HAUNTED HOUSE" TALE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 797, 18 October 1929, Page 10

HAUNTED HOUSE" TALE

FLYING MISSILES BREAK DOORS AND WINDOWS POLICE BAFFLED Thirteen plain-clothed policemen and a Spiritualist medium were engaged one night recently in trying to solve the mystery of Johannesburg’s “haunted house” in Troye Street, where for live successive nights stones, bricks, nuts, bolts, tins, bread, planks and other missiles crashed through doors and wiudows from a source which has baffled the city police, says “The Cape Times.” Over 200 people assembled in the street opposite the place—a row of three dilapidated tenement cottages hemmed in by shops and faced back and front by two-storey factories.

One of the tenements was empty. A second was occupied by an old woman ; and her waitress daughter, and the third by a man named Tooney. Policemen have paraded past the building both front and back, ai d have 1 lain in wait for hours on the roof of ! the cottages blit have failed to locate the source of the phenomena, although : they themselves have been struck by I flying missiles. There are some who | believe that the origin of the mystery j is supernatural. j Police mingled with the crowd In j the street and kept a keen watch, j et j nuts and bolts flew through the win- ; dows and doors: and where they came ! from could not be ascertained. ! When the Spiritualist medium went j into a trance spirit messages were re- ! ceived from “William Thomas,’’ who declared that he had lived in Trove ! Street before he passed over to the j spirit world, and that the attacks on the house were * due to venom and spite. “I shall stay in the house tonight and protect you,” he conveyed to the old woman through the medium. “I will do all I can to stop them throwing.” A second “spirit” confirmed the promise of the first visitor. The crowd indulged in brick-throw-ing but only in a spirit of hooliganism, produced by disappointment that the weird visitor had suspended his uncanny attacks. The tenants of the building have given notice to vacate it. The old woman said she would rather live in a single room than put up with it. On one occasion, while a policeman was parading the small backyard and another watched from the roof, a three-foot plank crashed through the i back door, and next door a tin hit the j bedroom wardrobe and fell into a bed, ; yet the police had no idea where they I came from.

The police also watched inside, suspecting a trick, and were struck by a missile which came from outside. A table in the little room is littered with a collection of things which have come through doors and windows.