The Stratford Knockings: the Phelps poltergeist at Stratford, Connecticut

The Phelps Mansion stood on Elm Street in Stratford, Connecticut, near the Housatonic River. It was a Greek Revival house, built in 1826 by Matthias Nicoll for his daughter and her husband, the sea captain George Dowdall. Its second floor was said to resemble "the upper deck of a sailing vessel."

In 1850 it was home to the Rev. Dr. Eliakim Phelps, a minister of about 59, described as an early mesmeric healer. He lived there with his much younger second wife, her children Anna, 16, and Harry, 11, and two younger children. Phelps had copied the Fox sisters' "system of telegraphic raps," the code born at Hydesville in 1848.

10 March 1850. The family came home from church. In the nursery, "furniture was thrown about in disorder; chairs on the bed, and thrown down upon the floor." Later retellings add doors and windows standing open, and eleven stuffed figures "kneeling… with open Bibles." The next day, clothing lay on a sheet, "laid out with the arms folded across the breast." A tea kettle turned up hidden behind boxes in the cellar.

An umbrella "leaped, without visible assistance, a distance of, at least, twenty-five feet." "Nails, forks, knives, spoons, bits of tin, iron, and keys, were thrown from different directions." Witnesses said objects moved at abnormally slow speeds and changed course in flight. On 14 March, 46 objects reportedly dropped inside a locked parlour. A rap on the back door knocker was "loud enough to be heard twenty rods distant."

About 30 were reported over the haunting. One was so lifelike that the youngest child whispered, "Be still, Ma is saying prayers." One wet-ink note read: "Fear not when he returns; all danger is o'er."

The violence centred on Anna and Harry. Anna was pinched, leaving "savage-looking red marks" that a New York Sun reporter saw. Harry was struck by small stones, found tied and hanging from a tree, thrown into a cistern, and "suddenly caught up by some unseen power from the floor." Papers and a child's bed were set on fire. Through the rap code, the entity called itself "a tormented soul in hell" and answered "For fun" when asked why it was causing trouble.

Phelps opened his doors to editors and reporters from the New York Sun, the Bridgeport Standard and the Derby Journal. Rev. John Mitchell, a retired Stratford minister, watched often. The seer Andrew Jackson Davis visited. In September 1850, three Shakers from Mount Lebanon arrived. Austin Phelps, Eliakim's son, later wrote: "That the facts were real, a thousand witnesses testified."

Phelps kept a log. E. W. Capron published it in 1855, writing that "no member of the household could have had any agency in the matter without being at once detected." While Anna and Harry were both away, there were "no manifestations."

The debate followed. Many believed the bored young wife and her children had created the story. Frank Podmore argued that most poltergeists are an adolescent playing tricks. Davis blamed "discharges of vital electricity" from the children. Phelps himself came to find the messages "frequently false, contradictory and nonsensical."

The family left for Philadelphia around 1 October 1850. Moses Y. Beach, publisher of the New York Sun, later bought the house, and no further disturbances are recorded. It was demolished in 1974. Nothing survives. The story of the Stratford poltergeist does, retold in books and podcasts to this day.