Thief played tricks – or was it a revived ghost?
Midland houses robbed, eggs beaten, suits put in water.
Mercury Staff Reporter.
Last night householders in Abbey Street, Rugby, were still trying to solve a mystery – why the midnight visitor who broke into five houses in the street and ransacked the ground floor rooms acted in the peculiar way he did.
Mrs J. Brown, of 165, Abbey Street, came down in the morning to find several pounds of sugar spilled on the floor, five eggs carefully beaten into the sugar and the mixture topped with jam.
Mr J.L. Skelhorn, who lives at No. 171, discovered his coat had been immersed in a bath of water, his phenobarbitone tablets had disappeared, and his camera had been hurled to the bottom of the garden. One of two wrist watches left on the kitchen table had also gone.
Next door, at No. 169, Mr T. Burbaury found his best suit neatly laid out on the floor like a corpse, with both sleeves folded across the chest.
Mr B.M. Maycock, of No. 163 Abbey Street, searched for his jacket and found it in a water butt at the back of the house, together with his spectacles case and other objects.
Although all the occupants of the houses were sleeping on the premises none of them were disturbed. The questions they are now asking are: Was it a local “Raffles” with a distorted sense of humour? Was it the work of a maniac performing some weird rites? Was it a poltergeist suddenly become active?
“We cannot understand why anyone breaking into a house to steal should act like this,” Mr Burbery told me. “It doesn’t make sense.” Altogether about £15 in cash was taken and a watch worth £29.
A member of the Rugby C.I.D. said he didn’t see anything unusual in the occurrence. “I think it was somebody who decided to make a night of it and thought he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.”
An old inhabitant of Rugby was reminding people of stories of a murder reputed to have taken place near the site of the houses in Abbey Street more than a century ago.
Birmingham Weekly Mercury, 3rd September 1950.