The Utengasse Knocking Ghost

The Utengasse is an old street in Kleinbasel. Archaeologists working at Utengasse 15/17 found the oldest settlement in Basel, a Bronze Age village. That history has nothing to do with what happened at No. 47. But in 1929, something in a second-floor flat there drew a crowd.

A boy lived in the flat with his family. The London press said he was six, while the local legend calls him Marcel and says he was 10. The children's room was separated from the living room by a thin wall. In that wall, the legend says, "one would hear a strange, eerie pounding and knocking." To the boy, the taps beside his bed sounded like a skeleton in the wall.

The knocking ghost, the legend says, had singled out Marcel. Every time he approached the partition wall, he was seized by a terrible fear. He trembled all over his body.

Then there was the figure. The boy declared that he had several times seen an old woman dressed in red, slowly cross the room. The family members with him saw nothing. They were surprised to see him turn pale and faint.

Basel was excited for days, and crowds kept watch before the building. The building manager filed a complaint. The police suspected the boy was faking it. So they placed him in bed with his arms and legs tied. According to the report, the sounds were still heard as soon as the boy approached the wall.

"Police have searched this and adjacent houses from top to bottom without result." Spiritualists came to investigate the phenomenon as well. No findings of theirs were recorded.

There was talk of evacuating the building. In the end the city's building department, the Baudepartement, had the flat cleared. It stood empty for three months. A swindle was generally assumed. Yet no explanation for the disturbances was found. No investigator named a cause or a culprit in any surviving account.

The story reached London. The Daily News printed its Geneva correspondent's item on 16 November 1929, under the headline "'Ghost' baffles police." That text is now kept by the Poltergeist Archive. In Basel the case lives on as a stop on the Kleinbasler Sagenweg, a legend walking tour. In 2015 Hannes Nüsseler placed it first in a TagesWoche feature on seven haunted houses in the region.

No photograph, police file or follow-up report has surfaced. The two accounts still disagree on the boy's age. The wall, the knocking and the woman in red remain where the old reports left them. Unexplained.