The Cavendish Road poltergeist, Kirkholt, Rochdale

Kirkholt was Rochdale's main post-war council estate. Building began in 1945, and the first tenants arrived in July 1948. By the late 1950s it was largely finished, mostly brick semi-detached houses.

In October 1971 a new tenant, Tony Dean, was moving into one of them, on Cavendish Road. Friends came to help. One of them was Bob Stoker. He was 18.

Wednesday, 20 October 1971. The early hours, before dawn. Stoker was in the house when the sound began in a bedroom. The Manchester Evening News described it that same day. "Heavy footsteps marched across the floor of a council house bedroom early today… but the room was empty."

Footsteps, then scraping, then footsteps again. "It went on for more than an hour, thud, thud, scrape, scrape." Nobody reported seeing anything, only the sound. In the end Stoker had heard enough. "I just couldn't take any more," he said.

He ran across the road to the vicarage, but couldn't raise anybody. So he phoned the police. In 1971 Rochdale was policed by Lancashire Constabulary, and an officer came out to Cavendish Road. The paper put it simply. "The policeman heard the noises too, but there was just no explanation."

Back at Rochdale Police Station, the call went onto the message pad. Two words. "Suspected poltergeist." Tony Dean, the new tenant, had been out when it started. He gave his own verdict. "I feel a bit apprehensive about sleeping there now."

Ray King's report carried another strange story. At midnight, all the lifts in a new headquarters under construction, apparently the police's own, began to operate. They went up and down for an hour. A site engineer offered a guess: "We have no definite explanation, but dust could have affected the electricity contact points." The article set the two stories side by side, but no source says they were connected.

Nobody at the time explained the house, and there were no hoax claims. Ordinary candidates are easy to list, though none has been tested against the case. Kirkholt homes were mostly semi-detached, so noise from a neighbour through the party wall is one, and a heating or water system cooling, a newly occupied house settling, or animals in the loft or under the floor are others. The case survives in a single press report, transcribed by the Poltergeist Archive. A later Paranormal Database listing speaks of "officers" and an "owner," details that clash with the original account of one policeman and a helper in a rented council house.

No follow-up has been found. Nobody knows whether the Deans stayed, or whether the footsteps came back.

But Kirkholt has other stories. A 1958 listing describes a council house on the estate where, over three weeks, hammering would start at 8pm and answer any knock made by the family or visitors. In 1985 Councillor Vernon Earnshaw looked into a Kirkholt flat that families kept leaving because they believed it was haunted. For one night in 1971, though, the estate's strangest visitor left only a sound. And a police log that gave it a name.