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5 Langmead Street

Langmead Street is a tiny road off the High Street in West Norwood, just behind West Norwood Station. Like many south London streets it was damaged during the war and No.5 was taken over by the local council and repaired.

At the time of the incident the house was occupied by Mr and Mrs Greenfield (Senior), their sons Cecil and Dennis, Dennis’ wife Gladys, Gladys’ mother and two young children, Gordon aged eight and Patricia aged fourteen. At first the family heard noises scraping and tapping noises apparently from the loft a fairly classical start to a poltergeist haunting.

The noises could only be heard from the topmost of the three floors. As time progressed, the noises became louder until they could be heard from any part of the house and were described as sounding like furniture being dragged. Eventually they sounded more like ‘something walking on the ceiling’.

After about four years of this not particularly intrusive but nonetheless disturbing activity, Cecil Greenfield awoke one summer night thinking he could hear someone moving around outside his first-floor bedroom. On opening the door he could see nothing outside. Thinking that someone might have been ill, and had gone downstairs to the kitchen, Cecil began to head towards the stairs when he realised that a grey-white, adult sized figure was ascending the stairs towards him.

He could not make out any details of a face but had the impression of arms folded at breast height. As the form approached, Cecil felt an icy coldness which gradually became more severe (though this may have been a reaction to the sighting); he also felt what he described as ‘a sort of electric vibration’.

As the form passed over a loose floorboard on the stairs, Cecil heard a creak that suggested it had mass or weight. Cecil screamed and the apparition instantly vanished. Cecil was found, ‘white and shaking’, by his parents, who had a bedroom on the same floor. Just five days later Dennis and Gladys, arriving home from a party in the early hours of the morning, walked into the down stairs hallway and saw the same grey-white figure standing a little way up the stairs.

Again, they could make out no features of a face, but this time they determined that it had its arms hanging by its sides. They ran to a neighbour’s house and when they returned the figure had gone. Fourteen-year-old Patricia also saw the same form, this time in the afternoon.

She was hysterical for quite some time afterwards. Becoming seriously concerned, Cecil Greenfield called the police and Inspector Sidney Candler visited the house, having heard Cecil’s description of crashes and bangs, moaning sounds as well as the weird lights that were now appearing. Candler and his colleagues found the inhabitants huddled together in the living room dressed in a curious mixture of night clothes with day clothes hastily thrown over them.

The police searched the house from top to bottom but found nothing; yet the family persuaded them to stay until dawn when daylight seemed to ease their fears. The next night the same disturbances happened again and Cecil again called the police. This time Candler arrived with eight constables. The household was once again gathered in the living room and one constable was posted on guard outside the door. Other officers were placed throughout the building, Candler roaming free around the house.

During this police vigil, and with the family kept together in one place, there were ‘raps, crashes and moans from the loft, the quilt was unaccountably snatched from a bed and a picture crashed from a wall, its cord unbroken and the hook undisturbed’. Candler said that he was sceptical when he first heard the story but agreed after talking to the Greenfields that something strange was happening to them. Dennis described one very curious episode; he had entered Patricia’s bedroom and seen her mattress ‘lifting and curling up’ as if being moved by invisible hands. Patricia was not in the house at the time.

Even using all his strength, Dennis could not move the mattress which was now suspended in mid-air as if by an iron fist. Suddenly Dennis himself seemed to be seized from behind although there was no one else in the room. Thoroughly alarmed, he ended up with his shirt torn and soaked from perspiration. On another occasion young Gordon had apparently been flung down the stairs in some paranormal manner though he had not been injured.

Some claims were classic poltergeist events, including radios turning on spontaneously, flashes of light, and pictures moving of their own volition, but some were quite exceptional: Dennis once claimed he had seen a bottle of milk moving up the stairs one step at a time under its own power. Philip Paul believed that some of Dennis’ claims were probably hallucinatory after the periods of strain he had been under, but rejected the idea that the events were being deliberately faked.

By the end of the summer new apparitions were appearing; Cecil saw a figure standing by his bed which disappeared after he had hidden beneath the bedclothes for a time. Shortly afterwards the heavy kitchen table moved when no one was in the room. There was evidence of wall writing on one of the first-floor bedrooms though it seemed to be quite meaningless either ‘MP S2 38 or ‘MP SZ 38’. Perhaps unfortunately, the events reached even the national press and inevitably became something of a local attraction.

The investigator of this case, Philip Paul, considered the possibility that the family was faking the claims in order to be rehoused by the council it would certainly not have been the first time that ‘ghosts’ had been used for this purpose. However, Paul rejected this idea after several investigations and interviews with the family. At one point he even gave them a way out by saying, ‘Of course, if your ghost isn’t real, you could stop all this discomfort very quickly.

Simply give an interview to the press and say you invented it as a joke. Then you will only have to suffer for a day or two longer, after which it will all die away and soon be forgotten.’ The family had been concerned by the local attention they were getting and this may well have seemed an attractive proposition if they had indeed been lying. Dennis replied that although the events and the crowds were causing stress, if they lied about the claim and pretended to have invented the stories they would be in a difficult position if they had to call in the police again.

No resolution was ever found and, as is typical of poltergeist hauntings, the effects gradually faded and disappeared altogether. Two years later the Hewitt family replaced the Greenfields and, although they were well aware of the history of the house. they claim to have had no experiences during their time there. They seem to have had a fairly healthy attitude to the history of the house, referring to the apparition as Horace’, but any conversation with him was entirely one sided Horace never joined in.

Some years later, the now retired inspector Candler summed up his feelings to Philip Paul. confirming that be bei die farnliy had undergone some strange experience. He admitted he was still baffled by the case. Italy | New York | Wiltshire | Activity | Activity | Activity | Borley | Brazil | Brazil | Brazil | Burma | Canada | Corney | East Drive | Edinburgh | Finland | France | France | Germany | Ghostly | Lincoinshire | Manchester | Middlesex | Northern ireland | Northern Romania | Nova Scotia | Paraguay | Phenomena | Poltergeist Information | Scotland | Scotland | South London | Suffolk | Switzerland | USA | Washington State | Whitechapel |