Mary Jobson and the Bishopwearmouth (Sunderland) poltergeist

Bishopwearmouth was then a village. Today it is part of Sunderland city centre, historically County Durham. Here John and Elizabeth Jobson lived with their daughter Mary, usually given as 13. A later newspaper account places the family on Hendon Road.

The dates depend on the account. Dr William Reid Clanny's dated entries put the onset of her illness on 9 February 1840 and her recovery on 22 June. Another tradition says she fell ill in November 1839. The writers who debated the case in 1899 gave the year as 1839.

Dr R. B. Embleton recorded that "she complained of severe pain on the back part of the head, increased on pressure; her eyes were very sensible to the light." Her face distorted. Her pupils dilated. Convulsions began. For spells she could not see, hear or speak.

Then the house began to answer. Three loud knocks sounded near the bed. Always three. Violent scratching followed. Footsteps and bangs moved through the house. Bells rang even when no one was there to ring them. Doors opened and closed of their own accord. Water appeared from nowhere and was sprinkled in the room. Doctors found Mary's medicine snatched out of their hands. A phantom lamb was seen in the house. On the ceiling, an astronomical design appeared in green, yellow, and orange. If anyone painted whitewash over it, it reappeared.

Music was frequently heard. Dr Edward Drury, known for his earlier investigation of the Willington Mill haunting, testified: "On listening I distinctly heard most exquisite music which continued during the time I might count a hundred." Elizabeth Gauntlett, described as Mary's governess, confirmed it.

Then came the voice. Loud, strong, and weirdly sweet. It was not Mary's own. One visitor noticed her lips did not move while it spoke. Witnesses noted that her hands and feet stayed above the bedcovers while things happened.

The voice said it was God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, apostles and martyrs. One witness wrote down: "I am the Lord thy God which brought thee out of the land of Egypt." It recited family genealogies the parents did not know, later said to be accurate. It insisted this was a miracle and that medicine was useless. In May 1840, Mary foretold an attempt on Queen Victoria's life. Then she was cured, and it all stopped.

Clanny was senior physician at Sunderland Infirmary and inventor of the Clanny safety lamp. He gathered the testimony and published it as A Faithful Record of the Miraculous Case of Mary Jobson, its second edition dated 1841. Sixteen witnesses in all, Clanny and three other medical men among them. To them the force was angelic, not demonic. Clanny was "ridiculed and persecuted, but always maintained his firm conviction."

In 1899 Alfred Russel Wallace took the case into the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, against Frank Podmore. Podmore held that poltergeists were mostly trickery by the child at the centre. Wallace answered with qualified witnesses and events "all without any discoverable cause; and all in presence of a sick girl." Arthur Morrison had classed it in 1891 as possession, while allowing that some such cases involve mental illness. Fraud or ventriloquism remains the obvious sceptical reading. Against it stand the witnesses' notes on her lips and hands.

William Howitt retold the case in 1863. Owen Davies reprinted Clanny's record in Ghosts: A Social History. Mary, after her cure, apparently lived a fairly mundane life.