The Cardiff Poltergeist: Pete the Polt at Mower Services, Crwys Road

Cathays, Cardiff. 1979. John and Pat Matthews took over Mower Services, a lawnmower repair workshop and small yard set back from Crwys Road behind a garden accessories shop. The premises were part of a terrace of houses built in 1882. A Baptist chapel stood next door.

Accounts of how it began differ. In one, John was watching a rugby match on a television in a shed in the yard with Pat's brother, Fred Cook. One quiet Saturday afternoon they were distracted by what sounded like stones landing on the roof. In another, John and a worker named Ian were repairing a mower. A bang. Something like a rock hitting the sheet metal roof. Another bang followed. Then another.

It did not stop. Tools, bolts and small engine parts flew or turned up on the floor. Dust was dropped down the backs of workers' shirts. Then came the corner. A stone hit Ian in the chest. He threw it back. Something came straight back at him. "And this became a regular thing," John said, "and many people threw stones into that corner, or nuts and bolts, and nine times out of ten they had something back."

Pete seemed to listen. Ask for a plug, Fred recalled, and he would throw you a spark plug. A Rolls Royce keyring landed at his feet. Pat watched one spanner swing back and forth, then another, "and before I realised, the whole lot was swinging back and forth." Coins arrived too, about five pound a month by John's reckoning. Three old pennies dating back to 1912 turned up in the shop, with crumpled £5 notes. A lawnmower started up on its own. Once, blue flames emerged from a brass World War II shell case kept as a souvenir.

Outsiders saw it as well. Police officers attending a break-in reported activity. An insurance representative, named in one account as Gareth Lucas, said: "I could see a stone whizzing around on the floor. There was nobody else out there." Next door, Rev. Mike Fuller said stones started hitting the window.

In 1989 John Matthews contacted the Society for Psychical Research in London. It sent David Fontana, a psychology professor at Cardiff, who investigated from June 1989 to 1992. On his first visit, a stone was thrown across the workshop while John and a visiting sales rep stood with their hands visible and still. Fontana witnessed objects thrown and appearing on several occasions. He never saw one in flight. Only the moment it landed. He reproduced the stone return from the corner on separate occasions and took it as a sign of intent and "rudimentary intelligence." Motives and opportunities for fraud, he found, were scarce. He published two reports in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, in 1991 and 1992.

Near the end, Fred looked up. On a shelf was the apparition of a 1940s schoolboy. A cap, dark short trousers, a jacket, big black boots. "You could see the outline, of his hands, his face, and yet you couldn't put a face to him." Some believed Pete was the ghost of a seven-year-old child who had been killed by a car. No such child has been identified. The family refused an exorcism. "There was no malice in him at all."

In 1993 the business moved to Splott. Fred said Pete followed him to his house in Llandaff. Then the activity seems to have melted away. No specific allegation of fraud has been made against the family or staff, yet questions remain. Fontana never saw an object in flight. The workshop was cluttered with small parts, with several staff around. Accounts differ on the first incident, the boy's age and the end year. Mark Rees notes the investigation failed to definitively disprove a hoax. In 1994, ITV's Strange But True? brought Pete to a national audience, a series that also covered the Enfield poltergeist.