The Casa delle pietre: the stone-throwing poltergeist of Campo San Boldo, Venice

Campo San Boldo is a quiet square in the San Polo sestiere of Venice, close to the boundary with Santa Croce. A low house with a garden stood there. Part of it was said to rest on the site of the demolished church of San Boldo.

In March, Tullio Gioppo moved in with his wife and their two children, a boy and a girl. A young maid lived with them. The year is uncertain. One retelling, drawing on the Gazzetta di Venezia, gives 1929. The Venetian writer Alberto Toso Fei says the early 1920s.

It began at the end of July. A dense hail of stones shattered the glass of several windows. The family blamed local boys playing a prank. Then the stones came back. Now there were bigger pieces among them.

They fell almost every evening. They did not let up even at night. Some were big enough to chip the wooden front door. The crowd said they seemed to come from the sky.

The Gazzetta di Venezia reporter put it this way: "Pare che i proiettili piovano dal cielo come aeroliti." It seems the projectiles rain down from the sky like meteorites. In the dry-stone garden wall, holes inexplicably opened, and just as inexplicably closed. Inside the house, something stranger. Objects began to fly by themselves whenever the young maid passed by.

After nearly twenty days, Gioppo turned to the authorities. Royal guards watched the house for two days and two nights, caught nobody, and mostly kept the crowds back. Fascist squads took over for three more days and nights, and the stones kept falling. By the end of August, crowds gathered every evening and rumours of a ghost spread. One watcher climbed a fig tree in the garden for a better view and took a bump on the head.

Then it ended. One account says it stopped in autumn, without warning. Others say it stopped when the young maid was sent away. Some said she ran away out of fear. The thrower was never identified.

An old woman of the neighbourhood had her own answer. Where the house stood, she said, a parish priest had once been killed on the altar of San Boldo, with a bronze candlestick in one telling, by a chaplain in another. His spirit wanted prayers said for his soul. Local histories of the church, built in 1088 and demolished in 1826 to make way for new houses, mention no murdered priest. Toso Fei saw a poltergeist of the classic kind, the kind said to appear where adolescents are present.

The sceptical reading of such cases, from Podmore to Joe Nickell, points to an individual motivated to cause mischief. No one has argued that about this maid in particular. The garden, the fig tree and the loose wall offered cover to anyone outside. Nobody was ever caught.

No photograph is known. No stone was kept. The story survives through Gianni Nosenghi's Il grande libro dei misteri di Venezia risolti e irrisolti, Toso Fei's "La casa delle pietre" and Venetian blogs, while the original Gazzetta di Venezia pages remain untraced. It sits beside other stone and object cases of 1929, a house on Troye Street in Johannesburg and the throwing at Borley Rectory.