The Folkestone Poltergeist: the Cheriton dug-out at Enbrook Manor, 1917

May 25, 1917. Ten Gotha bombers came over Folkestone in daylight. They dropped 159 bombs. 95 people died, 25 of them children, most of them shoppers in Tontine Street. 192 more were injured.

Mr Jacques, J.P., of Enbrook Manor in Cheriton, criticised the town's lack of preparedness. That autumn a shelter was dug in his grounds, across the carriage drive from the house, about 25 yards away. Afterwards it would become a coal cellar and wine store. The work went to a local builder, Frederick Rolfe, 27, and his boy assistant, Fred Penfold, about 16. The dug-out was about 17 feet deep, reached by about 13 steps.

By November, stones were flying about, and Rolfe was "repeatedly hit (particularly on the head)." A short bricklayer's hammer "threw itself towards me." The sledge hammer weighing 14 lb "came over and dropped near with a thud." The pickaxe, lying in another part of the structure, "came for me too." Chairs "danced and flew about in the most extraordinary style."

Some of it was strangely gentle. A brick hovered above his head and settled "just as a bird would settle down." A stove "settled down so gently that I never heard it." And the candles kept going out, snuffed by "little jets of sand which came down from the direction of the roof."

Others saw it too. The cook, C. M. Thomas, watched bricks move towards a ladder with nobody touching them. They "were all going just as if they were having a lark together." Pte. E. F. Cummins of the Canadian Light Horse came as a sceptic. In an affidavit of 4 December 1917 he described a crowbar that floated "out to the open where Mr. Rolfe was standing," and sand that came "with a hissing noise."

Thomas Hesketh, chief engineer of Folkestone Electricity Works, came on 19 November. Near dusk a rock of about 3½ inches struck Rolfe "violently on the left hand and fell on the ground close to me." Then three rocks "were hurled in rapid succession against the bottom of the wall at the foot of the steps." Nobody could be seen above.

Hesketh went to London to see Sir William F. Barrett, who came down on 22 November. Barrett sat for about an hour in the dug-out with two lit candles. "Nothing whatever happened whilst I was there, beyond the strenuous bricklaying work." Arthur Conan Doyle made four visits of about two hours each and "got nothing direct," but saw new brickwork "chipped about by the blows." On 3 December the Daily Chronicle wrote: "All Folkestone is talking about 'Spooks.'"

On 10 December the petroleum geologist E. H. Cunningham Craig inspected the site. He called the phenomena "quite typical of the discharge of natural gas," and felt the accounts had become "embellished." Barrett replied that "no efflux of gas, however violent, could have produced the movement of heavy rocks." Conan Doyle called the gas theory "the height of absurdity."

There were doubts closer to home. Penfold admitted throwing sand himself on some occasions. A military tailor, W. H. Stephens, accused the boy of trickery, though Stephens took a welt behind the ear from a small stone. Neither the admission nor the accusation covers the heavy rocks, or what Hesketh, Cummins and the cook described.

Barrett and Hesketh published "The Folkestone Poltergeist" in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in 1918. The SPR's own summary found natural gas, trickery and other causes unsatisfactory. Conan Doyle used Cheriton in The New Revelation to argue that poltergeist cases are wrongly "treated as an entirely isolated phenomenon." In 2025 Brett Holman revisited the case on Airminded, and Alan Murdie in Fortean Times. Holman calls the cause "an open question."