The Runcorn Poltergeist ("The Runcorn Thing"), 1 Byron Street, Runcorn, 1952

No. 1 Byron Street, Runcorn, was a full house in the summer of 1952. The tenant was Sam Jones, 68. With him lived his sister-in-law Lucy Jones, a grandchild, Eileen Glynn, and a middle-aged lodger later named as Miss Whittle. And there was John Glynn Jones, 17, an apprentice draughtsman at ICI Weston Point. He shared the bedroom where it all began.

Accounts disagree on the date. August 10, 14 or 17. They agree on the room. It began as a scratching in the drawer of a dresser in Sam Jones's bedroom. The next night the dresser started to make a tapping noise.

The noises got louder and louder until all four occupants were driven out. The drawers sounded as if they were being pulled out, rattled and slammed back again. Sealed with adhesive paper, they still rattled. The mirror swung backwards and forwards on its pivots. The dressing-table moved about a foot from the wall of its own accord.

Witnesses said John was lifted from his bed and deposited on the floor. China broke and a clock moved. The kitchen ceiling cracked, exposing the laths. Townspeople queued outside. Up to fourteen observers saw the phenomena at once, between peaceful interludes and spells of pandemonium.

Three burly policemen were thrown off an empty chest on the landing. Rev. W. H. Stevens, a local Methodist minister and a society's official investigator, was hit on the head with a dictionary. Later write-ups say the Society for Psychical Research sent him, a link never confirmed. Stevens tested John. Four witnesses sat on him as he lay in bed. The manifestations continued.

A spiritualist medium, Mr Francis, held a séance. It only seemed to make matters worse. A formula for exorcism arrived from Germany, with one of its four pages lost in the post. At a lunch party in Frodsham, meant to give John a break, a glass of lemonade being poured for him burst in the hostess's hand.

At neighbouring Pool Farm, later retellings say, fifty-three of Howard Crowther's pigs died over two weeks in August 1952. Tests reportedly ruled out swine fever. A black cloud, around ten feet high, was seen moving about the farm. Once it vanished through the wall of the pig shed. The Paranormal Database adds a seven foot tall ghostly figure seen at the site.

Thomas Barrow, 18 and on leave from the forces, spent four nights in the bedroom at the request of John and their friend John Berry, and says he witnessed the phenomena. Decades later he wrote that Miss Whittle died in October 1952, falling from a cliff known as Frog's Mouth on Runcorn Hill. 'The spirit did not appear again afterwards.' No record has been found to confirm her death.

Stevens traced the force to John Glynn himself, a build up of repressed energy, abused by an evil entity. Another version has him blaming John's frustration about joining the military. Suspicion fell on John at the time, yet no confession or exposure was ever documented. Trickery, excitement in crowded rooms and a legend that grew in the telling remain the obvious alternatives, though no one has argued them in detail for this case. The psychical and spiritualist bodies involved never agreed on a cause.

The damage, pig farm included, was estimated at £20,000. The Runcorn Guardian followed the case through August, September and October 1952, and it became a national and international sensation. Locals called it the Runcorn Thing. It lives on in podcasts, local ghost walks and roundups of Britain's classic poltergeists, beside Enfield and Pontefract.