The Swanton Novers Rectory Oil Poltergeist

Swanton Novers is a small village near Melton Constable in North Norfolk, England. Its parish church is St Edmund's. The rector, named in one account as the Rev. Hugh Guy, lived at the rectory with his family. The household included a servant girl of about fifteen. Her name appears in no surviving account of the case.

8 August 1919. Liquids began to appear in the rectory. Not from a single leak. They ran from the walls and ceilings of the building. Paraffin. Sandalwood oil. Methylated spirits. Water. One account adds petrol. Over a thirty day period the flow continued, by one report up to fifty gallons in one day. The disturbances seemed to follow the servant girl from room to room.

For the family it became impossible. The Church Times reported that the "poltergeist" had put the rector and his family first to great inconvenience and then "to flight". They left the house.

The story spread fast. A surveyor, an educational expert, a mineralogist and a journalist came to Swanton Novers, and their theories were "published daily". One idea was geological. Perhaps "the house was over an oil well, the liquid percolating and precipitating." It did not survive scrutiny. The liquids were refined household fluids, not crude oil. In The Times of 8 September 1919, Cloudesley Brereton wrote that it was "more than evident" the sandalwood oil and methylated spirits were "the work of a hoaxer".

Then came Oswald Williams, a stage illusionist. He hid. He watched. He reported seeing the housemaid throw a glass of salted water at the ceiling. Confronted, according to the Daily Express of 2 September 1919, "she denied and then broke down and confessed." One summary credits Brereton with the observation instead, and the sources do not agree. Williams argued that it would only take a small quantity of oil to create the mess.

The rector was not fully persuaded. He argued that the girl could not have thrown gallons of oil, although "a small quantity could be attributed to her". The Norfolk News noted "a diminution in the private supplies" of paraffin in the house.

The Church Times urged the Society for Psychical Research to step in. The SPR Journal later printed an anonymous article, "A Supposed 'Poltergeist' Case and Its Explanation". It attributed the oil leaks to the trickery of a 15-year old girl. Sceptics also questioned the fifty gallons, since a little oil can look like a flood. Yet the story would not quite close. The Norfolk News was still running the Swanton Novers oil mystery on 8 November 1919.

Charles Fort folded the case into Lo!, published in 1931, where the Swanton Novers mystery sits beside rains of objects. Fort, as ever, treated it as an open question. The Church Times reprinted its 1919 report a century later.

No apparitions, lights or voices were ever reported. No photographs are known. What remains is rare in poltergeist lore: an outbreak made entirely of liquid, centred on a teenager, in an English rectory that shares a genre with Borley Rectory and little else.