“GHOST” HAUNTED THE WRONG MAN.

Shannon News, 27 August 1926, Page 2

“GHOST” HAUNTED THE WRONG MAN.

- ♦ TRIED TO SCARE THE DOCTOR', BUT LOST HIS JOB. LONDON, July 10. Edwin Gell, of Northfield Avenue, Ealing, .at South-end County Court yesterday, sued the Rochford Guardians ‘ for £25 paid towards his pension. He said he was dismissed from Iris post as mental ward attendant for pretending, as a joke, to be a ghost. In 1923 it was rumoured that the Rochford Institution was haunted. “After reading the story in ' the ‘Wieekly Dispatch,’ ” Said 'Gell, “I put a sheet over my shoulders and when footsteps were heard I thought it was the night nurse, but instead it was the doctor. He reported the matter to the committee and I was discharged for misconduct.” He also stated that apparitions were supposed to have paraded the institution wards and grounds accompanied by the ringing of bells, but he had nothing to do with that. Edith Jones, superintendent nurse, said she saw Gell in the mental block enveloped in a sheet. Things reached such a state that nurses were threatening not to go on duty. Gell contended that what he had done was a practical joke and did not amount to misconduct.