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The Link – Matthew Manning

On Eastern Sunday my parents had some friends in during the evening, and I was out of the house. I came home and shortly afterwards their friends left at about ten o'clock.

As they were showing their guests to the door they passed through the dining room, and to my mother's embarrassment found a large pewter charger upside down on the table; they said nothing to their friends or to me about it.

I had gone to bed by this time and I lay there restlessly although I do not remember whether it was particularly hot that night. I suddenly heard a scraping noise coming from the direction of the cupboard, which continued for about thirty seconds. Having listened to it for a moment, I switched on my lamp and saw to my horror that the cupboard was inching out from the wall towards me. When it halted it had advanced about eighteen inches. I switched off the light and almost simultaneously my bed started to vibrate violently back and forth. I was now too timid to move and I lay in anticipation of whatever might happen next. The vibrating ceased and I felt the end of my bed rising from the floor at the bottom end, to what I estimated to be about one foot. My head end of the bed then rose two or three inches, and at the same time the bed pitched out towards the centre of the room and finally settled at a tangent to the wall.

I was not going to accept being shunted around and I 'got out of bed as quickly as I could, intent on informing my parents that I had enough, and that I was not going to occupy the room any more until something was done about it.

It transpired that they were not free from worry either; first they had found the pewter charger upturned on the dining room table and then on returning to the sitting room they saw the settee pulled out at an angle across the room. When we went to inspect my bedroom we found a heavy armchair placed across the doorway barring any entry to the room. It was at this stage that for a second time in five years we felt we were caught up in some freakish and frightening dilemma.

I spent that night upstairs in my parents' room on the floor in a sleeping bag, and although we all feared the worst, nothing more occurred until early next morning.

The first room we saw was the dining room. It looked as though a bomb had hit it. Chairs were upturned or simply not in the room, the table was no longer on its feet, and ornaments were strewn around the room and on the floor. The sitting room was in a similar state as was nearly every other ground floor room in the house.

Tables and chairs were piled on top of each other, pictures were dismounted and several objects, such as a kettle, and pieces of cutlery, had vanished. Having inspected the field of battle we began to replace everything as it had been previously, starting in the sitting room.  We moved to the dining room and corrected the disarrayed furniture; we found an object here that had been moved from the sitting room, and on returning it there, we found that this room was again in a state of total disarray, just minutes after we had tidied it. After the kitchen and dining room had been tidied up we righted the sitting room again. This took us only a few minutes, by which time the dining room had again been "attacked".

This sequence of upsetting one room after another continued all day on Easter Monday, and although we were obviously worried, we could see an amusing side to it all. We were perturbed because we could not understand it, and we did not know what would or could happen next. Objects were constantly being moved, but could never, at this stage, be seen to move.

It was not unusual to find the kettle in the deep-freeze, all the chairs placed on the table, a hat hung up on a nail where a picture should have been, or a broom balanced across the back of a chair.

On the second day of the outbreak, when my brother and sister were entering the kitchen early in the morning, they were met, as they came through the kitchen door, by a trolley which was gliding towards them about an inch from the floor; they turned and ran away and the trolley was found soon afterwards jammed in the doorway where they had been standing. They later watched a detergent bottle rocking from side to side on the edge of the bath, while no one else was near it.

This sequence of events continued in the same fashion for several days. It was soon evident that the phenomena became particularly pronounced at certain times of the day, chiefly mid-morning and evening.

The events that took place were peculiar and even amusing; yet at the same time they were often too difficult to be reproduced by any member of the family. Some of the most interesting demonstrations were those that involved delicate balancing feats, and on more than one occasion we found a broom balanced across the horizontal handrail of our staircase. It was easily off-balanced from its position when touched. In our sitting room we had three metal framed tables with stone tops, and these were occasionally delicately placed one on top of the other; the total weight of the tables was obviously great.

Beds seemed to suffer more than any other pieces of furniture, and they were frequently stripped completely, or even overturned. My sister's bed was particularly "victimised", and on one occasion it was found with two of its feet hanging out of a first floor window.

Many objects disappeared, to be found later hidden or returned to a different, and usually very obvious place. These were not necessarily small articles, but also included pictures, bed clothes, kitchen equipment and ornaments which would often be found in the backs of cupboards or under beds.