Sowerby Bridge, Halifax, West Yorkshire (1955)

Notice is hereby given that Bogdana Tarandziej, of 53, Towngate, Sowerby, is applying for naturalisation, and that any person who knows any reason why naturalisation should not be granted should send a written and signed statement of the facts to the Under-Secretary of State, Home Office, London, S.W.1.

Halifax Evening Courier, 1st October 1951.

A Sowerby mystery.

The home where they dare not sleep.

They get home between 5 p.m. and 6, have tea, sit in the living room for a couple of hours, have supper, then leave for the night. Mr Bodgan Tarandziej sleeps in Halifax, paying 15s. a week for lodgings. His wife goes to her parents for the night. “We have to do it – we just cannot sleep here,” she says.

Somewhere in the valley a clock chimed the half-hour: half-past eight. Time for the mill worker and his wife to leave their home for the night. Time for the father to dandle his little daughter on his knee and kiss her good-night. Time for him to go back to his lodgings. “You see, we just cannot sleep here any more,” said Mr Bodgan Tarandziej. “We haven’t had a full night’s sleep here since October.” He is the tenant of 59, Town Gate, Sowerby Town; a neatly furnished little old house, one of a row perched on the hill. He has been there with his wife for nearly three years now. But they don’t sleep there any more. “And we won’t until these things are explained,” he said.

His wife, the former Miss Doreen Georgeson, took up the story. Before her marriage she lived with her parents, Mr and Mrs Gordon Georgeson, at 53, Town Gate, just a few yards down the lane. “I’d heard stories before my marriage about odd noises up the road in the night,” she said to a reporter. “But when we got the chance of No. 59 we took it. It wasn’t bad, at first. And it was the first home of our own: we were determined to like it. Noises awakened us in the night. Gradually they became worse. Last autumn it became just too bad for us to carry on. Both of us are working. We could not sleep. We had to go. There were terrible ‘rushing’ noises. The jangling of pots in the kitchen early in the morning. Banging noises from the small back bedroom – and there was no one in there. We found doors opening after they had been fastened. And when we went to look – there was no one there. We never saw anything. One night, we sat up in the living-room, stoking up the fire so that it was very warm. At 1 a.m., Lassie, our dog, whimpered suddenly. Then she scuttled back under the sofa, terrified. The room was suddenly icy cold.”

They could not sleep. So Mrs Tarandziej went back to her old home to spend the nights with her parents, who were already looking after her baby, Kateryna, 18 months old.

Mr Gordon Georgeson took up the story. “We haven’t room for Bodgan here,” he said, “so he sleeps in lodgings in Halifax, goes to work in a mill at Shelf, then travels back to his home to spend the evening. Every night he catches a late bus back to his lodgings. Once recently I went into No. 59 when Bodgan and his wife had left for the night. I took Lassie with me. Suddenly, she leaped and whined in terrible fright. I saw a sudden glow: a glow of golden light, coming apparently from down the bedroom stairs. At other times I have been told of lights in the house in the early hours; but no one was sleeping there and, so far as I know, there was no one in the house.”

Next door to No. 59 live Mr and Mrs Herbert Smithson, with their three children. Mrs Smithson said: “We have heard strange noises from next door for a long time. I thought Bodgan and Doreen must be moving the beds about or making furniture or something. It got so bad I decided to complain to them. The noises have gone on since they decided to sleep somewhere else. Sometimes, there are banging noises and the jangling of pots at one o’clock in the morning.”

What is the cause? The wind? The tenants of both Nos. 57 and 59 say they have heard the noises on calm, windless nights. A practical joker “I thought of that,” said Mrs Smithson. “But after all this time…?” Some odd structural defect? “But what about the pots, the opening of doors that have been fastened?” asked Mrs Tarandziej. So far, no one has put forward a reasonable explanation. So, every night, a man and his wife have supper together, then the man walks round to his parents-in-law and kisses his daughter good-night and the family is parted until the next evening…

No. 59, Town Gate and the neighbouring property belongs to the Sowerby Bridge U.D.C. An official of the Housing Department said today: “We have had the complaints and, of course, they are receiving attention. The matter has actually been discussed in committee and is still under investigation.”

Halifax Evening Courier, 17th February 1955.

‘Ghost’ frightens couple from home.

Evening Post Reporter.

Sowerby Bridge Council may have to employ a ghost catcher to investigate a mystery which has frightened two of its tenants out of their cottage every night for four months. The tenants, Mr and Mrs Bodgan Tarandziej, both 31, have been driven out of their home by “terrible rushing noises, footsteps, doors and trapdoors that refuse to stay closed, jangling pots in the kitchen, bangs in the back bedroom” and in fact everything that goes bump in the night.

Mr Tarandziej travels by bus five miles to lodgings in Shelf every night, and his wife and 18-month-old baby sleep at her mother’s house near their cottage in Town Gate, Sowerby Town. A relative said today: “They are terrified.”

