Poltergeists
are "noisy spirits" who haunt individuals or families, not the
houses they live in. Usually, the activity that accompanies a
poltergeist haunting focuses on the presence of one particular
individual, who's always present when the haunting takes place.
Poltergeists make loud noises and move objects. They may hurl vases from
mantels or move heavy pieces of furniture in front of astonished
observers. Some scientists believe that poltergeists are not
ghosts--just strange events that may be caused by a young person or a
family who are living under a great deal of tension. Still, others
believe that poltergeists are ghosts who enjoy mischief.
The case of
the Sauchie Poltergeist, which occurred in Sauchie, Scotland in 1960,
helped provide proof that poltergeists are not ghosts, but strange
events related to a young person's distress. All of the activity
centered around an eleven-year-old schoolgirl named Virginia Campbell
who had recently moved from Ireland to Scotland.
No one
really understood how upset Virginia really was when she moved to
Scotland in October 1960. Virginia was the youngest child, and the only
one left at home, now that everyone else had left home to work and raise
their own families. Because her parents were almost sixty and because
her brothers and sisters had gone, Virginia's childhood had been lonely,
especially in the rural county where they lived. As someone who knew the
Campbells said, "they gave the impression of people who had lived
for a long time in a remote and isolated place."
In fact, her
loneliness would only be accentuated by the move to Scotland, because a
number of things about the move disturbed Virginia's peace of mind.
First, she was upset enough that her father had to stay behind to sell
their farm in Ireland. Second, she wasn't happy that she and her mother
had to live with her aunt and uncle in Sauchie. They had a small house
and she had to share a bed with her younger cousin, Margaret. 
To make matters worse, her mother found work in another town that was
not commuting distance from Sauchie. So Mrs. Campbell decided to live in
the town where she worked and left Virginia in Sauchie. Perhaps worst of
all, Virginia had to leave behind her only friend, Annie, and her
beloved dog, Toby. So Virginia, who was a shy girl anyway, was left to
stay alone with her uncle's family, share a bed with Margaret, and start
school in a new town. She felt very lonely and upset indeed.
The first
sign of any poltergeist activity happened on Tuesday, November 22nd,
just after Virginia and Margaret had gone to bed. Virginia's aunt and
uncle, who were sitting downstairs in the living room, heard the girls
call out that they heard a noise in their room.
"Go to
sleep, girls," Mr. Campbell called. "It's just your
imagination."
A few
minutes passed, then the girls rushed downstairs. As they did, a "thunking"
sound, much like a bouncing rubber ball, seemed to follow them down the
stairs into the living room. The noise stopped, and everyone looked
puzzled. The Campbells thought that the girls might have been playing a
trick on them and ordered them back to bed. But when they looked in on
the girls a few moments later, they could hear the knocking, which
seemed to come from behind the girls' headboard. They asked the girls to
switch to another bedroom, thinking that the knocking disturbed them
from sleeping. But when the girls were tucked into another bed in
another room, the knocking began again, just behind the headboard of the
new bed. Virginia's aunt and uncle weren't sure what to do, when
suddenly the knocking ceased, right around the time that Virginia fell
asleep.
The next
night, the strange knocking was heard again, shortly after Virginia and
Margaret had gone to bed. Even after Margaret ran terrified from the
bedroom, the knocking continued. At first, her aunt and uncle suspected
that Viginia was making the knocking sounds herself as a cruel joke;
perhaps, hey thought, it was her attempt to have the bed all to herself.
But when the knocks continued, they became just as terrified as
Margaret. They called a local minister, Mr. Lund, who arrived at their
house shortly after midnight. He heard the loud knocking sound as well
and noted that it came from behind the headboard. He thought Virginia
might be to blame also, but when he asked Virginia to move down in the
bed, so that her head was not touching the headboard, the knocking
continued. This convinced him that Virginia could not have been
producing the knocking sounds herself. What's more, the headboard did
not touch the wall in any way, so that the knocking was not coming from
the wall; it came from the headboard itself! Mr. Lund placed
his hand on the headboard and the wall. When he heard the knocking, only
the headboard vibrated in unison with the sound. The knocking continued,
despite Mr. Lund's presence.
Then, as Mr.
Lund watched, a large, heavy linen chest that stood near Virginia's bed
began to rock back and forth. It rose slightly off the floor, before it
moved toward the bed, jerking along and almost toppling a time or two.
After it had moved about eighteen inches, the chest stopped, then
returned to its original position.
By this
point, Virginia was becoming hysterical, and Mr. Lund tried to calm her
down by joking that her boyfriend must have been knocking to get her
attention.
"Maybe
you should knock back to him," Mr. Lund suggested.
He talked
for awhile to Virginia, who seemed to become somewhat more relaxed. Then
he suggested that Margaret should get back into bed with Virginia and
that both girls should try to get some sleep. No sooner had he spoken
than the knocking began again, very insistently, as if to say that
Margaret wasn't wanted in Virginia's bed. When Margaret used another bed
in the same room, the knocking stopped for the night, and both girls
fell soundly asleep.
