The Columbus Poltergeist
In March 1984, in Joan and John Resch's house in Columbus, telephones, lamps and glasses flew around their fourteen-year-old adopted daughter Tina. A Columbus Dispatch photographer caught a sequence of a handset in mid-air and the picture went round the country. A WTVN crew left a camera running while Tina believed she was not being filmed: the tape shows her reach out and pull a standard lamp over. James Randi, who came later, showed that every flight happened strictly outside an observer's line of sight, and the photographer admitted he had only pressed the shutter when the girl was looking away. The parapsychologist William Roll went on regarding the case as genuine.
The Unlucky Mummy and the Titanic
The painted coffin lid of a priestess of Amun-Ra, acquired by the British Museum in 1889 as EA22542. By the early twentieth century a story had grown around it: everyone who owned it was ruined or died, the photographer who took its picture shot himself, and in April 1912 the museum was said to have shipped it secretly to America aboard the Titanic. None of it happened. The lid is a flat board, not a mummy, and no body was ever attached to it; it has not left London except for wartime and 1990s storage, as the accession registers show. The story was got up privately by the journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson and the editor W. T. Stead, who liked to tell it at dinner; Stead himself died on the Titanic.
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