Councillor H. Haigh, who lives a few doors from the 100-year-old cottage, said: “The Housing Committee has discussed the matter and it will be investigated. I imagine that a surveyor will first examine the cottage to see if there is any structural defect. If nothing of that kind is found to account for the noises some council member may suggest we employ a psychic research expert.”

At the cottage, Mrs Tarandziej’s mother said that the noises had been heard for several years. “My daughter and her husband have been in the house three years and finally they could not stand it any longer. They have asked the housing manager to find them a new home. My son-in-law kept trying to fasten down a trap-door in the roof with string – but it was always open again the next morning,” she said. Lassie, Mrs Tarandziej’s pet dog, is terrified by the noises and is now highly nervous and upset.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 18th February 1955.

Driven from their home by “ghosts.”

From our own correspondent. Hebden Bridge, Thursday.

Councillors and officals at Sowerby Bridge are facing one of their strangest jobs – what to do about a haunted cottage that belongs to the Council. The tenants, Mr and Mrs Bodgan Tarandziej, have been driven out of the house – the first real home of their own – by “terrible rushing noises; jangling pots in the kitchen early in the morning; bangs in the back bedroom and doors opening after they have been fastened.”

Afraid to sleep in the cottage – 59, Town Gate, Sowerby Town – they part each night and sleep in separate houses. Mr Tarandziej travels by bus five miles to lodgings in Halifax while his wife and their 18-month old baby sleep at her mother’s house nearby.

A Housing Department official told me: “The matter has actually been discussed in committee and is still under investigation.”

Bradford Observer, 18th February 1955.

Nocturnal vigil gave no sign of Sowerby ‘ghost’.

Evening Post Correspondent.

While Sowerby (near Halifax) slept last night, I waited in a cottage in Towngate for a sign or sound of the strange happenings which have forced Mr and Mrs Bodga Tarandzief and their 18-month-old daughter, Kateryna, to sleep elsewhere. For company I had a 79-year-old water diviner, a pathologist, who was accompanied by his technician and his eight-month-old Shetland dog, Jock – the supersensitive member of the investigating team. But it was no night for supernatural revels. At 3 a.m. with the snow drifting deeper in the bleak village, we left the cottage without having heard any untoward sound – except those which were manufactured in tests. Jock, the dog, could hardly have spent a more peaceful night as he dreamed away time in front of a roaring fire.

The water diviner, Mr Jack Quain of Industrial Road, Sowerby Bridge, who approached the problem from a supernatural point of view, claimed as he left that he had “snuffed” the poltergeist last Saturday in the next door cottage of Mr and Mrs Herbert Smithson in an incident that broke his whalebone stick. He said, however, that he would recommend new floorboards for the bedrooms to housing officials of Sowerby Bridge Urban Council who owned the property.

The pathologist Dr. J. W. Weston of Halifax and his senior laboratory technician, Mr Gavin Davidson, said “We feel there is nothing to substantiate the presence of a poltergeist and that it would be a waste of time bringing in psychic research. Everything can be explained by natural phenomena – warped and loose bedroom floorboards, a rattling window frame, draughts, wind and mice.”

For myself I regretted having to leave the fireside at 3 a.m. for it meant walking into the teeth of a blizzard and stepping up to the knees in drifts.

Last night’s investigation was an unofficial affair.

The Council officials have examined the structure and say they found nothing  to explain away complaints by the Tarandziefs.

Dr Weston and Mr Davidson first interviewed Mr and Mrs Smithson and Mrs Tarandzief, who had come from her parents home nearby. Then they searched the house from cellar to roof, tested furniture and fixtures and combed the precincts. Came midnight, Mr Quain took the stage, turned out the gaslight and the vigil began. It was a happy hour and we discussed everything from murder to misfortune. The clock chimed one – the vital hour – but no unusual sound was heard. At 1.45 a.m. Mrs Smithson heard bumps in her bedroom and heard tapping outside. We heard and found nothing. At 3 a.m. Mr Quain tested his whalebone sticks against the wall that was “live” last Saturday, and with no movement forthcoming said the poltergeist was “snuffed” – his way of saying his job was done.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 24th February 1955.

 

Sowerby “ghost” is laid – at vigil in old cottage.

The Sowerby poltergeist does not exist, Dr J W Weston said yesterday after he had kept vigil from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. in the old cottage at No. 59, Towngate, the home of Mr and Mrs Bodga Tarandzief and their baby daughter. Dr Weston, a Halifax pathologist, explained away the sounds that forced the family to sleep elsewhere as being due to “warped and loose bedroom floorboards, a rattling window pane, draughts and winds.” Mr Jack Quain, the Sowerby Bridge water diviner, who shared the vigil on Wednesday night, claimed that the ghost was “snuffled” on Saturday, when his whalebone divining-rod shattered during an experiment.

Bradford Observer, 25th February 1955.

The houses do not seem to be there any more, and elsewhere on the internet it’s said they were demolished in the 1950s.