Whitechapel

Newark Street is in the heart of London’s East End. In 1952 No. 88 Newark Street was occupied by Harry Conway and his family. They had a seven-year-old son who slept in a bedroom on the second floor of the four-storey building. Frequently the child, in terror, would tell stories of icy fingers that had pulled the bedclothes off his bed. Finding it difficult to believe that the child was not just having nightmares, the family watched their son deteriorate into a nervous wreck, finally requiring hospitalisa tion. This was when the family decided to move.

Noises were heard around the house, and the lock on their son’s bedroom door had to be changed several times as it was either found inexplicably locked or unlocked when it should not have been. An aunt staying in the house experienced the same problems with her bedclothes as her nephew. The poltergeist hauntings of 88 Newark Street were not confined to the Conway family but carried over to the next occupants of the property, something of a deviation from the poltergeist ‘norm’. In June 1954 Harry and Brenda Cox moved into the house both to live and to set up their dress-manufacturing business.

The cutting tables and machinery were fitted into work rooms on the top floor, Harry and Brenda took a living room and kitchen on the first floor and a bedroom on the second and shortly afterwards Alec and Vera Bessel! moved into the ground floor. Alec Bessell was employed by Cox. It was not long before the staff working on the top floor claimed that they had heard footsteps outside their rooms, but no matter how hard they tried they had never been able to see anyone. Cox thought they were imagining things.

A few days later Cox and his wife both heard footsteps outside their room when no one should have been there. Believing it to be a burglar, Cox took a poker and went to investigate. He found nothing; the entrance door was secure. One evening Alec and Vera Bessell arrived home at around eleven o’clock, believing the Coxes to be in their rooms or in bed. They could hear heavy thumping noises and something that sounded like a sweeping sound from the Coxes’ rooms above them and thought it was rather inconsiderate time for them to be doing the housework.

It was twelve-thirty when they heard the Coxes arrive home late. Unnerved, the Bessells told them about the noises but when they checked their rooms they found nothing had been disturbed. In the early hours of the morning Harry and Brenda Cox woke up feeling an icy chill — the bedclothes were being slowly pulled off the bed; this happened four more times and began to cause the family considerable psychological strain. Cox claimed in an interview with investigator Philip Paul that his hair had stood on end and he had become motionless.

He could not move his limbs. Eventually he was able to release himself from the sensation and get downstairs. He described the event as the most horrifying experience he had had. If Alec Bessell was away on business the Coxes would sleep in Vera’s rooms to keep her company; from there they could often hear sounds in their own unoccupied rooms above. Once, at midnight, they heard ‘heavy measured thumps descend the 48 stairs from the top to the bottom of the house’.

They found nothing. Cox made sure that the Yale lock on the room they were in was locked; the following morning no one had been near it and it was found unlocked. One first-floor door for which there was no key was found locked and Cox had to break in. Some friends, Michael Winter and his family, came to stay with the Coxes and, for lack of space Michael Winter and Harry Cox slept in the living room together. During the night Winter saw coat-hangers, on rails in the room, spinning round.

He also felt movements on the bed though Cox was adamant that he (Cox) had not woken up at all during the night. Brenda and Vera, together in the downstairs kitchen, watched an artificial flower fly across the room which heralded the onset of a period of similar activity: jugs and tumblers moved from the sideboard to the chairs, cups and medals scattered over the floor and it was evidently a poltergeist with a distinctly human attitude towards the Inland Revenue a vase of water poured over completed income-tax forms!

During a visit by Harry Cox’s parents, his father suddenly heard a sound ‘like a cat in pain’ coming from a glass-fronted cabinet in the room. They could find nothing to account for the noise.

A medium who visited the house believed the haunting was being caused by the ghost of a man with a wooden leg. In the end the effects faded away, as poltergeist phenomena tend to do.

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