Paraguay

Poltergeists are usually extremely reluctant to be obliging and often frustrate researchers by their unwillingness to perform for ‘sceptics’. Not so the one which afflicted emigré Kenzo Okamoto and his family in their remote farm twelve miles from Ponta Pora in Paraguay.

To begin with, the poltergeist did not seem to have focused exclusively on the Okamoto family. For example, some neigh- bours of the Okamotos were terrified when their bed was lifted up into the air and they were pushed around by an invisible force. Everyone evacuated the farmhouse, except for one stout old lady’ of 76 who worked on Okamoto’s tomato patch. She found herself being bombarded with tomatoes and threatened Okamoto that she would call the police; he assured her he had nothing to do with it’. His own children were later to be pelted by tomatoes. The poltergeist apparently now moved in on the Okamoto family. Stones rained down inside the house.

A reporter, Kazunari Akaki, visited the farm, spending five days there investigating the poltergeist. He was highly sceptical and unconvinced by many of the occurrences. For example, an upstairs room was full of objects that had apparently been mysteriously transported there from the ground floor. Akaki helped to move them all back, only to discover that they had all moved back upstairs again when he came back from a trip into town. He began to believe it was simply Okamoto playing tricks. During dinner he was unimpressed by the falling stones and when he was getting ready for bed he was similarly unconvinced by chocolates falling on the floor of his bedroom which he thought ‘could. . . have been thrown over the partition’.

The following afternoon his scepticism was dramatically demol ished. As Guy Lyon Playfair relates in his book The Flying Cow, when Akaki returned to the house after driving Okamoto’s Toyota jeep (which weighed 2.12 tons), he parked it outside the front door. He had no sooner got into the house when he heard a noise, went back outside and saw that the jeep was now 40 yards away with no tyre marks in the soft mud between the spot it was flow in and the place where it had been parked. And the position it was now in was uphill from where it had previously been. Akaki noticed that the poltergeist activity seemed to be more in evidence when the engine of the jeep was running and also that it peaked at twilight. Combining these factors, he asked Okamoto to bring the jeep back to the front door, with the engine running, at twilight. Back in the house Akaki discovered torch batteries flung against the wall and an iron railing lying on his bed. It had not been there when he had been in the bedroom only a few minutes prior to that.

The poltergeist went on to cause spontaneous combustion, which is a rare occurence in poltergeist cases hut not unheard of One of the objects to catch fire was a damp shirt hanging on the back of a chair, apparently burned as a result of contact with ‘a fireball that suddenly appeared and equally suddenly vanished though leaving an inch wide mark on the family’s dog. When this happened the dog had been asleep, and he had not been disturbed enough to even wake up.

Burn marks also appeared on wooden partitioning in the house and on a thatched roof. It was astonishing that the thatch did not catch fire, being highly inflammable. One potentially sinister, but in the end harmless, event occurred in May 1973 when Okamoto’s ten month old baby disappeared, complete with pram. The child and pram were found outside the house under a tree after a period of searching. The child was unharmed and dry although it had been raining throughout the time the baby was missing. No focus for the phenomena could ever be determined, and the poltergeist eventually quietened down.

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