HUMPTY DOO, Northern Territory, 1998
It was a dark and stormy night. Rain was holding off for the moment, but huge, black clouds were rolling and a dramatic lightening display was filling the steamy tropic sky with sound and fury. The residents of 90 McMinns Drive, Humpty Doo, sat on their patio, chilled beers at hand, enjoying the show.
There were two young couples, Andrew and Kirsty Agius, Dave Clark, his partner Jill Summerville, plus their mate Doug Murphy. All five were in their late twenties to early thirties. Inside the house, fast asleep, was Kirsty and Andrew’s 10-month-old daughter Jasmine.
As Nature’s magnificent light show crashed and flashed in the sky above, strange, decidedly unnatural things started to happen.
When small pebbles began flicking out of the shadows and landing in their midst the group assumed that someone had sneaked onto their rented two-hectare (five acre) property to play a silly joke. But when the prankster failed to respond to their shouts and was not discovered in repeated searches of the grounds, they tired of the situation and moved inside – only to have the pebbles follow them.
In classic poltergeist style, showers of the centimetre-wide stones – all apparently lifted from their 70-metre-long gravel driveway – landed on floors, tables, beds and heads after apparently materialising just under the ceiling. Though the ground outside was saturated, all the pebbles that fell indoors were bone-dry and distinctly warm to the touch. Hardly believing their senses, and being practical people, one of the first things the housemates did was to fetch a ladder to check if there was something amiss in the loft. As soon as they opened the ceiling manhole, however, a brisk shower of stones fell upon their upturned faces. Later that night, to their increasing dismay, knives, small batteries, spanners, shards of broken glass and other objects began to drop or to hurtle across rooms.
Over the next couple of days the polt – they soon realised that’s what it had to be – cranked up the level of its vandalism, causing serious damage; a CD player was thrown to the floor and destroyed, windows and glass cabinet doors were smashed by ashtrays and other flying objects.
Things came to a head one Saturday night when it seemed their persecutor meant to actually drive them from the house: littering the floor with a blizzard of stones, wrenching appliances from shelves, upturning mattresses and - creepiest of all – making sinister scraping noises inside the internal walls. The events of that long night were almost too much for Jill and Kirsty. “It completely freaked us out; it was like something was actually inside the walls right next to us. We couldn’t sleep; we were crying. We would have left the house but we had nowhere else to go.”
Although the residents weren’t particularly religious they were now willing to try anything to get rid of the paranormal pest. So – when you’ve got a polt problem, who ya gonna call?
Three gutsy priests
The first thing Father Stephen de Souza of Darwin’s St Mary’s Cathedral did when he arrived was to look through the entire house. In the kitchen he “… noticed a microwave with a steak knife on top. As I walked away, one of [the residents] called ‘Father!’”
Turning, he saw the knife flying straight at him. There was nobody in a position to have thrown it. There was no time to jump out of the way but when it was about half a metre from his chest it stopped, “just as though it had hit something” and fell at his feet.
The Jesuit was unfazed. He had seen it all before. In his native India he’d been called upon to deal with several similar infestations. His “take” on the situation was that a restless spirit may have been drawn to the house, possibly because one of the occupants was, without being aware of it, a natural medium. Using age-old Catholic ritual he attempted to “bind” the spirit and reassured the tenants that it was very unlikely to physically injure anyone. He admitted, however, that in his experience prayer rarely caused a poltergeist to cease its activities. The imp would go away when it was good and ready, or, if its nasty tricks were indeed linked to someone in the house who was an unconscious medium, it might follow that person when they moved to a new residence.
Father Stephen’s prayers gave the household a brief respite; the polt kept its nasty little head down for three days but then, just as the residents were hoping it was all over, the craziness started again.
Next to try popping the polt was Humpty Doo’s parish priest, Father Tom English. During the first of four visits he saw several objects flying in ways that seemed to defy explanation. The polt, he said, “doesn’t follow the laws of physics”. A pistol cartridge fell from nowhere to land at his feet, and other things “… crashed against walls … they’d just fly out of a room that nobody [was] in, for instance. Outside, things came crashing down near us”.
