The Balornock Poltergeist (the "Maxwell Park" or "Pollokshields" case)

Balornock sits on the north side of Glasgow. In late 1974 two families lived one above the other on Northgate Quadrant. Upstairs were Mr and Mrs David Grieve, their sons Derek, 14, and Jeffrey, 11, and the boys' grandmother, Mrs Anne Anderson. Downstairs lived Mr and Mrs James Kennan and their son Gordon.

It started late on 3 November 1974. Banging and tapping broke up the families' sleep. The Grieves heard it coming up through the floor. The Kennans thought it came from upstairs. The Grieves called the police. Officers woke the family downstairs several times and charged three of them.

Then the Kennans went to stay with relatives. The disturbances went on without them. Ornaments and furniture appeared to move by themselves. The hands of clocks raced. Tunes were tapped out.

Later accounts go further. Beds moved across the room with such force that cracks were left in the walls. Pictures were knocked down. Objects were thrown across the room, sometimes at the family and visitors. The knocking is said to have beaten out Handel's "Death March". Many people felt that someone was standing right behind them. Mrs Grieve felt she was contacted by what claimed to be the spirits of dead miners.

The charges were dropped. Suspicion, the Glasgow Herald reported on 17 January 1975, had fallen elsewhere, "on an obstreperous ghost." Police, housing officials, councillors, workmen and mediums from Glasgow and London all came to the house. One officer put it plainly: "There is something strange in that house, something we cannot logically explain." A senior officer later told the family he had taken some of his men off the case. "They were turning in reports like, 'The bed was proceeding in a northerly direction'." The Grieves asked to be rehoused.

Professor Murdo E. Macdonald of Glasgow University accepted that something unusual was happening. He put it down to "psychic energy" rather than a ghost. The astronomer Archie Roy, founder of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research and president of the Society for Psychical Research, investigated with the Rev Max Magee. They found the activity centred on the two boys. It dissipated after a service was held by Magee and one of the boys was sent to live with his grandparents. Other versions say Derek left school, became an apprentice electrician, and the trouble eased.

From the start, police treated it as one neighbour disturbing another. Some later writers still see a row between two neighbours at its root. The link to a frustrated teenager, and the calm after he left, fits both the focus person idea in poltergeist research and ordinary sceptical readings. No formal hoax finding was ever made.

Roy told the story in A Sense of Something Strange in 1990. He changed the families' names. Without saying so, he also changed the place, calling it Maxwell Park, an area of Pollokshields on the other side of the city. Newspapers later ran it as the poltergeist of Pollokshields. In 2013 Geoff Holder's Poltergeist over Scotland put the case back in Balornock. A reviewer for the Society for Psychical Research called it "a kind of proto-Enfield", a forerunner of the Enfield poltergeist.