The Trinity Street Poltergeist, Belfast

October 1931. A family rented a house in Trinity Street, just off Clifton Street, in north Belfast. The house was soon sublet. A young couple moved in. An elderly couple took the second floor. Then the disturbances began.

Footsteps on the stairs, slamming doors, creaking chairs, piercing screams. Bangs came especially from the attic, where the door banged on its hinges. Windows opened by themselves, and ornaments and furniture were hurled around the house by an unseen figure. A young man in the kitchen was hurled by a door. Some tenants tied their doors shut at night, only to find the cord broke.

Then came the figures, and no two accounts agreed. A tenant couple saw a black figure in a cape and hat, gliding along the ground. Others spoke of a headless man with glowing red eyes, a man in evening dress, a figure dressed as a nun. A pale male face rose out of the ground outside the kitchen window.

A young wife woke to a spectral hand hovering over her face. Her six-year-old son glimpsed the visitor too. One Tuesday, about 6 pm, a girl saw eyes at the back window and screamed. Upstairs, the elderly couple stayed calm and kept to their routine.

The weekend of 16 and 17 January 1932, the story broke in the Belfast News-Letter, the Irish News and the Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner, and the Irish News reported thousands in the street. Carloads of sightseers arrived as early as 3 am, and schoolboys skipped play to watch the door. Police from Glenravel Street Barracks held the crowds back, and on several occasions used force to disperse them. They confessed themselves mystified. On Sunday night, 17 January, the tenants left.

Around 19 January a self-described psychic, Mr Campbell, arrived with flour, wax and a planchette. He spread flour on the stairs to catch footprints. At a séance his medium named a murdered young man, Edwards, whose body lay in a brickyard. Campbell took it to mean the backyard.

In the coal shed he found a soft brick floor with loose bricks. Then, he said, he was pinned to the yard wall. He collapsed, and was revived with whiskey and rum after about two and a half hours. The landlord, accounts say, refused permission to dig. Nothing was ever found.

Fred McKibben, the agent for the house, called it a hoax and claimed the police agreed. A constable at the back door said the house had been searched and no ghost found. The Irish News later concluded the story was a myth, spread largely by young people and fed by public superstition. Another theory held that the landlord staged the sightings to frighten out subtenants he resented. By the end of January the house stood empty.

In 1964 the Trinity Street houses were demolished. Joe Crawford, who lived opposite, recalled furniture moving and that the clergy came. Barney McGreevy, a policeman, remembered at least six officers on duty for weeks, though he never saw the ghost. In August 1983 Harvey Loudon, then 80, told the Belfast Telegraph that people came from all over the city. Nobody, he said, ever explained it.

Joe Graham put the story in a 1974 book of Belfast ghost stories, and his Rushlight Magazine calls it perhaps the most repeated ghost story concerning Belfast. In 2025 Andrew Sneddon of Ulster University returned to the Trinity Street poltergeist in a paper given in Limerick.