Although inexperienced in such matters he gamely blessed the place and doused it with holy water...
AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 1
There were two young couples, Andrew and Kirsty Agius, Dave Clark, his partner Jill Summerville, plus their mate Doug Murphy. All five were in their late twenties to early thirties. Inside the house, fast asleep, was Kirsty and Andrew’s 10-month-old daughter Jasmine.
As Nature’s magnificent light show crashed and flashed in the sky above, strange, decidedly unnatural things started to happen.
When small pebbles began flicking out of the shadows and landing in their midst the group assumed that someone had sneaked onto their rented two-hectare (five acre) property to play a silly joke. But when the prankster failed to respond to their shouts and was not discovered in repeated searches of the grounds, they tired of the situation and moved inside – only to have the pebbles follow them.
In classic poltergeist style, showers of the centimetre-wide stones – all apparently lifted from their 70-metre-long gravel driveway – landed on floors, tables, beds and heads after apparently materialising just under the ceiling. Though the ground outside was saturated, all the pebbles that fell indoors were bone-dry and distinctly warm to the touch. Hardly believing their senses, and being practical people, one of the first things the housemates did was to fetch a ladder to check if there was something amiss in the loft. As soon as they opened the ceiling manhole, however, a brisk shower of stones fell upon their upturned faces. Later that night, to their increasing dismay, knives, small batteries, spanners, shards of broken glass and other objects began to drop or to hurtle across rooms.
Over the next couple of days the polt – they soon realised that’s what it had to be – cranked up the level of its vandalism, causing serious damage; a CD player was thrown to the floor and destroyed, windows and glass cabinet doors were smashed by ashtrays and other flying objects.
Things came to a head one Saturday night when it seemed their persecutor meant to actually drive them from the house: littering the floor with a blizzard of stones, wrenching appliances from shelves, upturning mattresses and - creepiest of all – making sinister scraping noises inside the internal walls. The events of that long night were almost too much for Jill and Kirsty. “It completely freaked us out; it was like something was actually inside the walls right next to us. We couldn’t sleep; we were crying. We would have left the house but we had nowhere else to go.”
Although the residents weren’t particularly religious they were now willing to try anything to get rid of the paranormal pest. So – when you’ve got a polt problem, who ya gonna call?
Three gutsy priests
The first thing Father Stephen de Souza of Darwin’s St Mary’s Cathedral did when he arrived was to look through the entire house. In the kitchen he “… noticed a microwave with a steak knife on top. As I walked away, one of [the residents] called ‘Father!’”
Turning, he saw the knife flying straight at him. There was nobody in a position to have thrown it. There was no time to jump out of the way but when it was about half a metre from his chest it stopped, “just as though it had hit something” and fell at his feet.
The Jesuit was unfazed. He had seen it all before. In his native India he’d been called upon to deal with several similar infestations. His “take” on the situation was that a restless spirit may have been drawn to the house, possibly because one of the occupants was, without being aware of it, a natural medium. Using age-old Catholic ritual he attempted to “bind” the spirit and reassured the tenants that it was very unlikely to physically injure anyone. He admitted, however, that in his experience prayer rarely caused a poltergeist to cease its activities. The imp would go away when it was good and ready, or, if its nasty tricks were indeed linked to someone in the house who was an unconscious medium, it might follow that person when they moved to a new residence.
Father Stephen’s prayers gave the household a brief respite; the polt kept its nasty little head down for three days but then, just as the residents were hoping it was all over, the craziness started again.
Next to try popping the polt was Humpty Doo’s parish priest, Father Tom English. During the first of four visits he saw several objects flying in ways that seemed to defy explanation. The polt, he said, “doesn’t follow the laws of physics”. A pistol cartridge fell from nowhere to land at his feet, and other things “… crashed against walls … they’d just fly out of a room that nobody [was] in, for instance. Outside, things came crashing down near us”.
Although inexperienced in such matters he gamely blessed the place and doused it with holy water...
AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 1