Poltergeist fear.
A poltergeist is believed to be causing a series of strange happenings at a tiny cottage in the village of Washington. This week the occupant, 70-year-old Mrs Elsie Howl spoke to the County Times of the frightening events that have occurred, including one incident which left her seriously bruised. Mrs How said she first noticed something strange about four years ago – but until now has kept quiet because she feared that people would not believe her.
Sinister ordeal for woman.
Mysterious goings-on in a tiny cottage in Washington have taken a more sinister turn – culminating in a physical attack which left a 70-year-old woman seriously bruised. Events which would have sent most people screaming from their homes appear not to frighten plucky pensioner Mrs Elsie Howl, who has shrugged off her injuries and says she just wants to know what is causing the strange events. She believes a poltergeist or some other unworldly force has manifested itself in her medieval cottage in The Street at Washington, but despite the recent incident in which she was injured, she says she is not frightened.
For years, Mrs Howl has kept quiet about the eerie events at her house in the fear that people would not believe her story and think she was making it up. Mrs Howl first noticed something strange four years ago when she was looking after a neighbour’s mongrel dog. It was in the habit of lying quietly in front of the open fire, sleeping.
“One evening I was sitting here with my friend when the dog suddenly jumped up as if a coal had fallen on her. I went forward to touch her but she backed away with a glazed look in her eye and wandered around panting. I said to my friend that my right trouser leg was wet and clammy, and she said hers was too. The same thing happened about four times that year.”
Whatever it is that visits Mrs Howl’s cottage, which dates back about 600 years, did not stop there. One morning, she took off her watch and left it on a table downstairs while she went to have a bath. When she returned it had disappeared. “I looked everywhere for it – but could not find it. I just thought I had done something stupid and lost it until five months later when I walked into the kitchen and found it lying on the dresser still ticking, and showing the right time.”
On another occasion she lost her lipstick, and again was not worried by the disappearance – until she noticed that when the toilet was flushed the water was red. She lifted the lid of the high-level cistern and found the lipstick lying inside. “Nothing else happened for a long time, though I was conscious of strange noises from time to time. I was watching television one evening when I noticed the glass in one of my pictures on the wall was shattered. While I was looking at it, it flew across in front of me and landed on the other side of the room,” she said. Neither the string nor the picture hook on the wall were broken – so the picture had not simply fallen, and she could not understand how it could have fallen so far from the wall in any case.
Mrs Howl was once watching television when she heard a loud crash from the next room. She got up from her chair and went through to find a heavy mirror had smashed on the floor, and a delicate ship in a bottle which had been standing in front of the mirror had been placed on the fire surround – unharmed. Puzzling over the smashed mirror, she returned to her living room to find the television had gone from the table where it had been standing and was facing the opposite direction on the floor nearby.
The most recent incarnation of the poltergeist was the most terrifying of all. Mrs Howl got up from her chair to go through to her kitchen when she felt herself being pushed over to one side – down on to the floor. “I was pushed down gently and I felt a weight on my back. I tried to pull myself up on the chairs but I couldn’t. I managed to crawl through to the dining room and was able to pull myself up. At first, I thought I had had a stroke or something. I thought I had lost the use of my legs, but I could not understand the feeling of something pushing down on my back,” recalled Mrs Howl.
The next morning, she noticed heavy bruising on her arms, legs and back. Two days later, she decided to see her doctor, who she says told her he had never seen bruises like those covering her back. Mrs Howl’s doctor was not the first to see injuries inflicted by the poltergeist. A life-long friend brought her brother to stay in Washington, but he insisted on leaving the next morning – saying something had tried to strangle him in the night. Seventy-year-old Joan James said her brother went to see his doctor and was told his vocal chords had been damaged, and asked, “Who has tried to strangle you?”
“I was staying here one night when I felt something come in through the window. I thought it was an owl or something like that, but suddenly it was over my face and pressing down and I could not breathe. I tried to shout for help, but I couldn’t make myself heard. Then, just as suddenly, it disappeared,” said Mrs James.
Mrs Howl says she has twice seen figures in her room at night. The first time, she saw a woman who looked like a neighbour who had recently died. “She was wearing a camel coat and had a shoulder bag. She looked very puzzled. She gave a sigh, took a step forward, and disappeared. The next night, I heard the same rustling sound I had heard before seeing my neighbour and when I looked I saw an old woman standing by the wall.”
She readily admits she is interested in spiritualism, and now feels she may be particularly receptive. But she refutes any suggestion that she is imagining the incidents, and her friend says: “There is definitely something peculiar about the cottage.” Having spent the last 19 years living in the cottage, Mrs Howl says there is no way she will leave, but she is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. She has invited an astrologer from Pulborough to come to her to see if he can shed any light on whatever it is that is haunting the house.
The poltergeist’s handiwork. Mrs Elsie Howl and her friend Joan James hold the remains of a mirror smashed in an unexplained incident at her Washington home.
West Sussex County Times, 8th October 1982.