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Why do rocks rain down on these houses each night, apparently from nowhere?

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Does a paranormal force propel them?

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The police are baffled, they can find no normal explanation.

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And what caused chaos in this German office?

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Why did lamps swing when no one was near?

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Why did the telephone make hundreds of calls while witnesses saw no one was dialing?

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Was this a supernatural subscriber?

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Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke, scientist, writer and visionary.

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A scientist who invented the communication satellite, the writer of 2010,

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and now in retreat in Sri Lanka, the visionary who ponders the riddles of this and other worlds.

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A few years ago, the people who live in this house reported an extraordinary series of events.

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Household objects moved around, and one observer saw a loaf of bread rise slowly in the air

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and hurtle across the room. Naturally, the family was scared and had no idea what was going on.

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But to any student of the paranormal, this spelt, portugaised.

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Portugaised is a German word, which means noisy spirit, but that's very much of an understatement.

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Portugaises are the original things that go bump in the night.

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And as a portugais in the house, there are strange bangings and crashings.

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Furniture moves around, stones fall out of the blue, machinery goes haywire,

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all without any apparent physical cause. No wonder that for centuries,

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portugais have spread alarm and controversy throughout the world.

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Thornton Road, Birmingham. It's not the quiet suburban neighbourhood, it seems.

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Five of these houses are under siege. Night after night, rocks rain down on them.

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The bizarre bombardment has lasted more than six years.

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Glass in every window has been shattered, forcing the residents to erect barricades to protect their homes.

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The stones seem to come from nowhere, yet the damage they do is real enough,

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not just to the buildings, but to the householders' nerves and bank accounts.

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We've had all the panes, but two go under the garage, which are the big panes. I think they're

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about 14 foot with reinforced glass, which cost nearly 700 pounds to be replaced.

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And we have since they've been replaced and the wire netting's been put up.

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We've had another four panes go now.

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Most of the windows under the veranda have been broken.

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Over £500 worth has been put in there.

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Buries' other windows have been cracked.

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And we have now wired all those windows and have been wired for nearly 12 months.

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Birmingham's police confess their stumped. In charge, Chief Inspector Len Turling.

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When I first came here some 12 months ago, I thought at that stage that I would put

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two policemen on it and it would be finished in a couple of days.

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That has proven to be totally wrong.

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The case has all the hallmarks of a poltergeist outbreak.

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Its eeriest feature is the way the rocks seem to come out of the blue.

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In vain, the police have combed the gardens for vandals.

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No human being seems to be throwing the stones.

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Yet the stake-art goes on in Thornton Road, night after night.

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At this stage, we've probably wasted somewhere in the region of 3,500 man-hours

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in observations and inquiries in the Thornton Road area.

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The backs of these four houses in Thornton Road are virtually a battleground.

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And clues are hard to come by.

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This is a selection of the stones. This one is about average size.

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As you can see, it is quite a hefty stone.

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It's a pebble. It looks as if it's come from a seashore, but it hasn't.

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The gardens of these houses in this area all have these pebbles in them.

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The interesting thing about this and all the others that we've had

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is everyone appears to have been washed or scrubbed.

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None of them contain any dirt at all.

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We have had police officers lying, standing,

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hiding themselves from 6pm in the evening until 2 and 3 o'clock in the morning

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in all kinds of weather.

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They have been on top of roofs of adjoining properties.

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And in all these occasions, the only thing we can say is at certain times

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police officers have heard what they say appear to be stones striking the roof

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or the back of houses.

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In none of the occasions when we've been doing observations, have we seen anybody.

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It's as though somebody is watching you, actually going up into a room and drawing the curtains.

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And you get stones come over as soon as you seem to appear at the window.

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It's uncanny really, because it's just as though somebody's focused on you all the time.

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I don't really know what's going on down here.

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It's been going on for a period of 18 years.

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I don't really know what's going on down here.

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It's been going on for a period of 18 months.

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And we haven't got a clue who's doing it at all.

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Already this year, we have arrested 1,997 criminals.

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We have solved in the time we have been doing this inquiry at Thornton Road,

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we have recorded and solved five murders, two of which have been extremely complicated.

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And the inquiry was very protracted.

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And we've used the same expertise on our stone throwings as we have on these other incidents.

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And we still know farther forward with the stone throwing.

