The Leagrave Poltergeist and the Vicar's Exorcism

Leagrave was once a village. Today it is a suburb in north-west Luton, Bedfordshire, about 3.5 miles north of the town centre, its streets lined with bay-fronted semi-detached and terraced houses. Its parish church is St Luke's, on Leagrave High Street. In early 1976, one of those old terraced houses became the setting for a quiet, domestic haunting. Two young women lived there, Judy Thomson and Rosita McFadden.

It went on for seven weeks. There was the noise, hammering on the ceiling. Drawers in a chest opened and closed by themselves. Make-up and talcum powder turned up scattered all over the floor. Things went missing.

The women never described a figure. There were no lights, no voices, no cold spots. Only the sounds, the drawers and the mess. The local paper would later say the spirit had terrorised them for seven weeks.

They turned to the church. The women called in the Rev. John Watson, vicar of St Luke's Church, and he exorcised the house. Parish records held by Bedfordshire Archives confirm that a John Derrick Watson became incumbent of St Luke's, Leagrave, in 1974. What happened during the rite is not recorded. Nor is the date, or who was present.

What is recorded is the result. "Since the exorcism the house has been so calm," Judy Thomson said. "It feels like a great burden has been lifted."

The story appeared in the Luton News. Its date survives through a later look-back column. Thursday, March 11, 1976. Twenty-five years on, on 7 March 2001, the Luton News and Bedfordshire Chronicle revisited the item in its "Looking at the archives" feature. That column is now transcribed by the Poltergeist Archive, and it is the only account of the case known today.

No police, no psychical researchers and no national newspapers appear in the record. No photographs have been found. The street and the house number were never published.

No one is recorded as offering a mundane explanation at the time, and no hoax was ever alleged. Cases like this one usually bring familiar suspects: noise through a party wall, plumbing, joists contracting in the winter cold, drawers sliding on an uneven floor, or ordinary misplacing sharpened by weeks of strain. Mischief by someone with access to the house is another. None of these was ever put to the Leagrave house specifically.

The case belongs to the same decade as the Enfield poltergeist of 1977 to 1979, though the two are unrelated. Leagrave never became famous. It remains a single newspaper paragraph, two names, a vicar and a sentence of relief. The original 1976 issue may yet surface in the digitised newspaper archives, with the address and fuller quotes.