky with electrical things,” said Bill, who does not believe in the supernatural. With the damage already running into hundreds of pounds, he only hopes that it will stop soon – whoever is doing it.
Reading Evening Post, 13th September 1982.