Similar
knockings occurred the next day, but other, even stranger things were
beginning to happen. Some china vases had moved by themselves, an apple
had floated out of the fruit bowl, a sewing machine had started by
itself when no one was near. But these were minor incidents compared to
what happened during the course of the next week, especially at school.
On Friday,
November 25th, Virginia went to school for the first time in three days.
She had been kept from school when the knocking had happened, because
her aunt and uncle thought she was too upset to attend school. When she
returned home that day, Mr. Lund, who had stopped by for a visit, asked
Virginia how her day had been.
"All
right," she said, matter-of-factly, "but something funny
happened when I was there. When my teacher was standing near my desk,
the lid of another desk went up all by itself."
That was all
Virginia said, but when A.R.G. Owen, a researcher who studied the
Sauchie poltergeist, interviewed Miss Margaret Stewart, Virginia's
teacher, he received slightly different and much more compelling
information as to what had happened. For example, Miss Stewart noticed
the lid of Virginia's desk raise up and down three times, when
Virginia's hands were squarely on top of the desk. In fact, from Miss
Stewart's vantage point, Virginia appeared to struggle against the desk
top, as if to stop it from rising. Miss Stewart had the presence of mind
to check if Virginia were raising the desk top with her knees; she
wasn't. Then Miss Stewart stared at Virginia, as if to say, "That's
enough." Virginia stared back silently.
However,
Virginia seemed to have forgotten something that happened about fifteen
minutes later. The girl who sat behind Virginia asked permission to
return her library book and left her desk for awhile. As Miss Stewart
watched, much to her surprise, she saw the girl's empty desk rise slowly
upwards, until it was an inch off the floor. It stayed there for a
moment, then gently lowered itself back to the floor. Immediately, Miss
Stewart rushed to the desk to make sure strings hadn't been used to
raise the desk. She found a normal desk, and no way to explain its
movement. None of the other children had noticed the desk's movement,
and she felt more than a little embarrassed at her rush to an empty
desk.
In order to
cover over her actions, Miss Stewart turned to Virginia and asked:
"Are you feeling better, Virginia?"
"There's
nothing wrong with me, Miss Stewart," Virginia replied.
Three days
later, on Monday, November 28th, Miss Stewart was again surprised when
Virginia approached the teacher's desk that morning. At the same time, a
blackboard pointer on the desk began to vibrate and move across the desk
until it fell on the floor. As the pointer moved, the teacher felt the
desk and found that it was vibrating as well. Then the desk began to
move in a counterclockwise fashion, away from the teacher. She looked at
Virginia, who was still standing a few feet away. At that point,
Virginia started to cry.
"Please,
Miss, I'm not doing it," Virginia said.
"It's
all right. Just help me straighten up my desk."
It was
apparent from a number of other happenings that Virginia's distress was
caused especially by the loss of her best friend and her dog. One day,
the local doctor, Dr. Logan, stopped by to see how Virginia was doing
and brought along his dog. Virginia was very taken with Dr. Logan's dog
and remarked that he looked just like Toby. She played with the dog
awhile, then Dr. Logan left with his pet. Later that night after she had
gone to bed, Virginia went into a trance, of sorts. She began to talk in
her sleep, calling for her dog Toby and her friend Annie.
Mr. Lund,
the minister, was visiting at the time of the trance and gave Virginia a
teddy bear, thinking that this would calm her down. For a few minutes,
she held the bear and cuddled it, perhaps thinking that it was her dog,
until she felt a button on its front.
"This
isn't Toby," she cried and threw the teddy bear across. Then, her
eyes closed and still in her trance, she flailed her arms and hit Mr.
Lund and seemed to become hysterical. Mr. Lund and her aunt and uncle
quickly left her room, and soon her trance ended and she was quiet the
rest of the night.
By December,
the Sauchie poltergeist had become a common topic among the townspeople.
It had been written about in the newspaper and had begun to achieve a
national reputation.
On December
1st, Mr. Lund and three other ministers decided to perform a religious
service of intercession in Virginia's bedroom to provide the family some
comfort. Mr. Lund brought a tape recorder to make a record of the
service which lasted fifteen minutes. During the service, some knocking
and scraping sounds were heard. Although the poltergeist activity did
not go away, it was much less frequent after December 1st. By that time,
Virginia was back to normal at school and even had a friend, Elizabeth
Brown. In fact, the poltergeist was so much less disturbing that
Virginia gave it a name: Wee Hughie. A few objects moved during the next
few months, and soon both Margaret and Virginia began to blame a number
of suspicious occurrences on Wee Hughie, most notably the disappearance
of a few bags of candy. Wee Hughie, obviously, had a sweet tooth now
that Virginia was feeling better.
At any rate,
Toby was eventually reunited to Virginia, and by March, 1961, the
poltergeist activity ceased completely. Clearly, as Virginia began to
feel better about her new surroundings, Wee Hughie was much less active.
With the disappearance of the candy and a few other similar events,
Virginia and Margaret may have decided to blame Wee Hughie for a few of
their own transgressions. A poltergeist may come in handy after all.
ŠJames M. Deem.
From an unpublished manuscript. All rights reserved.
