The Cape Cod Poltergeist: the Connolly Household

Cape Cod, Massachusetts. 1957. Maude Connolly was a widow. She lived with her two adopted daughters. By the account that survives, she was not a superstitious woman.

Her story reaches us through one man. Milbourne Christopher was a magician, a historian of magic, a president of the Society of American Magicians and a founding member of CSICOP. In 1970 he told it on page 142 of his book ESP, Seers & Psychics. No town, no street and no house is named.

The family was watching television. Then papers in the living room began whirling in the air. Ornaments fell from a knickknack shelf and crashed to the floor.

It did not stop there. A heavy mirror fell from the bedroom wall. An ashtray that had been resting on a table with a glass top slammed against the surface with such force that the glass was shattered.

The next morning brought more. Mrs. Connolly found an imitation fireplace and a couple of chairs overturned in the living room. Nobody had seen them fall. Such things went on for four days. No police, clergy, scientists or reporters are recorded at the house. The witnesses were the three people who lived there.

A building inspector suggested the problem might be coming from the fireplace. Mrs. Connolly hired someone to put a protective covering over the chimney top. She attributed the events to powerful drafts swirling down the chimney and disturbing objects in their path. Christopher's ending is a single line. "From that moment on, the objects stayed put."

Christopher offered the case as a poltergeist with a natural cause. Some cases of poltergeist activity, he found, can be attributed to unusual air currents. Wikipedia's "Poltergeist" article sets the case beside G. W. Lambert's separate 1950s theory of underground water shifting beneath houses.

Questions remain. Could a draft press an ashtray hard enough to break glass, or topple chairs and a heavy wall mirror? The account gives no measurements and no weather. Robert Todd Carroll, who quotes it in The Skeptic's Dictionary, admits he "can't even prove that these events happened." He adds that Christopher "has a stellar reputation" and that he has "no reason to mistrust his account."

There is a strange echo. In 1958, during the Seaford, Long Island case known as "Popper the Poltergeist," Nassau County Detective Joseph Tozzi received a letter from a woman named Helen Connolly of Revere, Massachusetts. She described chairs and furniture moving about in her living room. The cause was a heavy downdraft through her fireplace. Once the chimney was capped with a rotary metal turbine, the flying tables and chairs ceased to fly.

Same surname, same state, same downdraft, same cure. Maude or Helen, Cape Cod or Revere, it may be one story told twice. No newspaper report from the time has yet settled which.