The ghost that blew a fuse over television.
Bristol BBC producer Anne Owen does not believe in ghosts, but she is convinced an electronic poltergeist is playing supernatural tricks with a programme she is compiling. Anne’s weird experiences began on a filming trip to Rosenheim, in Bavaria, where she was researching the activities of the electronic poltergeist. “I am working on a new series called Leap In The Dark, which deals with telepathy and extra-sensory perception,” Mrs Owen told me from her home in West Dene, Coombe Dingle, Bristol, last night. “In Rosenheim we investigated the story of the first electronic poltergeist in history.”
Mrs Owen said that whenever a young girl called Anne-Marie was at work in a lawyer’s office, the electricity supply went completely haywire. “Strip-lighting tubes jumped out of their sockets, electronic copying machines cut themselves off, and fuses leaped out of fuse boxes,” she said. Then the lawyer found his telephone bill had suddenly risen astronomically to four times its usual amount. It was discovered the telephone was constantly dialling the speaking clock of its own accord, three times faster than it could be dialled by a human.”
“When we got back to Bristol with the film, we took it into the dubbing room, and all the lights went out,” Mrs Owen told me. “They came on again when we left with the film. When we took it to the cutting room for editing, all the sound on the equipment packed up.”
Mrs Owen finally decided the whole exercise was getting creepy when she was recording a studio interview in Bristol with Professor Hans Bender, of Freiburg, in Germany. “Sue Storey, a producer’s assistant, was timing the interview with a stop watch,” she told me. “In two hours, three stop watches went wrong, and had to be replaced. This is absolutely unheard of. I think the poltergeist is taking a dim view of television,” she said.
Western Daily Press, 11th September 1975.