The Truro Poltergeist: the Carclew Street Rain of Stones

Truro, 1821. Carclew Street was a new part of town, off Lemon Street. One of its houses had been hired as a depot for the arms of the militia regiment of Royal Miners. The armourer, Serjeant Thomas Ashburn, lived there with his wife Jane and their children. He carried a severe head wound from Portugal. Next door lived the serjeant-major, Roger Candy.

Wednesday evening, 18 April 1821. Ashburn heard glass breaking. Several windows had been smashed by stones. He ran out into the street. There was no one in sight. The stones kept coming.

He and the serjeant-major fetched the officers resident in the town. They saw the stones strike the houses, and were occasionally struck themselves. Yet, as the Exeter Flying Post reported, "every attempt to discover the person who threw them, or the precise spot from whence they came, was unavailing." The stones fell through the night. Neighbours concluded they "were directed by no mortal hand."

The mayor and magistrate, John Ferris Bennallack, came with constables. A crowd followed. Stones flew in all directions. Some hit the mayor and a member of his staff. Most were aimed at the armoury house. Guards were posted and the windows boarded. Still the stones came. Neighbours told the West Briton the stones smelled of brimstone. Others said they were quite warm.

On 4 May Ashburn was found insensible and convulsing. The family moved to the Charles Street house of Laurence Holker Potts, surgeon to the Royal Miners. The trouble seemed to follow. The Royal Cornwall Gazette described "a milk jug jumping from the window bench into the middle of the room, a tea-pot splitting to pieces on the table, a tea caddy flying about and depositing its contents upon the floor, and a candlestick jumping from the chimneypiece." Jane Ashburn was convinced something had followed her. She went back to Carclew Street. The stones began again.

There, a mirror was found smashed inside the house, though it had been locked and empty all day. Then fear turned to the streets. The Gazette of 12 May reported that "the poor woman was hunted through the Truro streets last Tuesday, by a pack of boys and girls, who declared their intention of tearing her dress and drawing her blood, that she might have no power over them!"

Suspicion settled on the Ashburns' son Thomas, aged 16. Found in a trance-like, frozen state at Trebilcock's bakery, he was judged to be faking and "cured" with water and a cane. Accounts differ on who exposed him: Potts, or the officer Edward Milford with Sergeant Sampson.

Thomas confessed, reportedly after being promised a pardon. He said he had acted alone. He hid stones in his mouth and pockets, climbed walls to avoid being seen, and took his father's keys to break the mirror. His motive, he said, was his mother's beatings with a poker and a broom, and a father who did nothing. The papers turned to mocking "the superstitions of the lower classes."

Not everyone was convinced. Later accounts say many witnesses swore they had seen projectiles appear from nowhere, some when the boy was nowhere near the house. Could a 16-year-old strike the mayor unseen while soldiers and police turned the neighbourhood upside down? Of the bakery trance, the Cornish Bird blog asks: "But what if he wasn't?"

In 1941 Ashley Rowe read a paper on the case to the Royal Institution of Cornwall. Today the Truro poltergeist is a stop on a self-guided ghost tour of the city.