The Calvados Castle Poltergeist at the Château des Noyers, Le Tourneur

The Château des Noyers was not an ancient fortress. It was built in the 1830s at Le Tourneur, in Calvados, from the stone of a fire-damaged medieval castle nearby. In October 1867, soon after the de Manneville family inherited it, the trouble began. Noises. Slamming doors. Objects that moved. Then, around 1870, quiet.

12 October 1875. A chair moved by itself in the tutor's room. It had been secured. Under the roof lived Ferdinand Lescaudey de Manneville, his wife Pauline, their son Maurice, about nine, the boy's tutor Abbé Y., and four servants. At night something thumped on every door. Ferdinand's diary records a tread on the stairs "which had nothing human about it." Others heard the heavy footsteps of "what must have been a giant of a man" stomping down the main staircase.

A heavy ball rolled along the corridor and struck the door of the green room. There were growls, the bellowing of a bull, a long trumpet call, and a woman's voice outside the castle calling for help. The organ, closed and locked, played by itself.

About a hundred of the abbé's books landed on the floor in a fan. Only three books of Scripture were spared. The drawing room furniture formed a horseshoe. A key was ripped from Mme de Manneville's hand and struck the back of it, leaving a huge bruise. An army officer fired a revolver at something dragging at his bedclothes. The bullets only hit the opposite wall.

5 January 1876. A priest sent by the diocese arrived, and the house fell silent. On 15 January he performed a ceremony and left. It all began again at once. On 25 January, in clear weather, a large mass of water fell down the chimney onto the fire. A priest in the room was blinded by ash. He signed a statement. Late in the month the whole house shook violently.

Then the parish priest performed an exorcism while a novena of Masses was said at Lourdes. One account puts the climax at 11:15 p.m. "The agonised roar of an animal slowly killed." Then silence. In August and September 1876 the organ, the falling medals and the opening locks returned, weaker, before fading away. The family sold the house in 1877.

Ferdinand kept a daily journal. The cook, Célina, kept her own, still held by her descendant Didier Duchemin, a former mayor of Le Tourneur. Ferdinand secretly strung threads across every opening. They were never broken. Snow showed no footprints. In 1892 and 1893 an account based on his diary appeared in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques as the case of the "Château de T."

No source claims a hoax, and none offers a specific mundane cause for this poltergeist. A later popular tale blames an angry woman, a former owner who kept coming home, but no one has traced it to the witnesses. Camille Flammarion believed hauntings were real, sometimes the dead at work, sometimes the psychic powers of the living.

Flammarion told the story in Les Maisons hantées in 1923 and called it the most significant case. In English it became Calvados Castle. The SPR Psi Encyclopedia ranks it with Coimbra among "two of the most dramatic on record." In 1984 a fire gutted the empty house. The façade survives. The green room fared better than the rest.