The Black Monk of Pontefract: Britain's Most Violent Poltergeist

You are a teenager left minding the house on a quiet August evening when the light fixture starts to sway with no draft, a fine white powder drifts down at chest height, and pools of water keep forming on the kitchen floor no plumber can trace. This is where it began at 30 East Drive, and it got much worse than falling powder.

The address is an ordinary council house in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, on a postwar estate called Chequerfields. The Pritchard family lived there, and the disturbances that made the house famous are usually dated to 1966, with a second, fiercer bout in the years that followed. The case became a fixture of British paranormal writing and later the loose basis for the 2012 film "When the Lights Went Out."

What the family reported

The early events were the classic poltergeist inventory: green foam bubbling from taps and the toilet, dispensed as if the house itself were unwell; plants leaping from their pots; cupboards juddering; and that persistent dusting of white powder settling from mid-air. Then it escalated. Furniture was said to move and tip, a heavy sideboard among it. The family's teenage daughter, Diane, became a focus of the activity and reportedly claimed she was dragged up the stairs, leaving finger-like marks on her throat, one of the details that fixed the case in the literature.

The figure that gave the haunting its name arrived later. Witnesses described a tall shape in dark, monk-like robes, hooded, sometimes glimpsed on the stairs or as a silhouette. Local lore tied it to a Cluniac monastery that once stood in the area and to a monk supposedly executed in the sixteenth century for crimes against a girl, which is folklore rather than record, a backstory bolted onto the phenomenon to explain why it seemed to single out a young woman. The family took to calling their tormentor Mr Nobody before the Black Monk name stuck.

Between physics and something else

Poltergeist cases invite sober explanation, and much of the Pontefract material is consistent with it. Many such outbreaks cluster around an adolescent in a stressed household, and skeptics reasonably point to the human capacity, conscious or not, to stage and amplify events, alongside ordinary causes for damp, draughts, and noise that a frightened family reads as attack. Cold spots and moving small objects are the easiest things in the world to misremember once fear has taken hold. No independent instrument ever recorded the sideboard in flight.

What the debunking does not fully dissolve is the volume and the witnesses. Neighbours, relatives, and visitors described events over an extended period, and the reported physical marks on Diane are not a creak in an old joist. Whether that points to some undirected psychokinesis, an intelligent presence choosing its targets, or a family and its guests swept up in a feedback loop of suggestion is the argument the house still generates. Number 30 East Drive is now a privately run attraction, which does nothing to settle it.

Below, readers have posted their own poltergeist ordeals and hooded-figure sightings, voting each True, Fake, or Not sure. Read them by daylight, and enter your verdict.