Poltergeist nightmare.
Tyneside couple tell of terror.
A Tyneside couple talked today of the poltergeist which brought terror to their home. Their ordeal began when a toy donkey glided – unaided – down the stiars. Then a doll jumped from one shelf to another in the dining room of John and Lillian Price’s terraced house in Ilfracombe Gardens, Whitley Bay. It was the start of two weeks of fear for the family which only abated this week when a priest and a Baptist minister carried out a ceremony at the house.In the two weeks, the poltergeist caused at least a dozen happenings.
“It was hell on earth. We were terrified. We slept in our clothes for a week because we didn’t know what was going to happen next,” said 57-year-old Mrs Price. Mr Price, aged 59, said: “It was a terrible ordeal but things seem to have quietened down since the priest blessed our home.”
The incidents included: A piece of glass which moved four times in the bedroom and bathroom; A clothes horse which fell against a wardrobe and was later found on another wall of the landing; Clothes emptied from dressing-table drawers and later replaced in other drawers; A shelf-rack which fell, bringing down a collection of dolls, even though the nails attaching it were left intact in the wall; An electric blanket was switched on, plugs kept being put in and a quilt and other bedding was moved about.
But the most frightening occasion was when a heavy chest packed with blankets was thrown against the bed room door locking the couple’s grandson, Robert, in the room.
Father John James, of St. Cuthbert’s Roman Catholic Church, North Shields, visited the Price home after the disturbances. “I comforted the family and blessed the house,” he said today. “In particular I blessed the rooms where most of the disturbances happened and I blessed the people in the house and said a few prayers. There was definitely something happening there and the family were very upset but I don’t know what were the actual causes.”
Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 25th February 1977.