The poltergeist has many faces, and none of its hypostases fits into the framework of any rational explanation. Eyewitnesses can only be amazed at one or another trick of the invisible and rack their brains in search of at least some kind of logic in their actions. Stone throwing seems to be one of the most senseless, dull and illogical manifestations of this phenomenon.
The windows were breaking "in a spiral"
The mysterious events in the Van Zanten house, located near the town of Charleroi (Belgium), took place in 1913 and lasted only four days. But during this time, the entire city police were put on their feet, and in the house itself the ceiling was dismantled, the walls were hollowed out, the parquet was removed. And all because stones and pebbles flew into the building from nowhere …
At first, Van Zanten thought that his windows were being stoned by street boys. He called the police, and they set up surveillance. The hail of stones, however, only grew, and it was completely impossible to understand who threw them. One of the police officers wrote in a report: “Before my eyes, a small stone hit the very center of the window glass, and behind it a flurry of stones fell on the same glass, breaking the window so that a spiral appeared around the hole from the very first hit, thus methodically turning all the glass into a pile of shards. Moreover, I saw how a pebble stuck in a hole formed by one throw was knocked out of there by another pebble of exactly the same size and hitting the same hole … I got the impression that the purpose of the unknown thrower was to not leave a single piece of glass in the window. "Further, the policeman noted that the villains - "glass-haters" must be truly super-sharp shooters and have a phenomenal eye, and to achieve such unheard-of accuracy, use a powerful and well-oiled catapult.
The nearest buildings were located 150 meters from Van Zanten's house. The buildings were thoroughly searched, but no shooters or catapults were found. The frightened owner could only be comforted by the fact that neither he nor his family were hurt, and the mysterious bombing ended on the fourth day as suddenly as it had begun. Perhaps because all the glass and glassware and porcelain in the house had already been broken.
Lipstick stones
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This situation, detailed in the book "Haunted Houses" by the famous French scientist Camille Flammarion, is just one of the stories in which invisible stone throwers operate.
Something similar, only with the use of much heavier "shells", happened in 1901 in the town of Garrisonville (Ohio, USA). Stones began to fly towards him from the north-west, from the side of the forest, in huge numbers, extremely frightening all the city dwellers. After all, the distance to the forest seemed too great to throw such large stones without the help of throwing mechanisms. And who was willing to engage in such a senseless business, given that the rockfall ultimately did not cause much damage to the townspeople or their homes?
In 1910, many European newspapers reprinted an article from the magazine Giornale di Sicilia, published in Palermo, Italy. “In early June of this year, Padre Paolo Palmisano and many of his fellow villagers witnessed the very slow flight of stones, which did not harm anyone,” the article said. - Padre Paolo saw with his own eyes how one stone separated from a wall made of stones, slowly described an arc in the air and sank into the palm of a local peasant who was sitting at that moment by the wall …”.
In 1929, the famous American naturalist Ivan Sanderson was convinced of the "reasonable" movement of stones from his own experience. While visiting his friend on the island of Sumatra (Indonesia), Sanderson every morning found small pebbles and pebbles by the veranda of the house in which he lived. At dusk, they were thrown here by unknown persons hiding in the jungle surrounding the house. The search for the mysterious throwers did not lead to anything, moreover, it was rather difficult to throw stones so accurately from a distance of 80 meters. The scientist decided that a poltergeist was involved. Wanting to test his hypothesis, one evening Sanderson marked a few pebbles with lipstick and threw them back into the blackening jungle. In just a few seconds, these same stones fell at his feet. Sanderson considered this to be reliable evidence of the manifestation of a poltergeist: who else, besides him,in such an insignificantly short time, he is able to discern small pebbles in the dark and return them exactly to the feet of a person.
Cottage in Grenada and Swamp Thrower
The distance flown by the stones is sometimes such that even the most open-minded witness will doubt that people were involved in such throws. In 1923, in France, police watched for four months as stones fired at a farmhouse along the Ardèche River. In the end, the commander of the law enforcement officers sent a report to his superiors, in which there were the following words: “No mortal is able to throw stones at a distance of 400 meters and at the same time hide so skillfully that our people, who made the most careful searches, could not notice."
In 1935, an abandoned cottage on the island of Grenada was mysteriously bombarded with stones. Poltergeist phenomena have been observed there before; among the surrounding residents, the house was considered a place of gathering of ghosts. Soon after the "rockfall" began, the building was burnt, but the cobblestones flying from nowhere, continued to reach the ashes for some time.
In the 1960s, in India, in the state of Assam, a swampy depression at the edge of the jungle suddenly began to throw stones and clods of mud. The target of the enraged swamp was travelers who passed along a nearby road. True, the stones for the most part flew past people, whistling sometimes within a few centimeters from them, but clods of dirt covered the person from head to toe. Peasants from the surrounding villages tried to track down unknown throwers, but to no avail. Moreover, the "mud throwing" continued incessantly, and the search engines themselves pretty much got it.
The secret remained unsolved
The most striking and well-documented case of a stone-throwing poltergeist is considered to be the night shelling of five houses at once in Birmingham (England) in 1982. Constable W. Midland, having received complaints from the residents of Ward End Street about the broken windows, dispatched a group of law enforcement officers to the scene. They had no doubt that these were the tricks of local teenagers, and prepared to send several hooligans to the police station - so that others would be discouraged. But the police did not find the juvenile violators of the law, but they faced a riddle that has not been explained to this day. They heard the sound of stones hitting the roofs and walls of houses, the sound of broken glass, but they did not see anyone who could throw these stones. Neither ambushes, nor interrogations, nor night vision devices helped. By the end of the year, the visits of the sinister invisibles had ceased, but the secret remained unsolved,despite the most thorough investigation.
It is impossible to deny the fact that behind these Phenomena someone's bad will is visible. Too astonishing is the precision with which the stones strike pre-designated targets. And at the same time, it is useless to ask questions about why and for what reason all these actions are performed, in which there is no logic, but only utter stupidity. Flammarion cites data from Professor Ernesto Bozzano, who has been working on the poltergeist problem for over 30 years. Of the 532 cases studied by the professor, 374, in his opinion, belong to the category of phenomena caused by the actions of the souls of the dead; the remaining 158 are "guilty" of unknown spirits, which are possibly associated with living people - witnesses of poltergeist events.
Nowadays, among specialists, the most common version is that poltergeists cause some hidden capabilities of the human subconscious. Much less popular are hypotheses about the antics of people from parallel worlds, invisible aliens, hypnotists, spontaneous telekinesis and revenge of the unburied dead. But, be that as it may, it seems to us. to explain the actions of a poltergeist, in any case, it will be necessary to admit the existence of a supernatural world, in which phenomena that we do not understand have some kind of their own, special logic.
Igor Voloznev. Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" № 12 2011