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T C Lethbridge – Ghost and Ghoul

At it happens, I have once seen the arrival of an apport, in the prosaic surroundings of the tea-room of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Cambridge. There were several of us standing round the walls of the room, drinking tea and chatting. There was an open space of concrete floor, perhaps eight feet across, in the middle of this gathering. Suddenly, at a moment when nobody happened to be talking much, there was a little tinkle and a small brass curtain ring arrived in the middle of the floor.

Nobody had thrown it there; they were not the kind of people who would do so. It just arrived. There was no explanation.

Miss R. was one of the people who observed this curious little incident. I heard her remark, half to herself, 'It's the poltergeist again.' Nobody else took any interest. They went on with their serious conversations before hurrying away to give their lectures or whatever else they had to do. Miss R. and I picked up the ring. It was an absolutely ordinary small curtain ring, somewhat tarnished. It would have been less remarkable had it been a Roman finger ring or a Saxon brooch.

I asked what the previous poltergeist happenings had been.

Apparently there was a human skull which kept jumping off shelves and tables, and objects had been moving about in the museum cases. But the phenomena did not take a violent form and did not last very long.