The Bromley Poltergeist: the haunted allotment sheds of Grove Park

Grove Park, south-east London. On the Bromley border, in what is technically the London Borough of Lewisham, two sheds stood beside the allotments. They were run as the Kentish Garden Guild, a small shop selling gardening supplies to the allotment holders. Three pensioners kept it going. Alfred "Alf" Taylor. Tony Elms. Clifford Jewiss.

26 April 1973. The three men were together in one shed when powder hit the ceiling. Then a pewter jug flew off a shelf and across the room. Jewiss put it in a covered box. It reappeared on the floor. In one account the jug "shot across the floor (even when sealed inside a plastic box)".

It did not stop. Pellets of fertiliser lifted themselves out of a bin and moved up to the ceiling. Bottles unscrewed themselves and their contents were dumped on the floor. Half-ton bags of fertiliser changed position on their own. Coins flew around the sheds. The sheds shook violently. Things went, in Taylor's words, "going round the hut like skittles." Matches showered down. Once, half a hundredweight of peat arrived from nowhere. Over a hundredweight of Maxi-Crop fertiliser had to be destroyed.

Then it turned on the men. A box of tools struck Taylor on the head. A seven-pound weight came off a set of scales. Taylor felt invisible hands push him hard, at home and in an office building. But Elms suffered most. He found fertiliser in his coffee cup just before he drank it. His shirt was cut to shreds by a saw. A flower bulb was forced into his mouth.

Elms consulted "white magicians." Then, at night, he performed an exorcism himself. Those waiting outside heard chaos. The walls thudded loudly. The heavy iron door repeatedly swung open. Elms came out bruised and bleeding. The next morning the shed looked "as if it had been hit by a bomb." Crosses were painted or scratched everywhere.

In the autumn of 1973 the Society for Psychical Research sent Pauline Runnells and Manfred Cassirer. They visited repeatedly. They saw it for themselves. A beaker moved by itself and lightly touched Runnells on the head. Elms's money vanished. Runnells was immediately hit on the head by a penny and a 5p piece. Objects hung in mid-air or disappeared. Security bolts vanished. Writing appeared: "1659" on wood and in fertiliser, question marks, random letters, a friend's name. A brass object stamped "MN" dropped from nowhere. The impression of a child's face showed on a shelf.

Then came the skull. White sulphite and brown Maxicrop formed its outline on the counter. "The whole impression was skull-like and gruesome," Cassirer wrote. "It was subject to a gradual process of disintegration, rendering it even more macabre."

The SPR investigators could find no evidence of deception or motive for hoax. Poltergeists are usually linked to an adolescent focus. Here there were only three retired men at work. Some commentators see Elms, the main target, as a focus person, but nothing pointed to trickery by him. The phenomena stopped at about the time building work on a nearby garage finished. Nobody has ever tested a connection.

Later retellings grew. The weight came to circle Taylor's head menacingly. The skull face was said to be burned into the counter. The older accounts describe neither.

Cassirer published his account in 1993 as a pamphlet, The Persecution of Mr Tony Elms (The Bromley Poltergeist). John and Anne Spencer told the story in The Poltergeist Phenomenon in 1997. A haunting with no house, no child and no apparition. Just three old men, a garden shop and two years of flying fertiliser.