The Sunderland East End ghost panic (the "Great Ghost Hunt of Hendon")

That autumn, the Sunderland Echo reported a ghostly apparition in the town. The effect was immediate. In the words of local historian Norman Kirtlan, "the East End of town was on red alert for paranormal activities." Hundreds of Wearsiders turned out "with bricks, sticks and flaming torches", determined to fight the spirits. The police did not laugh it off. Officers from Hendon armed themselves and went out too.

29 October 1883. About two days before Halloween. Sergeant Burns and PC Reay had been walking the beat together for about two hours. They turned from Hendon Valley Road into Robinson Terrace. At the corner of Linden Street, a gas lamp lit the cobbles. Something hovered just above them. "Cloaked in white and twisting like paper tossed in the breeze, the mysterious shape seemed to defy logic; human in shape but as transparent as the mists that rolled in from the North Sea."

The officers drew their batons. They took out their handcuffs. They meant to arrest it. The figure gave a piercing scream. Then it "shot into the air and evaporated." Police whistles sounded as midnight approached.

About three hours later, PC Jepson was trying the door handles of the Salem Hotel, near Harold Street. Under a gas lamp he saw a figure dressed in white. At first he took it for a child. But its movements were too unnatural.

As he approached, it seemed to "twist into the air like a wisp of smoke." It vanished at the crossbar of the lamp. Jepson checked that every door on Harold Street was locked. Then he wrote the sighting down in his pocket notebook.

The next day a letter arrived at the police station. It was signed "the Ghost". It named the place where its "ectoplasmic presence would be felt next". D'Arcy Terrace. The Sunderland Echo printed it, and wondered aloud why a ghost would bother with handwriting and the post.

Ghost fever spread across Wearside, above all in Hendon and the East End. Locals armed with shotguns fired at mysterious shadows and at white-clad figures. That was the end of it. The police called off the Great Ghost Hunt of Hendon.

The ghost was never identified. No hoaxer was ever named, and no arrests are recorded. Still, the case leaves its own clues. PC Jepson's first thought was that he was looking at a child. The letter signed "the Ghost" hinted at a living hand, and the Echo of 1883 treated it with open irony.

White figures in Victorian streets were often blamed on pranksters in sheets. The Hammersmith Ghost of 1803 was another armed street hunt, and it ended in a shooting. No source has tied the Sunderland apparition to such a joker. The officers described something that hovered, screamed and rose into the air.

The story is known today through Norman Kirtlan, a retired police inspector, forensic artist and archivist for the Sunderland Antiquarian Society. Kirtlan retold it in his Wearside Echoes column for the Sunderland Echo, under the title "Fighting Spirits with Flaming Torches", drawing on the paper's reports from 1883. It was not the town's first mass ghost watch. In March 1843, upwards of 1000 people had waited at a Sunderland churchyard for a sailor's dead sister to return. They saw nothing.