The Coker Hill Haunting 3: A Witness March 4, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
The journalist himself arrived once the haunting had officially come to an end. However, he found one individual, ‘a well-to-do, respectable, intelligent man’, who had been in the building on Sunday 13 June when as many as three hundred neighbours had gathered to hear the noises.
When I got in the sound seemed to be immediately in front me. I turned towards the window, and the knocking was then apparently in front of me. I could see nothing, but it resembled as if a carpenter was beating a box with a mallet. I turned completely round, and the knocking was again in front. You may depend, sir… that there is something in it, but what I cannot make out. I looked under the bed, examined the walls, and went outside see there was any communication, but found nothing. All this took place when several were in the room, and looked rather ‘gallied,’* I can tell you, at each other. The woman, I am sure, had nothing to do with it. She was in bed, and it would be impossible for any one in the room to give such loud blows even if he were beating the bedstead or the flooring.
This might be the time to indulge in a little amateur psychology. As noted in a previous post Beach can’t think of a British poltergeist case where the haunting is so strongly and so explicitly associated with one individual. Usually there is a suspicion about a house maid. Here, though, there seems to be a connection between the woman’s fits and the noise. One particularly striking observation (allegedly) came from the local doctor:
Dr. Edie, of West Coker, was called in, and examined the woman. It is stated that when he held the woman’s hands the knocking ceased, but that immediately he let them go it re-commenced, but this is merely the gossip of the village.
We could cynically say that a woman left for months on end with her own with two children had found someway to create this pantomime: we might even reason that as the wife of a magic lantern operator she understood the nature of showmanship. However, if this was the case, her neighbours did not pick up on it. Other thoughts: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
*Beach had to look this one up: ‘worried, flurried’.
