The Berkbigler Phantom Rock-Thrower, Tucson, Arizona

Richard Berkbigler was a truck driver, 45 years old. He and his wife Mary owned five acres at the base of the Santa Catalina Mountains, on the fringes of Tucson, Arizona. Brush and cactus all round. No other houses nearby. After more than a year in a trailer on the land, they moved into their new 4,400 square foot house in September 1983. It was unfinished. Concrete floors. No doors between the rooms.

It began almost as soon as they moved in. Stones landed on the roof. Then they came at the house itself. "The stones were large, about fist size, and a number of them struck the house directly," D. Scott Rogo later wrote. They arrived in flurries of about five, two or three seconds apart. Then a pause of five to fifteen minutes. Some episodes lasted two or three hours.

Soon it was every evening, usually between 5:30 and 7:00 p.m., around the time Richard came home from his trucking job. "I can't even come home and enjoy a beer anymore," he said. The men ran outside and found no one. Sometimes they were hit while they searched. Only one thing worked. "The attacks would only stop when the family turned off all the lights in the house and simply went to bed."

Several relatives and friends were struck. One was briefly knocked unconscious. Then a rock hit Richard's 21-month-old niece, Anita Marie Knight. Sheriff's deputies combed the brush with a helicopter and dogs. They never sighted the culprit. Rocks hit their patrol cars too, about $600 in damage. "I'd like to catch him myself," said Deputy Art Dumes. A visiting newspaper photographer was pinned down for two hours by flying rocks.

Later retellings describe a climax on December 4, with two newspaper reporters in the house. Rocks slammed into the side door for two hours. To strike it, they had to pass through the garage where a van was parked, through a narrow two-foot space. The family put the damage to the house, a van and a car at about $7,200.

December 6, 1983. Rogo arrived while the attacks were still going on. About 20 reporters, friends and volunteers were at the house. The next day UPI carried the story nationally. Rogo wrote the case up twice. First as "Tucson's Rock Throwing Phantom," Chapter 5 of On the Track of the Poltergeist (1986). Then as "A Case of Mysterious Stone-Throwing in Arizona" in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in 1987.

The family mostly blamed a living man. Someone upset that they had displaced him from a temporary shelter in the unfinished house. Food disappeared from a refrigerator they kept outside. Relatives described a man about 5 feet 7 inches tall, 160 pounds, with short brown hair and dark clothes. Mary Berkbigler wondered about something else. "Maybe it's a spirit," she said. "Maybe we've built over some sacred burial ground or something."

Rogo regarded the events as possibly poltergeist activity. There is a simpler reading too. A hidden thrower in thick brush at dusk would fit the evening timing, the lights-out ending and the empty searches. A Tucson reader, Marsh Myers, later accused Rogo of making the circumstances "fit" his hypotheses. Nobody was caught. No confession is on record. How the attacks ended is not known.

The Berkbigler house joined a long line of stone-throwing cases, from Lithobolia in 1698 to the Ohiro Lodge guest house in Wellington in 1963. Like most of them, it ended without an answer.