The Corda poltergeist of Wilsele

In the early 1970s Wilsele was still its own municipality. It became part of Leuven in 1977. On the Aarschotsesteenweg, behind the railway bridge over the canal, stood the house of the Corda family, recently arrived from the Ardennes. Father Fons. Mother Mariette. Their children Christiane, Jean, Jacques and François. The spot carried a memory. On 2 December 1954, a special train carrying German football supporters had derailed at speed on a switch near the canal bridge. People died.

May 1972. Newspapers reported stones falling on houses. They struck numbers 223, 225, 227 and 231. Windows broke. Stones punched holes in walls and damaged cars. The focus, witnesses said, was Jacques Corda. He was 13 by one account, 14 by another. According to the stories, he made stones appear "zomaar uit het niets". Simply out of nothing.

The stones did not only fly. One day they suddenly stood neatly in a row on a low wall. Another day a stone flew into the soup.

Objects moved on their own. A washtub went into the shed by itself. An ice lolly disappeared from the table. It turned up many days later in a bedroom drawer. Still frozen. During one conversation, a police commander set a glass of beer on the table. It vanished.

In the café, the stories grew. A woman's broom disappeared while she was sweeping and was found high in a tree. The baker's bread was already in the bread bin when he arrived. On 22 August 1973 the Nieuwe Leidsche Courant told of a 16-year-old boy whose shorts were suddenly pulled down in a public place. A later article reportedly described shouting, mocking laughter and cruel threats heard inside the house.

A professor from Utrecht, named in the sources as Prof. Te Haeff, examined Jacques and said he had what parapsychologists call "parergie". A professor from KU Leuven called it telekinesis. Psychics visited the house. The family came to believe the devil was involved. They accepted an exorcism, linked in one account to a certain Cardinal De Brabander, and were baptised again. The disturbances continued.

The press kept coming. Het Vrije Volk sent a team to the house. The magazine Kwik bought the exorcist's account. BRT television covered the story too.

Jacques, people said, could name and describe people who had died in the 1954 crash, with precise details about the train's passengers. Some locals thought the stones were railway ballast, tied to the disaster. Others spoke of parergie, telekinesis or the devil.

Then, in 1974, the stones fell again. A gendarme said two boys had been caught red-handed with a pile of stones, and treated that as the solution. Authorities and media mostly wrote the case off as a schoolboy prank. That finding concerned the renewed falls of 1974, not the earlier events in the house. Nobody in the surviving accounts accused Jacques directly. Many neighbours were not convinced.

Interest faded. The family moved back to the Ardennes, and incidents reportedly continued after they left. The house was demolished. Julien Weverbergh recorded the case in his book Ufonauten in opmars, and in 2019 the VRT programme Van algemeen nut returned to it. In 2020 a local commenter wrote: "we weten nog altijd niet hoe dat kwam." We still don't know how it happened.