The Stone-Throwing Poltergeist at Sri Aurobindo's Guest House, Pondicherry

Pondicherry, then French India. At 41 rue François Martin, in the White Town quarter, stands the Guest House. Sri Aurobindo lived there from October 1913 to October 1922. In the middle of December 1921, by the Mother's account, the stones began.

It started unobtrusively. A few stones were thrown at the Guest House kitchen, seemingly from the terrace opposite, "but there was no one there". Then, Sri Aurobindo wrote, "daily it increased in frequency, violence and the size of the stones". Half an hour became several hours. Near the end came a regular bombardment before midnight. One huge stone, in a closed room, "reposed flat and comfortable on a cane table".

"They appeared in mid-air a few feet above the ground, not coming from a distance but suddenly manifesting." On the staircase, the Mother saw them falling straight down, and only from the roof downwards. The police searched and kept watch. Then a stone whizzed between a constable's legs. The police abandoned the case.

It all gathered around one young servant, an under-cook of about 13 or 14 in the Mother's memory. Sri Aurobindo called him "the centre of the attack". At the climax he sheltered in Bijoy's room. Stones appeared inside the closed room. They struck him and made him bleed. "I went in at Bijoy's call and saw the last stone fall on the boy." Sri Aurobindo and Bijoy sat side by side. The stone came from the front. No one could be seen throwing it.

The Mother decided the process depended on "a nexus between the boy-servant and the house". The boy was sent away to Hrishikesh's place, "and immediately the whole phenomenon ceased".

On 10 March 1954 the Mother told another story. Datta had scolded the cook, Vatel. He was "in contact with some Musulmans" who had "a book of magic", and he threatened that the household would be forced to leave. Days later, stones and pieces of brick fell in the courtyard. One struck Datta's arm. None fell within "a circle of twenty-five metres around Sri Aurobindo". A policeman with a loaded pistol heard Vatel's name and left. While he waited in the courtyard, "not a stone!"

In meditation she saw "three little entities of the vital", who said they had been ordered to do it. She sent them away with "white light" and rubbed out charcoal signs, numbers and Tamil words on a kitchen pillar. Next day Vatel was in hospital, said to be dying. "Oh, just for a few stones!" said Sri Aurobindo. "That very evening Vatel was cured", and the attacks ended.

The two accounts, set down 17 to 33 years later, disagree on the police, the cause and the ending. In 1938 Sri Aurobindo wrote that only "three or four stones" fell inside a room. But the stones were "material enough", and a heap of them stood at the staircase bottom for two or three days. Every account comes from inside the ashram. No police record or newspaper report has been found.

No named critic has studied the case. The usual answers in stone-throwing poltergeist cases would be the young servant throwing in secret, or someone on a neighbouring terrace. The witnesses pointed to the constable, the closed rooms and the stone from the front. The quiet while the policeman stood guard cuts both ways.

The story survives in Sri Aurobindo's letters titled "The Stone-Throwing Incident", in Nirodbaran's Talks with Sri Aurobindo, where a frightened disciple called "K" appears, and in the Mother's talk, republished as "Raining Stones". Searches found no outside book, documentary or study.