The Rue Neuve-Saint-Paul knockings, Poitiers (1864)

Poitiers, in the Vienne. Winter, 1864. On Rue Neuve-Saint-Paul, near the old church of Saint-Paul, stood a house occupied by a woman the press named only as Mlle de O…, sister of the Comte de O…. Decades later, Camille Flammarion would call it the house of Mlle d'Ourches. Her brother, the Comte d'Ourches, was remembered as one of the first to take up Spiritist manifestations in Paris.

The Journal de la Vienne broke the story on 21 January 1864. Every evening, from six o'clock, strange noises filled the house. They sounded like artillery fire. Violent blows seemed to strike the doors and the shutters. The household first suspected children or ill-meaning neighbours.

Mlle de O… complained. The police took the matter seriously and posted agents inside and outside the house. Then the brigadier, the sieur M…, was seized by a violent shock. The next day he had still not fully come to himself. Word spread. Each night a crowd gathered under the windows, so large that the authorities requested a picket of the 10e chasseurs to clear the street.

After a lull, the noises came back with new intensity. On 17 and 18 February the Journal de la Vienne published articles by Piogeard. These were no longer knocks. They were detonations, like the successive discharges of a double-barrelled gun, or small bombs. They shook the doors, the windows and the partition walls, every night from six o'clock to midnight.

No one saw light. No one saw smoke. No one smelled anything. Exorcisms were performed, and the house fell quiet for a few days. Then it started again, in different forms.

The police and the gendarmerie recorded the events in official reports, made at the family's request. Piogeard ran his own test. Pistol shots fired in the cellars could not be heard on the first floor, so the sounds seemed to come from the upper regions of the house. He also noted that some people questioned had heard nothing at all.

The paper had promised arrests, but none came. Its final unsigned article gave a verdict: "Nous croyons à une supercherie fort habile." A very clever hoax. No culprit was named. By May 1864 the disturbances had completely stopped.

Allan Kardec followed the case in his Revue spirite. In February he urged patience and warned that opponents of spiritism might stage a hoax. By March he judged the facts definitively Spiritist. Some blamed a famous medium who no longer lived in the neighbourhood, while a correspondent writing from Orange blamed gases rising from an old cemetery, but the house was built on rock. In May the Revue argued that any pranksters would have had to be skilful and numerous.

In November 1864 a sceptic, M. David (de Thiais), listed earlier hauntings near Saint-Paul to argue that such things recur and prove nothing. Kardec replied that a phenomenon reproduced for centuries in the same place pointed to a law worth studying.

The street had a history. In the 13th century a stone-throwing spirit was reported near Saint-Paul. In 1447, Pierre Mamoris recorded a spirit there that dragged furniture and broke glass. In February 1864, knocking was also reported at Bois-de-Doeuil, near Ville-au-Moine, where a child's cradle swung with no visible cause. Camille Flammarion later told the Poitiers story in Les maisons hantées. The police reports themselves have never been located.