Introduction
Several days after the previous reports, Arthur Machen returned to the scene of the haunting in Hornsey. Though a short article, Machen does more than fill the space with quotes. Most interestingly, his interview with the attending vicar provides further nuance into the events. Next week, the reader will find a type of conclusion, if not closure, to the curious case.
The Racketty Ghost Breaks Out Again
by
Arthur Machen
February 24, 1921
The Racketty Ghost of Ferrestone-road, Hornsey, still remains a profound mystery.
Tables still rise in the air, and a chair with a child sitting on it has again been lifted, as though by invisible hands, from the ground.
All sorts of objects still dance about or are violently propelled from one point to another: and nobody knows how it is done.
It will be remembered that the Frost household consists of Mr. and Mrs. Frost, their two sons, Miss Clifton (Mrs. Frost’s sister), and the three grandchildren, two boys, aged 11 and 9, and a little girl of four or five.
Those are children of Mrs. Frost’s daughter, Mrs. Parker, who died at the house in Ferrestone-road in April last.
The elder of the boys seemed to be in a sense a kind of storm centre of the disturbances. At all events they were having a very bad effect on him, and he was sent away to the seaside.
Weird Breakfast Scene
It was hoped that on the removal of the boy there would be a removal of the trouble; but that has not been fulfilled. Things are as bad as ever.
I saw Mr. Frost, sen., yesterday, and he described to me what happened on Saturday morning last.
“I suppose,” he said, “it was about eight o’clock, as we were all sitting round the kitchen table at breakfast.”
“I was sitting nearest the boy. I saw the chair, with the little boy on it, rise from the ground. Not very high, I should think about six inches. Then it went back again.
“The boy didn’t seem frightened; he just said, ‘I’m going up,’ or something of the kind.”
What the Vicar Saw
So far Mr. Frost. Later in the day I saw Mr. Gardiner, the Vicar of St. Gabriel’s, Bounds Green, who has shown the Frost family every kindness and attention. There was one point which I particularly wished to put to him.
I had been informed that Mr. Gardiner had seen a fairy lamp fly from its shelf or mantelpiece in a straight line to a distance of about two feet from the shelf, and then fall with a crash.
I asked the vicar whether this was a correct description of his impressions.
He replied: “It is very difficult to say; difficult, I mean, to give an exact account of what one actually does see.
“I hear a crash, and then I see that something that was on the table or on a shelf is on the floor.”
The Table Walks
The vicar added that he has distinctly observed objects in actual motion:
“I saw the table move and a chair move in the Frosts’ kitchen this morning. There were in the room Bertie and his little sister.
“But as a rule, I have noticed that the manifestations seldom ever occur when I am actually in the room; they usually happen when I am just outside it.”
The vicar said that he had been at the house in Ferrestone-road for four hours yesterday morning. Disturbances had been continuous, and he had taken the little boy away with him.
Later, I was told by one of Mr. Frost’s sons that since Bertie has been taken to the vicarage—about seven hours before, I suppose—there had been absolute peace.
Bertie was in the room while I was talking to the vicar.
Bertie’s Story
He was asked what it felt like when he was raised from the ground, or “levitated,” as he was sitting in his chair.
His answer was that it was “like floating on water.”
It must be noted very clearly that the Vicar of St. Gabriel’s is absolutely convinced of the entire genuineness of the manifestations. He denies the possibility of any kind of trickery.
I should add that psychical investigators, accompanied by a medium, have held some kind of séance at the house in Ferrestone-road.
The medium is said to have described the late Mrs. Parker, the mother of the three children, very exactly.
The Weekly Machen
Previous: Two Unsigned Articles on the Hornsey Saga
Next: Bertie’s Banging Ghost
darklybrightpress.com 
Hence, I suppose, Machen’s later poltergeist stories — notably The Green Round, but wasn’t there another?
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What a lot of Machen I have not yet read! I see that someone uploaded some sort of transcription of The Green Round in the Internet Archive last November, since “this work of fiction is in the public domain in nations which follow the ’70 year rule’ on copyright.” And someone else uploaded what appears to be a scan of a first-edition copy in September 2022, but one must “Log In and Borrow” to read it.
My brain suddenly got storming today, about how little I know of the history of either ‘poltergeists’ or British ‘psychical research’, though I think I have read, or dipped into, Conan Doyle’s The Edge of the Unknown (1930) many a year ago, in its 1968 Berkley Medallion edition. And I have enjoyed odds and ends of late-19th- and early-20th-c. ‘psychic detective’ fiction – including the draft chapters of the first version of Charles Williams’s last novel as published in Mythlore (and so presumably now online in their archive)!
I have also not gotten around to commenting on your very interesting article about Machen and Charles Williams’s 1931 novel, The Place of the Lion, which the still fairly-recently reverted C.S. Lewis greatly admired immediately, and I have grow to appreciate more and more down the decades.
But today’s brainstorming began with the wild wonder as to how far we might compare the ‘knocking the world around phenomena’ of that novel, which is somehow related to and come about in or around the house called ‘The Joinings’, and through the person of Berringer, with ‘poltergeist phenomena’ as reported on by Machen (et al.) in this series.
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