The Chéragas poltergeist: Thérèse Sellès in the Todeschini household

Chéragas, today Chéraga, was a village west of Algiers, in what was then French Algeria. On 1 April 1908, Gaspard Sellès of Bab-El-Oued placed his daughter, Thérèse Sellès, as a servant with Jean Todeschini. He did it to ease his family's costs, since his wife was expecting a baby. Thérèse was about 14. Todeschini, born 1856 at Mustapha and a widower for nine years, was a tinsmith whose workshop and living quarters shared one house.

9 April 1908. Knocking began at a door that opened onto a closed, empty courtyard, and it came back over the next two days. The household posted a guard, kept a dog there and warned the gendarmes. The knocking went on. The dog did not bark.

16 April. The shop, empty and locked, was found disturbed. After that, objects moved around the house in front of witnesses the newspapers called on. In the kitchen, by one later account, the saucepans danced "une sarabande infernale", an infernal dance. Cutlery and utensils flew off, then went back to their usual places.

M. Fournier, a friend of the tinsmith, gave the most precise statement. He said he watched a carafe full of water move by itself. It travelled across the table and climbed several steps of the staircase. It came part of the way back down, and stopped. Fournier put it back on the table himself.

Thérèse saw something no one else did. A woman dressed in black, who asked her to look after her husband and children. Shown the family photo album, Thérèse picked out Catherine Ricciardi, Jean Todeschini's wife. She had died on 22 September 1899, at age 29. Thérèse had never met her.

Word spread from the Algiers press to Paris. More than 300 people a day forced their way into the shop and the home. A doctor was called in, and his advice was to send Thérèse home. She went back to her parents in Bab-El-Oued. A few days later, the visions and the moving objects stopped.

The case was covered in L'Écho du merveilleux, Le Progrès spirite and Annales africaines, which cited La Petite République and Le Matin. The psychologist Gustave Le Bon, a noted sceptic of mediums, was quoted doubting that "the experiment" would succeed. No contemporary exposure or confession has turned up. No gendarmerie findings are on record, and no scientific inquiry was found.

Commentators see a textbook pattern: an adolescent servant newly placed in a household, and disturbances that end once she leaves. Sceptics have long read this as a servant playing tricks. Parapsychologists read the same facts as spontaneous psychokinesis centred on her. The apparition rests on Thérèse alone, and nothing shows she could not have heard of the dead wife from the household.

In April 1911, La Vie Mystérieuse, edited by Papus, put the case on the cover of issue No. 55, looking back on an affair about three years old. Its drawing of kitchenware moving around the servant girl became the main picture of the case, and now illustrates the English Wikipedia article on the poltergeist. In 2018 the genealogist Brigitte Billard, who descends from relatives of the Todeschini family, traced the true 1908 dates through the Paris press. Comparable French cases include Guillonville in 1849 and the Cideville presbytery in 1850 and 1851.