The Bayón house poltergeist, el miedo de Rayán

Rayán is a casería, a farmstead hamlet in the parish of Moreda, concejo of Aller, Asturias. More than 50 people lived there, most of them tied to the mines. The Bayón family had come from Camplongo, in León, for that work. Eusebio Bayón and Concepción González had 13 children. The youngest was Juan.

Most accounts say 1915. One night the baby's crying woke his parents, who found the cradle moving by itself "con gran violencia". It happened again the following nights, and a neighbour offered to sit up with the child. At dawn the cradle started again. When he tried to stop it, he was thrown to the floor.

In another telling, Juan Alonso, a strong miner and family friend, was thrown across the room. A granddaughter, Felicita Bayón, remembered that three very strong men tried to stop the cradle and couldn't. Once it was found upside down, the baby still asleep inside. Soledad Bayón, about 11 at the time, recalled it spinning on the spot at dizzying speed in a house full of villagers. Then, she said, an invisible hand lifted it into the air.

It came every other night, mostly between 1 and 5 a.m. Knocks on the walls and doors, and from inside the walls. Footsteps on the stairs, like wooden clogs. Chains dragged across the attic. Moaning, crying, screams.

Stones fell inside with the doors and windows shut and no glass broken. Windows crashed open and shut together. A large crucifix rose from wall to wall and flew off. Rosaries and scapulars from a locked wardrobe turned up laid out in a cross on the baby, or hanging from his ears.

Neighbours took turns keeping watch. Several accounts say agents from the Guardia Civil post at Moreda guarded the house inside and out on many nights, and that some fled. Priests blessed the house and performed exorcisms, without success. Antón de Moreda, a child then, remembered a priest in a long cassock walking there for many months. Spiritists came too, among them a Bilbao group called "la mágica".

The end came through Concepción. One night she got up and said, "¿No oyes que me llaman?" Can't you hear them calling me? She went alone into the next room, and her husband saw her standing and talking for a long time. Family sources say she met a translucent, luminous figure that made her kneel and gave her orders.

Eusebio found her fainted on the floor. They had to go to Camplongo, she said, to have Masses said and light candles, and once the family made the journey, the events stopped. They came to blame her sister Catalina, whose will had asked for Gregorian Masses that were never said. Yet a daughter later said the trouble followed Juan for the rest of his life. Concepción died aged 103 without revealing the secret.

Not everyone was convinced. In a version credited to the historian Arantza Margolles, a sergeant from Caborana came and nothing happened while he was there, and the Gijón paper El Noroeste joked that even goblins feared the tricorne. Folklore offered the diañu and the trasgu, while the usual conventional explanations would be pranks in a house of 13 children, panic among the watching crowds, and decades of retelling. The dates already drift between 1910, 1915 and 1917, and no document from the time has been checked. The story lives on in family testimony, a 1995 feature in La Voz de Asturias, and the Milenio 3 broadcast of 31 March 2007, when Iker Jiménez had Juanje Vallejo report live from the house.