“Ghost” visits Norman Long.
Norman Long is embarrassed. He is being “haunted.” And the ghost appears to be fond of shaving brushes, for they are whisked away during the night. When he is at home at Sydenham, London, his car is started up mysteriously in the early hours of the morning. A bedroom basin, too, was smashed into fragments, so he tells me, in the middle of the night, and on that same occasion the ghost vanished with a B.B.C. script Norman had been studying.
Several professional mediums have written to offer their services in “exorcising the spirit.” But Long refuses to take it so seriously as all that.
John Sharman, senior B.B.C. variety producer, has come into the story as well, for John’s shaving brush disappeared when Norman was staying with him over-night and his car started in a locked garage during the night. “It’s all nonsense I must suppose,” Norman told me, “but I won’t deny the fact that these things happen wherever I go. John laughed at first when he heard the tale but he doesn’t laugh now. My sister – I live with her as I’m a bachelor, you know – takes it all quite seriously because of the mysterious things which have happened in our home near the Crystal Palace,” he said. “I think that all the knockings, rappings and other occurrences can be accounted for by the wind or creaky doors and perhaps somebody is having a joke with the shaving brushes. But the starting up of the car in a locked garage is harder to explain.”
Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 31st March 1939.