Mysterious bombardments.
“Lately there has been a slump in stone-throwing mysteries,” says the “Sydney Daily Telegraph” of Feb. 24, “but last night two young men walked into the Petersham police station and stated that they had discovered one. For two years, they said, they had been trying to get to the bottom of it, but, apparently, it was without bottom, and they wished the police to take the matter up.
In Merton Street, Stanmore, there is a building which is used as a sort of meeting-house by some twelve or fourteen young men, who have formed themselves into a convivial club. It is a building of two floors, and the top one is reached by means of a ladder. The end fronting Merton Street – it is almost alongside the railway line – is solid brick, but in the side are some half-a-dozen windows, and through these windows at intervals pieces of blue metal come from nowhere, seriously disturbing the equanimity of the club members. There have been several narrow escapes, and one night, it is said, a pipe was knocked, without any warning, out of a man’s mouth.
Sometimes blue metal rattles through the panes of two or three windows simultaneously, and there is a noise like the firing of cannon on the roof. But nobody throws anything. For two years the stone-throwing has been going on night after night, always about nine o’clock, and all the members of the club have had their turn at sentry duty. They have placed themselves in the most unlikely places, and awaited events. At nine o’clock blue metal crashes through the windows and lands upon the roof. But that is all that these amateur detectives have been able to discover.
Nobody throws the metal for there is never anybody about. It can simply be seen coming through the air, as though it is sent from the sky, where the spirits dwell. That it is not manna is evidenced by the fact that the two men aforesaid placed a large lump of metal in th ehands of the police officer at Petersham last night – a lump that had broken another pane of glass and had fallen upon the floor. Now a policeman is going to visit that meeting-house.”
Lyttelton Times, 24th March 1899.