Audrey ValezThe Black Monk
I'll say up front that this is the file I'm least comfortable with, and I'm keeping it anyway. I'm a skeptic. My first explanation for a haunting is always a draft, a pipe, a teenager, or a family that wanted to be in the paper. Most poltergeist stories fold the moment you press on them. This one has been pressed on for sixty years by people who wanted it to fold, and it's still standing.
A warm afternoon
Number 30 East Drive is a council house on the Chequerfield Estate in Pontefract, in West Yorkshire. Semi-detached, brick, a garden out back. In 1966 it belonged to the Pritchards, Joe and Jean and their two children, Phillip and Diane. There's nothing about the house that would make you look at it twice, and that's part of why the story travels. It could be anyone's.
The trouble started in the late summer of that year, while Jean was away with one of the children. Phillip was home with his grandmother. On a warm afternoon the room went cold around them, and then a fine white dust began drifting down from somewhere near the ceiling. It settled on the furniture and on the two of them. When they went to clean it up they found water pooling on the kitchen floor, with no pipe or spill anyone could point to. They mopped. It came back.
Then it stopped, for a couple of years, and the family got on with their lives.
Fred
When it came back in 1968 it came back for Diane. She was a teenager by then, and whatever was in the house seemed to organize itself around her. Heavy furniture moved across floors. Lights switched themselves on and off. Objects came off shelves and crossed rooms. The dust and the water returned. The family called the thing Fred, which tells you something about the Pritchards. You don't give a nickname to something you're planning to leave. The local papers preferred Mr Nobody.
The worst of it lasted through 1968 and 1969. Diane was thrown from her bed. And on one night, in front of her family, she was dragged up the staircase by something none of them could see. They saw her go. When it let her go there were red marks across her throat.
More than one member of the household described the same figure in the dark. Tall, in a long black robe, head bowed under a hood. That figure is where the name comes from, and where the local legend attaches itself. A Cluniac priory stood near the estate centuries ago, and the story in Pontefract is that a monk from it was executed for a crime against a young girl. Whether the two things have anything to do with each other is the kind of question I can't answer and won't pretend to.
Then it stopped
Poltergeist cases have a shape, and this one follows it. The activity built, peaked, and then ended as abruptly as it began. The Pritchards eventually sold up and moved on. The house didn't. It's still there, and the people who own it now let you book a night in it. There are beds. You bring your own bedding. I have thought about doing it and I have not done it, and I'm not going to dress that up as anything other than what it is.
What I do with this one
Here's my problem. The usual explanations are all available. A teenager at the center of every event is the classic profile for a hoax, and Diane was a teenager. A family that names its ghost is a family with a story to tell. The papers came, and papers change what people remember.
Against that, there's the number of witnesses, and the fact that they were the ones living with it. A staged haunting is a performance, and performances need an audience. The Pritchards weren't performing for anyone the night Diane went up the stairs. They were in their own house, and they were frightened, and they stayed.
I don't believe in the monk. I'm less sure what I believe about the house. That's an uncomfortable place to leave a file, and it's where this one belongs.
This case first appeared in my subscriber collection. My mailing list hears about new books before anyone else.