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KVOA TV of Tucson, Arizona reported a similar pelting poltergeist in 1983.

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Richard Birkbegler and his family are virtual hostages in their home.

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For 60 days, ever since they moved into this isolated area on Tucson's east side,

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they've been bombarded by rocks thrown by an unknown attacker from the deep rush surrounding the house.

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It goes on every night for the last seven weeks and last two weeks of the,

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well for nine weeks and the last two weeks has been night and day.

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The sheriff's department says it has been unable to find any trace of the alleged attacker.

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But while the search goes on, the Birkbeglers live in fear.

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Apoltergeist apparently ram paged through a house in Swansea in 1965.

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The furniture was flung about and objects shot through the air according to householder Mrs. Howell.

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I went out the back kitchen and as I opened the door, this bottle came flying towards me.

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And of course I shut the door to protect myself.

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I opened it again and I seen this other bottle.

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So I just picked up the children and I ran up the house.

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As I ran up, my husband was coming down the street here

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and he ran straight in the house and by the time he got in there on, the place was turned upside down.

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It was terrible, the couch, the TV, everything just thrown in the middle of the room.

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I went upstairs and when I got upstairs, the bedroom was all upside down.

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My little boy's cop was in underneath the bed. He would have been killed.

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And even the police, they had to break into the bedroom before they got there.

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They, well, they haven't got any explanation for it at all because as I said,

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it couldn't be nothing new man because how could it get out of the front bedroom down to the kitchen when the police had to break in?

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Apoltergeist was apparently photographed in action in Theresa Costa's kitchen in France in 1955.

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And Apoltergeist was blamed for ransacking a house in Abbott Road, Bournemouth in 1981.

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Food and wrecked furniture were strewn everywhere.

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Romanian teenager Eleonora Zugun claimed she was attacked by Apoltergeist that bit and scratched.

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Inflamed wheels apparently swelled up on her body before the eyes of investigators in the 1920s.

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50 years later, reports of a factory, Poltergeist, caused mayhem in Manchester.

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The work here at night has to stop.

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And quite simply, the trouble is that the men are far too scared to be in these warehouses during those night hours.

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The funny thing is, the steel objects weighing maybe a pound, flies at an aluminium panel and there's never a dent, never a scratch.

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A force of energy is like willing a piece of metal or something for one point to another just thinks to lift itself and fly.

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From this pub in Barnsley Yorkshire came tales of a playful Poltergeist.

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In 1965, Michael Collindridge was in bed with Tonsillitis.

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He'd been given a walking stick to wrap for attention.

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One day, he swore it took off and walled around the room.

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To the press, the dancing stick was a psychic wonder and Michael will never forget how the astonishing antics began.

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Suddenly I was aware that the stick was moving along the top of the bed.

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It sounds quite incredible but the top of the stick was just moving backwards and forwards.

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The Cranberries regulars still muse on the mystery.

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You actually went up the ward and operated like a pendulum left and right, you know?

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You still go back as infollers on top of bed.

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And they need to come up and stand on top of bed.

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Then you used to tap on top of safe and you'd open the door.

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You opened the door and tap on top of safe and you used to play tunes.

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And different people went up and asked you to play different tunes.

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And the tunes were recognisable.

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The one that I noticed was Jingle Bells.

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You used to tap two fun not one for yes or something like that.

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So I asked it and they were all asking me questions and they were tapping.

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I said, what's his favourite going to win?

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First race tomorrow, you know?

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But no dumb.

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X-rays at the local hospital revealed nothing.

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No secret devices for conjuring tricks.

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But Michael was kept under close observation.

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I can remember someone saying, will you take your hands out from under the covers?

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Which I did.

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I think actually just one hand was under the covers.

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I put my hands on the bed and the stick continued to move around.

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I then sat up.

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And I can remember that sort of being sat up in bed with this sort of stick behind me there.

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Still moving.

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Well, I stood fascinated watching it, thinking of trickery.

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But I saw no sign of trickery.

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I think as far as one can say it was some sort of spiritual evidence of some sort.

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Which was possibly attached to Michael rather than the stick itself.

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One day my father went home with strip top bed.

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And for no why is nothing.

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But I still think Michael would hurt it.

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Did you used to do it, Michael?

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No, no I didn't.

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Nothing to do with me at all.

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Well, that would have good.

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That would have good enough.

