Fabulous Folklore with Icy9 Aug 2025

The Wesley Poltergeist and the Bishopwearmouth Poltergeist Go Head-to-Head

Last week, we looked at some poltergeist definitions and whether such definitions are even helpful. Can something as truly bizarre as a 'knocking spirit' be boiled down to a series of checkboxes on a form?

Yet they're also not the invention of the 20th century. Nor are they the preserve of ghost hunters or psychics. Poltergeist accounts stretch back through the centuries, even if the spirit responsible isn't always labelled as a poltergeist.

Just look at the Tedworth Drummer from the 1660s and the haunting at Willington Mill in the 1840s. That's just as far as England goes - these accounts appear all over the world.

So as we're interested in folklore here, let's unpick two vastly different cases, from 1716 and 1840, to see how they appear in written records that try to avoid using the P-word. Do the accounts even describe poltergeists? Let's explore them in this week's episode of Fabulous Folklore!

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