The Battersea Poltergeist of Eland Road: the Robinson Family Haunting, 1927 to 1928

Eland Road runs off Lavender Hill in Battersea, south London. In the winter of 1927 one two-storey terraced house there belonged to Henry Robinson. He was 86, an invalid, and had lived in the house for 25 years. With him lived his son Frederick Robinson, a tutor, his daughters Lillah and Kate, his widowed daughter Mrs Perkins, her 14-year-old son Peter, and a live-in servant. At the back stood a lean-to conservatory with a glass roof.

Late November 1927. Lumps of coal, chunks of soda and coins began dropping onto the conservatory roof. They were small. They still broke the glass.

Early December brought a new barrage. Frederick called the police. Pieces of coal and pennies crashed onto the roof, he said, "but we could not trace their flight". One lump hit a constable's helmet.

The officer ran to the back wall to find the thrower. Nobody was there. Frederick later reported red-hot cinders in the outhouse with no fire nearby. Then two potatoes, hurled into the kitchen while an officer sat with him.

The trouble moved indoors. Loud bangings sounded in every part of the house. Henry's window was smashed. One morning a heavy chest of drawers crashed to the floor in his bedroom. The servant left on 19 December. The family, in Leslie Thomas's later telling, "spent the most miserable Christmas of their lives in a house that was full of flying coal, pennies and soda."

By January the furniture was travelling. Chairs "had marched down the hall in single file" and "piled themselves up on the table". An attaché case flew from a kitchen chair to the floor. An umbrella sprang from the hall stand to the kitchen floor. Soap appeared in an upstairs corridor.

The press arrived in the week commencing January 15, 1928. On 19 January the psychical researcher Harry Price came, with Mr Grice of the Evening News. Something dropped to the floor. Price picked up a shoe. Inside was a small metal figure from the front room mantelpiece, where it had stood unmoved for 25 years. On 25 January a Daily Express editor brought a medium, who found nothing significant.

Police took Frederick to St John's Hospital, Battersea, for a mental examination. He was judged sane. Henry was moved out, and the phenomena carried on. Price found Frederick "mentally normal and intelligent" and ruled out Peter. He first suspected shell-shocked patients at a private asylum about 80 yards away, armed with a catapult, then set the idea aside. His tentative verdict: "the evidence for the abnormality of the occurrences is much stronger than that for the theory that the Robinson family were wholly responsible."

The Society for Psychical Research was less sure. Dr V. J. Woolley and Mrs Brackenbury suggested the indoor incidents could have been staged "by several different persons acting independently with different motives". They admitted this did not explain the first falls the constable saw. Frederick later said the disturbances happened only when Peter was in the house. Others noticed that things always seemed to happen when Price was there.

Peter was sent to the country. The family drifted away, and in Leslie Thomas's words "peace descended on the house in Eland Road". Price told the story in Poltergeist Over England in 1945. Sixteen months after Battersea he was investigating Borley Rectory, another poltergeist with a taste for throwing soap. This case is often confused with the 1956 Battersea poltergeist known as "Donald". It is a different house and a different story.