30 East Drive – Moving In With The World’s Most Violent Poltergeist

I’m sitting in the bar of the Doubletree in Chelsea, enjoying a pint of Stella Artois and writing a few lines about recent events. It has been a whirlwind week, seven nights of paranormal investigation in a row, with roughly a thousand miles of driving stuffed in between, and precious little downtime.

I flew in last Friday and spent the weekend at Star Wars Celebration Europe (shite, in case you’re wondering, though it did give me the golden opportunity of catching up with some old and much-missed friends) and investigating a haunted London Underground station. All of which was the warmup for the main event: five days spent living with ‘Fred,’ aka ‘The Black Monk of Pontefract.’

Fred lives in an unassuming former council house (Americans: read ‘government subsidized housing’) which is now owned by a businessman named Bil. He has been declared the world’s most violent poltergeist (Fred, that is, not Bil…that would be weird). It is not difficult to see why. At the height of the initial outbreak, Fred dragged a teenage girl upstairs, leaving her severely shaken and with brutal bruising around her neck. Based upon a conversation I had last night with a fellow investigator, Fred is also believed to have broken the leg of a more recent visitor to the house.

 

 

I have long been fascinated with the case of the Black Monk. I won’t recap it here; interested readers can check out the blog entry before this one, or better yet, pick up Colin Wilson’s fascinating account of the case, Poltergeist! A Study In Destructive Haunting. Suffice it to say that unlike most outbreaks of poltergeist activity, which seem to be of self-limiting duration, the paranormal activity there has been going strong for almost sixty years.

Then I saw the movie When the Lights Went Out. Produced by the current owner of the house, it is a fictionalized version of the early stages of the haunting, which sticks largely (though not entirely) to the facts of the case. My interest piqued even further, I was fortunate enough to have an acquaintance introduce me to the owner (thank you Hazel!) who had an incredible proposition for me: Would I be interested in researching and co-writing a history of the 30 East Drive haunting, starting with its inception and going right up to the present day?

Would I ever!

“I don’t know though,” I said to Bil during our Skype chat late last year, trying desperately to sound casual and unconcerned. “I couldn’t do it without visiting the place…for a night or two, at least.”

“How about a week?” Bil said with a wave of the hand that implied such details were minor. “Let’s say Monday through Friday, sometime in 2016. Will that suit?”

You can bet your arse it would suit. By the end of the conversation, we had agreed on a week in July. Like all weeks at East Drive, it was bookended by weekend tours and private ghost hunts of the property by people who ranged from excited thrill seekers to dedicated paranormal investigators, all of them trying to uncover more of the mystery that has lurked at the heart of this housing estate since 1966.

It was with no small amount of trepidation that I opened the front gate of Number 30 last Monday morning, shortly before lunch, having spent a few minutes just standing outside and looking at it from the street. The place looked friendly and unassuming enough; in fact, it reminded me of my grandparents’ houses, and looked nothing at all like one of the most haunted houses on the face of the Earth.

I was joined by fellow investigators Andrew, Jason, Linda, and Charlie. We had all come a long way to be there (Andrew from Manchester, granted, but the rest of us from Denver, Colorado) and we felt like we were heading into a war zone.

We were met by Scott, a very friendly young chap who had been tasked by Bil to meet us and let us in. He had the kettle on when I first stepped foot inside the kitchen. As a consequence, I liked him straight away, and the coming week would not change that opinion. He proceeded to regale us with stories of his own experiences in the house, and those of his friends, who belonged to a paranormal research team named East Drive Paranormal. Many were chilling and some seemed far-fetched, yet they tracked with so many other eyewitness reports from inside that house. It seems that the laws of physics are on hiatus there, when it suits the resident ghost.

We were soon given the grand tour by Scott, who took us from room to room. I have to admit that it didn’t look (or feel) sinister or oppressive in any way that I could sense. “Just you wait,” Scott warned us in his thick Yorkshire accent. “Wait until it gets dark, when Fred comes out to play with yer. This place changes.You’ll see.”

That’s it, the reptilian part of my brain warned me gleefully, you are actually in a horror movie. Just you wait. 

While waiting for Bil to arrive, we took some reference photos of the house, both inside and out. Here’s a shot of the main hallways. Take a close and careful look. This will become relevant in just a moment.

We were just finishing our tea in the kitchen when Bil walked in. We shook hands warmly, and I watched him glance nervously into the hallway and give a hearty, “Hello there, Fred! It’s only me.” There was a definite undertone of please leave me alone in Bil’s voice, and frankly I couldn’t blame him.

“We need to talk about the book,” Bil said, suddenly all business. “Come on, I’ll take you to the pub.”

We all left, leaving the house completely empty. Bil gave me the key, which I used to solemnly lock up the house, leaving it entirely secure…but not until I had left a digital voice recorder running upstairs. You know, just in case…

Bil and I talked publishing for the next two hours, hammering out our joint vision for the book. I stuck to Diet Coke, purely because my team (The Boulder County Paranormal Research Society) has a strict ‘no alcohol’ policy on all investigations, and I was determined to maintain it here.

We returned some two hours later. Walking up the front pathway, I fished out the key and unlocked the door, which opened with a heavy ker-chunk and click as the tumblers turned. Bil and I walked inside. The rest of the team hadn’t arrived yet, having taken a different car.

“What the bloody–”

I give Bil full credit for not quite literally crapping himself there and then. He was standing in the door that separated the kitchen from the hallway, a look of slack-jawed amazement on his face. I craned my neck to look over his shoulder, and used a few choice curse words that were a lot less classy than his.

This is what we found.

The heavy wood-backed mirror which had hung in the hallway ever since Bil had first purchased the house (and for who knows how much longer) was laying on its side on the carpet, as though ripped from the wall and then cast aside by someone…or perhaps more worryingly, something…that was both immensely strong and very, very angry.

“Looks like you’ve made a new friend,” Bil said, reaching for his own camera and beginning to snap reference photos. We were both careful not to touch the evidence in any way, photographing it from various angles.

Shit, I caught myself thinking. And it isn’t even dark outside yet…