Black Monk of Pontefract

The Black Monk does not come from Pontefract Castle but from 30 East Drive, a post-war council house in the Chequerfield estate on the other side of town. The Pritchards (Joe, Jean and their children Philip, fifteen, and Diane, twelve) moved in there in August 1966. And for the first years nobody spoke of any monk: the family called whatever was in the house «Mr Nobody», and later named it «Fred». The monk came afterwards, and came out of an archive. Tom Cuniff, a local researcher, went through the town's historic executions and proposed that the house stood near where a monk of the priory of St John the Evangelist had been hanged in the sixteenth century, condemned for the rape and murder of a young girl. That priory was Cluniac, not Cistercian: the Lacys founded it around 1090 and Henry VIII dissolved it in 1539. That the identification arrived at the end and not at the beginning is the most important fact of the case, and precisely the one that disappears in the telling.

There were two outbreaks, not eleven continuous years. The first was in August 1966, with Philip and his grandmother Sarah Scholes alone in the house: white dust falling out of the air at chest height, pools of water appearing and disappearing on the kitchen floor, the tea dispenser emptying itself. Then the house fell quiet for a little over two years. The second outbreak, from late 1968 to mid-1969, was of another kind. Furniture moved, doors slammed, slaps were heard and left their marks. And what has remained as the image of the case happened: Diane, twelve years old, was dragged screaming up the stairs, and finger marks were left on her throat. It is in that phase that several witnesses describe the figure: tall, in a habit and hood. None describes a face. The family turned to the parish priest, who did not know what to do. And what ended the affair, by every account, was a piece of household improvisation: someone suggested hanging garlic at the doors, and the phenomena stopped. The Pritchards did not move out; they went on living there.

It is worth listing what this case does not have, because almost everything attributed to it belongs to others. No psychical society investigated it while it was happening: it was not documented by professionals at the time, and what exists are the family's recollections gathered well afterwards. There are no films and no photographs of the phenomena. There is no tally of thousands of incidents, because nobody counted them. And there were no failed ecclesiastical exorcisms, but a parish priest who did not know what to do. What there is, is a book: Poltergeist! A Study in Destructive Haunting, which Colin Wilson published in 1981 and from which every later account derives. The comparison with Enfield measures the difference well: that case happened ten years later and did have investigators inside the house, with cameras and tape recorders, for eighteen months. Pontefract is the most violent of the great English poltergeists and the worst documented, and the two go together: the violence is told from memory and recorded by nobody.

30 East Drive is still standing and you can spend the night there. Bil Bungay, producer of the film When the Lights Went Out (2012), inspired by the case, bought the house when shooting finished and rents it to anyone who wants to sleep in it out of an interest in the paranormal. It is not a museum, and the label «most haunted house in Europe» comes from its own promotion. What is true, and enough, is that Pontefract closes the trio of cases English poltergeist literature always cites together: Thornton Heath in 1938, Pontefract between 1966 and 1969, and Enfield between 1977 and 1979. And there is a symmetry worth pointing out. All three began in modest houses with children inside; all three became famous when someone from outside gave them a name (an entity, a monk, a voice) and the name weighed more than what had happened. At Pontefract the name came out of a local archive, and it is the one that has stuck.