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The Bulls Head

In January 1985 Richard and Pamela Flammerty and their family took over and moved into the Bull’s Head pub in Swinton, near Manchester. Just the following month they were to be assailed by poltergeist activity. Pamela’s account is related first-hand in the Orbis publication, The Unexplained. One night in February Pamela was alone in the accounts office, a thick-walled room off the cellar, checking the figures.

She could hear a scraping sound from behind her. When she turned she saw a stool independently moving across the floor. It looked as if it was being pushed but no one was there to push it. Then one afternoon, when the pub was closed, Pamela’s youngest son ran upstairs to her and told her that there was a man in the pub. No one was found but her son and his brother were certain that a man in a blue jumper had been sitting in the pub. A former owner of the pub confirmed that he had had similar apparition sightings. In an incident showing the overlap between areas of the paranormal — and one which will excite those researching electri cal and mechanical interferences (and perhaps have some bearing on the fairly new work being carried out by Hilary Evans on street lamp interference, the claim by some that they can extinguish, or occasionally light, street lamps at will), Pamela and her husband were walking along the upstairs corridor late at night when one by one the light bulbs went out.

There was no likelihood that this could have been caused by a fuse blowing, as they would all have been on the same circuit and would have gone out together. The couple were too frightened to investigate and locked their bedroom door that night. (Street light interference and other such interference may be the result of PK (psychokine sis) and this may give some clue as to the underlying cause of poltergeist activity — the two dominant theories are the exteriori sation from the witnesses or an external force which uses their energies.) In the morning every light in the building was on, including those that the couple clearly remembered turning off. That same night they heard footsteps; but footsteps that sounded as if they were on a stone floor rather than on the wooden boards that were outside the room.

Late on Easter Sunday something of a cross between an experiment and a ‘dare’ ended up with a family friend and Pamela’s stepfather being locked in the cellar for the night. Richard and Pamela were woken up by the friend, Steve McRey, screaming from the cellar. When they went down, he had a look of terror on his face. Pamela’s stepfather lay unconscious at the foot of the steps, ‘blood gushing from his head’. The two men had gone off to sleep but Pamela’s stepfather had woken to the sound of Steve shouting. The lights had suddenly gone out and her stepfather had made a dash for the steps. ‘An invisible hand suddenly gripped his left shoulder, and then a voice whispered harshly in his ear, “Derek”.’ He tripped over a beer barrel and struck his head, knocking himself unconscious.

A later event had elements which echo events in many paranormal areas, including UFO research. There had been trouble with the telephone line, so an engineer was called in and, while upstairs with the only people in the house, became certain that someone was downstairs using the telephone. When they went downstairs the telephone was off the hook although they were quite certain that it had been on the hook when they had previously inspected it.

The family eventually vacated the pub and Pamela Flammerty says, that in the time since, the hauntings have continued on a diminished scale, and in a more benign fashion. This suggests that the phenomenon was more of a haunting than a poltergeist, which usually attaches itself to a particular person rather than to a place, but the episode is included in this section of the Encyclopedia because of its similarity to many poltergeist reports. It may even be that poltergeist activity around Pamela and her family ‘overlaid’ itself on a background of hauntings in the pub which remained after the family had left. Italy | New York | Wiltshire | Activity | Activity | Activity | Borley | Brazil | Brazil | Brazil | Burma | Canada | Corney | East Drive | Edinburgh | Finland | France | France | Germany | Ghostly | Lincoinshire | Middlesex | Northern ireland | Northern Romania | Nova Scotia | Paraguay | Phenomena | Poltergeist Information | Scotland | Scotland | South London | Suffolk | Switzerland | USA | Washington State | West Norwood | Whitechapel |