The Ylöjärvi Poltergeist: Martinin pirut at Efraim Martin's croft

Ylöjärvi, north-west of Tampere. Winter, 1885. Efraim Martin was a respected man, a travelling-school teacher and former church warden. He lived on a small croft in Keijärvi village with his wife, Eva Charlotta, and their 13-year-old servant, Emma Lindroos. Emma was seriously ill with tuberculosis.

12 January 1885. Witnesses described a din in occupied and empty rooms. Matchboxes, tankards and candlesticks slid along the table and fell to the floor. Hymnals and wooden splints rose into the air, changed direction in mid-air and flew against walls or towards people. Nobody was harmed as pails floated and, by one account, a knife circled a witness's head six times.

Beds and tables jumped. The leaves of a large table beat together so hard they had to be tied to the floor. The table kept bouncing. Objects flew out of closed and even tied-shut desk drawers. The drawers never opened.

Then came things that did not belong. Foreign clay, carried out by the basketful. Two large acid bottles that appeared on the table, jumped and spilled. And one day the mistress's hands caught fire. Almost the entire neighbourhood crowded into the small farmhouse to watch. On 27 January, after just over two weeks, it stopped.

The governor of Häme province ordered charges. Crown bailiff Kasimir Liljestrand prosecuted the couple and the girl for sorcery and witchcraft, and the Martins for selling liquor to the crowds. The theory was that the haunting had been staged to draw customers. The house was searched from the attic to the basement. No pulleys. No secret hatches.

24 March 1885. At the winter court session of Pirkkala and Ylöjärvi, fifteen eyewitnesses testified under oath. Emma was too ill to be heard. The court found the events had been caused "partly by unknown forces, partly by Emma Lindroos with her pranks". Every charge was dismissed as unproven. The Turku Court of Appeals upheld the decision.

The haunting ended Efraim Martin's public roles and cost the household money. Emma died soon afterwards. The Martins died about five years after the trial. According to the magazine Seura, drunk men returning from seeing "Martin's devils" attacked 19-year-old Ernst von Nottbeck on his way to Lielahti, and he died the next day. The croft was moved across Lake Keijärvi in 1918 and later demolished. The City of Ylöjärvi put up a memorial plaque in 2017.

The court blamed Emma's pranks for part of it, and some incidents were put down to visitors. Yet Seura notes that Emma was present at only about 20 of the 90-plus incidents, and she was never convicted. The novelist and researcher Päivi Alasalmi lists the possibilities without choosing one: liquor, ergot, hallucinations from a mouldy house, mass psychosis. "Or something else?"

Visit Tampere calls Martinin pirut "the only Finnish poltergeist phenomenon for which accurate and comprehensive eyewitness accounts have been recorded." The sworn testimony made the case known to parapsychologists abroad. Jarl Fahler reprinted the witness statements in Parapsykologia in 1975, and Alasalmi turned the story into the 2018 horror novel Riivatut.