The Trinity Poltergeist: Captain Molesworth's house and the Webster v. Molesworth lawsuit

Trinity was then a village of villas about two miles from Edinburgh, near Leith. In May or June 1835, Captain Molesworth, an army officer stationed at Leith Fort, took a house there. It was one half of a semi-detached villa, and the other half belonged to his landlord, Mr Webster, who lived next door. The family carried a fresh grief, for Molesworth's elder daughter, Matilda, had recently died. The younger, Jane, was sickly and kept to her bed.

About two months in, the captain began to complain of sundry extraordinary noises. They came daily and nightly. Footsteps of invisible feet. Knockings, scratchings and rustlings. They sounded first on one side of the dividing wall, then on the other.

Sometimes the unseen agent seemed to knock to a certain tune. Ask it a question with a number for an answer, such as how many people were in the room, and it would answer by so many knocks. Beds were heaved up, as if somebody were underneath, and where the knockings were, the wall trembled visibly. And the noises were loudest wherever Jane happened to be. In the neighbourhood, people believed it was the ghost of Matilda, warning her sister that she would soon follow.

Molesworth suspected his landlord first. Webster replied that he was hardly likely to damage the reputation of his own house, and pointed at Jane instead. The captain lifted the boards in the room most infected, made holes in the wall between the two homes and fired at the wainscot. Sheriff's officers, masons, justices of the peace and the officers of the regiment quartered at Leith all helped. Friends and relatives spent nights in the house.

To rule Jane out, they tied her up in a bag. It made no difference. As Catherine Crowe later put it, "Do what they would, the thing went on just the same."

Molesworth eventually gave up and left, and Webster took him to the Sheriff Court of Edinburgh. He claimed for lifting the boards, breaking the walls and firing at the wainscot. He also claimed for the injury done by saying the house was haunted, which prevented other tenants taking it. Webster's advocate, Maurice Lothian, examined numerous witnesses, among them army officers Crowe described as gentlemen of "undoubted honor and capacity for observation." The suit lasted two years.

Each side had a suspect. Molesworth blamed Webster, Webster blamed Jane, and the neighbours blamed Matilda's ghost. Writing in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Andrew Lang used the case as an example of a poltergeist centred on a young person. He allowed that fraud, even hysterical fraud by a nervous child, explains some such cases. Not all of them, he argued.

The ending is still argued over. One modern blog says the trial closed on 7 August 1837 with a ruling for Webster. Elliott O'Donnell could not find the outcome. Lang reportedly wrote that the court papers proved the fact of the lawsuit but threw no other light on it.

Jane died, hastened out of the world, it is said, by the severe measures taken while she was under suspicion. Those who lived in the house afterwards experienced no repetition of the annoyance. Everything known rests on a single channel. Crowe heard the story from Lothian and printed it in The Night Side of Nature in 1848. Robert Dale Owen, John H. Ingram and Lang followed her. In 2013 Geoff Holder returned to the case with new research in Poltergeist over Scotland.