The Cideville Poltergeist (Presbytère de Cideville)

Cideville is a small village in the Pays de Caux, about 34 km northwest of Rouen. In 1850 its curé was Abbé Jean Tinel. He had two pupils. Gustave Lemonnier was 12 and training for the priesthood. Bunel was 14.

Late November 1850. At a public auction, a shepherd named Félix Thorel approached the younger boy. Thorel was said to boast of occult powers. Lemonnier later testified that the raps began when he was alone, on November 26th.

Sharp, distinct raps sounded behind the wainscoting. They answered questions. One rap for yes, two for no. They grew louder or quieter on request. Some accounts speak of hammer blows of extreme violence, heard 2 km away. The raps beat out tunes. Au clair de la lune. J'ai du bon tabac. The Angélus.

Then the objects moved. Lemonnier "saw knives, blacking-brushes, a roasting spit, and M. Tinel's breviary leave their places and go through the window-panes." The mayor of Cideville watched fireplace tongs and a shovel fly across the room. Tables and chairs spun. Knives stuck in the walls. A stocking went "darting like a thunderbolt" across the room. Observers felt an eerie cold breeze in the corridors.

Lemonnier saw "a sort of human shape, dressed in a blouse, which appeared to be a spectre." It followed him. Then the boy was "struck in the face by a shoe, a candlestick, and by a black hand." The hand disappeared up the chimney. The curé saw a greyish column slip out through the gaps around a door.

Nails and points were driven into the spots where the raps came from. The next morning Thorel appeared with bleeding scratches furrowing his face. Lemonnier said the figure in the smock looked like him. Thorel is said to have knelt and begged pardon. Tinel was not satisfied. He beat the shepherd with a stick "to the effusion of blood."

Jules-Eudes, Marquis de Mirville, a Catholic demonologist, came to test the agent. He asked for the number of letters in his name. "Eight raps were heard, the last more distinct than the others." Then his age. Forty-eight raps followed, "the forty-eighth being more accentuated than the others." Mirville was 48. When he sang a waltz from Guillaume Tell, the agent "listened at first without doing anything; then followed me exactly while I sang it."

Thorel sued Tinel for defamation and asked for 1,200 francs. The case opened on 7 January 1851 before the Justice de Paix of Yerville, Judge M. Folloppe. Over thirty witnesses, including the mayor and several priests, testified that the disturbances were genuine. The gendarmes Masson and Bourrienne saw nothing. In mid-February 1851 the boys were sent to another teacher. The disturbances stopped.

The court found that Thorel had publicly taken credit for the trouble and had apologised. His suit failed. The beating was treated as self-defence. On the phenomena, the judgment was careful: "Whatever might be the cause of the extraordinary facts which occurred at the parsonage of Cideville, it is clear, from the sum total of the testimony adduced, that the cause of these facts remains unknown."

Fontaine reportedly caught the younger boy cheating. Sceptics saw two bored boys playing tricks. The end of the activity when they left fits that reading, and the focus person model just as well. Andrew Lang abstracted the court record for the Society for Psychical Research and saw a poltergeist set off by nervous shock after a witch's threat. Frank Podmore generally blamed children's fraud. The court file, cote 4 U 6907, survives in the archives at Rouen. It sits beside the Epworth Rectory as another poltergeist centred on a clergy house.