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The attitude of any serious researcher towards poltergeist should be one of open-minded scepticism.

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Fraud is always a possibility.

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And sometimes the culprit gets caught red-handed.

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In this woman's house near Zurich something was smashing the chino.

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She called in researchers who left their video camera running.

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Unknown to her 10-year-old daughter.

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Mommy!

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Mommy!

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That's the most powerful thing about a fire.

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That's how it works.

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To the mother it looked like the work of a poltergeist.

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And the case might never have been solved if the real culprit hadn't been captured on tape.

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More crockery came to grief in this shop in the town of Bremen in northern Germany.

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Varses and glassware were smashed apparently while no one was there.

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Yet it never happened when assistant Heinrich Schultz was out of the building.

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The experts thought he must be acting as a focus for the poltergeist.

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But 13 years later he confessed that he'd done it all himself.

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And he even demonstrated his technique for the TV cameras.

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The police found the police.

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He dropped plates beside a tape recorder to record the sound of them smashing.

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Later he set the tape to play back from a hidden place.

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Others claimed to hear things breaking while he was out of the room.

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And a policeman who came to investigate found himself right in the firing line.

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Some investigators have tried to explain poltergeists by natural causes.

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And there's one extraordinary case where the explanation was quite literally down to earth.

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Whizbeach, Cambridgeshire.

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In 1979 residents of the Mount Pleasant Estate were alarmed by inexplicable bangings and rumblings.

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The terrifying trademarks of the poltergeist.

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There was that layer that was in the ground.

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And the police found the police.

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The terrifying trademarks of the poltergeist.

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There was that layer that was making the glass vibrate in the house itself.

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After two or three days it was getting quite bad.

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So much so in fact that you could feel the paven stones underneath your feet actually vibrate and scrape them together.

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The manhole covers you can hear them rattling.

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And in the house you could actually see the ornaments on the mantelpiece moving.

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I have brass plates and there's ornaments.

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And we were sat there watching the tally and they started to shake it first.

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And then they just one by one started to fall off shelves and off of ready the wall.

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And you thought, creaky, whatever's going on here, you know, it just weren't natural.

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We didn't really know what it was.

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I mean it could have been earthly spirits if you like.

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Some are airing up underground.

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You didn't know what it was, you see.

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And if you don't know what something is, then it is unnerven, isn't it?

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I mean these sort of things don't happen every day.

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You know, things just flying off walls and movements from under foot, you know, it was airy.

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It really was.

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But the real cause was reassuringly unparanormal.

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An air relief valve had failed in the main sewer.

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Effectively the air was trapped in the rising main and was in fact moving up and down the rising main.

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Causing the tremors.

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This would be similar to a central heating system.

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Air gets trapped in, the pipes rattle.

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If you imagine that in pipes of this size, effectively you've got 10 or 20 times greater noise as well.

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And the pipe ran directly under the road where our houses were.

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And that was their explanation. It was just this sewage pipe.

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Elsewhere in Cambridgeshire they found poltergeists aren't always so easy to explain.

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A gentleman brought out a very plausible theory a number of years ago about geophysical forces underground hitting a house.

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And making things shake, you see.

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Vibrations go up the wall, hat boxes are thrown off, tables are displaced, bars is suddenly moved.

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And people are sitting in this house and they don't realise that it's due to underground water running underneath

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or disused grains or seismic disturbance or something of that nature. Geophysical forces.

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Tony Cornell is testing whether such forces can create effects that could be mistaken for poltergeists.

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Right, we'll just mountain this up here. Down a bit, down a bit.

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Engineer Scott Steedman fixes a powerful vibrator to the wall to shake the house just like an earth tremor.

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This whole house probably weighs about 100 tonnes. Yeah.

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So that a normal earthquake, well, a good sized earthquake that really would probably do some serious damage to this house,

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would put perhaps 20 or 40 tonnes horizontally on this house.

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On the mantelpiece, household objects are carefully positioned. The sort of things that fly about during poltergeist outbreaks.

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So we can really shake the house properly. So if anything is going to happen, it's going to happen like this.

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Shall I go upstairs and have a look? I think it's a good idea. Right there.

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Right, now if we come up the stairs here, see the traditional wardrobe with a hat box has not been thrown off.

225
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The idea was that you've got a vibration up the wall and it threw the box off. Nothing's moved there.

