The Great Leighs Witch Stone Poltergeist (Scrapfaggot Green), 1944

Great Leighs, Essex. Autumn 1944. US Army engineers were building or extending Boreham airfield nearby, and a bulldozer widened the road at a crossroads called Scrapfaggot Green so military vehicles could pass. On the green lay a boulder that local tradition said covered a witch's grave. Time wrote that "a G.I., driving a bulldozer, had pushed the stone off the grave of a witch," and Harry Price later called it "a two-ton stone."

Time described the mischief as the witch "hightailing about the countryside, scattering scaffolds, blowing down haystacks, ringing church bells in the dead of night." Alfred Sykes, landlord of Ye Old Queen Anne's Castle Inn, told London reporters in his taproom: "Last night the church clock turned two hours slow, which never happened before." One of old Chipping's rabbits was found sitting on eggs in his chicken coop. All of Mrs. Warren's books changed jackets one night. "How do you explain that, young fellow-me-lads?"

Bob Reynolds, landlord of the rival Dog and Gun, had scoffed at the stories. Then he found "a boulder the size of a beer barrel outside his pub door."

Later retellings add sheep out of secure pens, three missing geese, and paint pots found in an attic. Scaffolding poles "scattered in his yard like matchsticks," as builder Charlie Dickson is quoted saying. Yet no one ever claimed to see the witch.

The Sunday Pictorial had a reporter in the village by 6 October 1944. On 11 October the paper called in Harry Price, of the University of London Council for Psychical Investigation, best known for Borley Rectory. He judged it "a poltergeist-at-large." His advice was logical. If the villagers blamed the witch, they should restore her stone.

They did so at midnight. Price dated it to "October 11-12," with the stone laid "east and west in the traditional manner," while Time said Friday the 13th. Price wrote, "The phenomena ceased." Time added a coda: "Next morning the stone was all awry again." Across it, spelled out in faggots from a nearby oak, were the words "Non in sum," which a Latinizing G.I. translated as "Nobody home."

United Press sent Dr. D. J. G. MacSweeney to investigate. He called the landlord "an upstanding citizen . . . but, I fear, a man with a glass in his eye for business." All the witnesses, he noted, were customers of his pub. Road crews from neighbouring Little Waltham said they had moved the stone a score of times in as many years. His conclusion: the witch of Scrapfaggot Green was, "to be blunt," a hoax.

Folklorists Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud write that "locals now admit they were tricks played on the London journalist." Even the witch is doubtful. Anne Hughes was tried at Chelmsford in 1621 and acquitted, and an "Anne Hues" was buried in consecrated ground in 1669.

Price wrote the case up in Poltergeist Over England in 1945. A children's book, The Witch of Scrapfaggot Green, followed in 1948. Since the 1980s a stone outside St Anne's Castle has been claimed as the original. Hidden East Anglia doubts it. The rock is "not very large."