The Bealings Bells: phantom bell-ringing at Bealings House, Great Bealings, Suffolk

Major Edward Moor was a man of careful habits. A retired East India Company officer, a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1806 and the author of The Hindu Pantheon, he had lived at Bealings House since 1806. The late 18th century red brick house stood at Great Bealings, near Woodbridge. In early 1834 Moor was about 63 years old.

Sunday, 2 February 1834. Moor returned from the afternoon service. He was told the dining room bell had been rung three times, at intervals, between two and five o'clock. His first thought was birds disturbing the outside wires.

The next day that thought did not hold. Five bells began to ring, and ring violently. Moor saw it, and so did his son and the cook. On 4 February, by one account, a bell rang so roughly and violently that it flew free from its hook and hit the ceiling. Moor later wrote: "so violent was it that I should not have been surprised if they had been shaken from their fastenings."

Accounts differ on the bells themselves. One 1870 retelling describes a row of nine, almost constantly in motion, at times all of them ringing at once, at other times only five.

Moor did not reach for the supernatural. He investigated, standing with servants to watch every bell and examining the wiring. He tried to reproduce the violent ringing with garden tools, and placed five servants in different rooms to recreate the effect. Servants, friends, family and newspaper reporters watched. The ringing went on until 27 March 1834, fifty-three days in all.

On 25 February he wrote to the Ipswich Journal. "You and your readers may be assured that there is no hoax in the matter," he told them. He was "thoroughly convinced that the ringing is by no human agency." Yet he would not name a cause. "How is it, then? I cannot say. A satisfactory solution is beyond the reach of my philosophy."

His letters struck a nerve, and replies arrived from different parts of the kingdom, giving accounts of similar ringings at about the same time. At Greenwich Hospital, Lieutenant Rivers reported bells ringing in his own rooms. There the bell-pulls were cut to end the disturbance, but the bells rang on as merrily as ever. A clergyman at a Norfolk rectory described similar ringing heard for nearly nine years. In 1841 Moor gathered it all into a book, Bealings Bells, published at Woodbridge by John Loder.

Not everyone took the bells at face value. In New Light on Old Ghosts, published in 1965, Trevor H. Hall concluded that Moor was not a reliable witness and had been duped by one of his servants playing a practical joke. Daniel Cohen saw more than a suspicion that Moor did it himself, and suggested the book may have been conceived as a gentle satire. Paranormal writers saw a poltergeist. Harry Price placed the case in Poltergeist Over England, beside Tedworth, Hinton Ampner and Willington Mill.

The Psi Encyclopedia of the Society for Psychical Research calls Moor's effort the first serious ghost hunt on record, noting that he looked for ways to establish a normal cause. Later lore added an elderly woman in grey, reported in 1950 gliding in and out of a bathroom. Bealings House still stands, a Grade II listed building. The bells left no photograph and no recording. Only Moor's account remains, and the question he could not answer.