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This hasn't moved, the cup hasn't moved, the plate, sorry, the tin tray, balanced on one nail, which is very precarious.

227
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That hasn't moved at all. Nothing has come off.

228
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Pick it up higher. We're running over 100 hertz now. Well, there's a low vibration.

229
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About 120 hertz. I can feel it through my teeth.

230
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Well over 10 tonnes going in and out of this wall 100 times a second.

231
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A typical poltergeist effect at the expense of a cup is it doesn't just drop like that.

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It flies and crashes, you know. But nothing, we're getting nothing like that at all.

233
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Danny, what can you feel up there? I can feel it through my feet, but there's nothing moving.

234
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Well it is a local effect, I mean it's very local in that wall. Yeah.

235
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Right, let's wind it up a bit faster.

236
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Only when the machine's really racing, virtually shaking the house to destruction, do things start to fly.

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Here we go.

238
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But the artificial earthquake has produced nothing remotely resembling the effects of a poltergeist.

239
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I think that geophysical theory, as pronounced several years ago, is dead as an explanation of a poltergeist. That might be.

240
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I've always been fascinated by poltergeist stories. Almost against my will, I've been compelled to take them seriously,

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because they show certain recurrent features. Often, not always, there's a disturbed adolescent somewhere in the background.

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Now, as all parents know, adolescents can raise plenty of hell without paranormal aid.

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Nevertheless, this persistent feature over many centuries and in many cultures suggests that something strange may be going on.

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In the winter of 1967 in Rosenheim, southern Germany, chaos descended on a lawyer's office.

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Every piece of equipment suddenly went crazy.

246
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Her Adam the lawyer and engineer, Her Brunner, were caught up in the strange events.

247
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And they fell down, and there were grass-pinters everywhere.

248
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And once I had a fluorescent light installed, and it rotated too.

249
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Even when it was on the floor, it rotated.

250
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It exploded once. Through there.

251
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Yes, then do you remember that painting, oil painting?

252
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Yes.

253
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Yes, she was sitting there, making photocopies. I was standing here in the corner, and in front of my very eyes, the picture rotated.

254
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Here, there was a metal cash box. The drawer was like this, and the metal cash box flew out at a right angle to the wall.

255
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It's crated out.

256
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Heard across the room.

257
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Oh, yes.

258
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And the money was scattered all over both rooms.

259
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That's terrible.

260
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Hundreds of telephone calls were made to the speaking clock, 0119.

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Dialed at impossible speed on one occasion, nine calls in two minutes, according to the bill.

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Here, for example, you can see a column headed 0119, one after the other, 20, 30 times the whole page.

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The telephone company laboriously rewired the whole system, but the calls to the speaking clock went on.

264
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Professor Hans Bender, Germany's foremost parapsychologist, was summoned to Rosenheim.

265
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Soon he announced the cause of the trouble, the office junior, a teenage girl named Anne Marie.

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She's now a settled housewife, but Bender believes she was the focus for a genuine poltergeist.

267
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Well, very soon we realized it is a case of poltergeist, depending on Anne Marie.

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When the girl was walking through the corridors, the lamps began to swing.

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We very carefully observed the swinging of the lamp.

270
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We did not notice the beginning, but the, what do you call it, amplitude was increasing without the presence of anyone.

271
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So there was a supply of force, you know, and nothing happened when she was not present.

272
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It was a very clear case of poltergeist phenomena.

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I must say I felt very humble. I was completely shocked.

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I must believe it. You could put it that way. I must believe it.

275
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But I did not want it to happen, you know. That is true. But otherwise, I suppose I was the cause.

276
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The most extraordinary phenomena, I think, are the telephone phenomena.

277
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I never observed it in other cases.

278
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And the interesting aspect of these telephone phenomena is that Anne Marie,

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without having the slightest knowledge of the technical system of a telephone, seems to have acted on swings.

280
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And so produced unconsciously these calls for time, 0, 1, 1, 9.

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And this for weeks and sometimes four times, five times in a minute.

282
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And the motivation may have been, when can I go home?

283
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Not at all. I'm no different from anybody else.

284
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Is it possible that adolescents can possess powers which they lose in later life?

285
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I think it's very unlikely. But I don't think it's completely impossible.

286
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I'm not sure.

287
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Next week, ESP.