The Hornsey Coal Ghost: the Frost family poltergeist at 8 Ferrestone Road

Hornsey, north London. January 1921. The household at No. 8 Ferrestone Road bought its winter coal, a normal nineteen hundredweight. The street stood on former parish church land beside the Old St Mary's Church Tower. Burials there had stopped in 1894.

Inside lived an elderly Mr Frost, about 70, and Mrs Frost, their sons Ivan and Lancelot, Mrs Frost's sister Miss Clifford, and three children. Gordon Parker, 11 or 12. Bertie, 9. Little Muriel. Their mother had died of consumption in April 1920.

Frost told the Daily Mail that "big lumps leapt out of the fire and broke the kitchen windows." Others smashed pictures and damaged furniture. Fearing explosives, the family cleared the coal into the garden. It came back, and they heard it dropping at the top of the stairs. "It seemed to be moving up from below."

By February the papers reported almost daily on explosions "like bombs" and rappings. Flat irons, brooms and crockery on the move. A loaf "suddenly flew off the plate into a drawer." A boy of eleven was seen "rising in the air, chair and all." Both boys said their dead mother appeared "dressed in red and standing at the foot of the bed."

Rev. A. L. Gardiner, vicar of St Gabriel's, saw "pieces of coal dropping as though from the ceiling" and watched a table and chair move. The family doctor, Herbert Lemerle, reported a clock that vanished. A police inspector said a piece of coal broke into three parts and vanished from his hands. Firemen said coal leapt from their hands and broke in mid air. A neighbour, Dennis Coker, searched every room and cupboard and found no one.

Not everyone saw something. Rev. Arthur Chandler spent a night in the house without result. Even the motion was disputed. One paper said the coal moved "as if borne on the air." Another insisted "It has never been seen in actual motion."

A. Mortimer Gunnell of the Society for Psychical Research said some incidents "could not be ascribed to human agency." Bertie was sent to the British College of Psychic Science. Arthur Conan Doyle reportedly planned an investigation, but no record shows it took place.

Gordon was later admitted to Lewisham Hospital after a convulsive seizure. Muriel died on 30 March or 1 April. Accounts differ. The doctor gave meningitis, with nerve strain hastening her death. "We are all convinced that she has been worried into this illness," Frost said.

Theories piled up: miners mixing dynamite into the coal, children's mischief after police traced one lump to a boy who "had kicked it out of the bath-room," and vibration from trains and lorries. The magician Nevil Maskelyne doubted there was "an atom of the supernatural" in such incidents. Gardiner rejected trickery and favoured a poltergeist, with the boy perhaps acting as a medium. Gunnell proposed a discarnate consciousness that "temporarily neutralises gravitation."

Charles Fort retold the case in Wild Talents in 1932. In 1999 David Farrant recorded an interview at No. 8, and gravestones were dug up in the gardens of Nos. 7 and 8. No inquiry ever reached a conclusion. The Hornsey coal ghost remains unexplained.