Welcome to the Nightwalks…

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30 East Drive, a 1950s council house in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, was once the node of one of Europe’s most terrifying poltergeist hauntings in the 1960s.

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In August 1966, the Pritchards – Joe, Jean, and their kids Philip (15) and Diane (12) – moved into the council house in Pontefract, completely unaware of the building’s dark baggage.

The weirdness began with a layer of chalky dust falling from a level below head height, but not from the ceiling. Philip and his grandmother noticed this during a hot summer Bank Holiday, when his parents were away on holiday. His aunt (Mrs Kelly) went to the kitchen to find something to clear up the dust layer, then slipped in a puddle of water that appeared without explanation.

Mrs Kelly’s attempts to mop up the water were frustrated by yet more pools of water materialising on the linoleum, right in front of her and her nephew. On one occasion, a puddle spontaneously appeared on the living room floor.

Lights would flicker on and off, often in the early hours of the morning. Arbitrary objects would go missing then reappear later, including a packet of biscuits which vanished from the kitchen then turned up inside a locked cupboard in the living room.

Other stuff that happened included green foam appearing from the taps and the toilet even when the water supply was switched off, the tea dispenser turning itself on so that dried tea spilled all over the counter-top, lights flicking on and off, plants jumping out of their pots and landing on the stairs, cupboards shaking vehemently, photographs somehow becoming slashed with a sharp knife, and an endless amount of objects levitating or throwing themselves, even a solid oak sideboard.

Diane was targeted more than the other family members. A heavy oak wardrobe in her bedroom upended itself. She was once dragged upstairs by her hair, screaming, and on another occasion she was pulled from her bed and slapped in the face while she was sleeping, then had her hair yanked.

Plates flew off shelves and smashed against the kitchen walls. A knife once hurled itself out of kitchen drawer, narrowly missing Jean Pritchard. Electrical appliances malfunctioned. A grandfather clock toppled from the landing and broke near the front door just after a visiting vicar was vacating the house.

Exorcisms didn’t work. In response to attempts to eradicate it, the poltergeist made the walls seep holy water, slapped people’s faces or pushed them down the stairs, and even manifested “hands” that conducted the hymns aimed at laying it to rest – wearing a pair of women’s fur gloves! The next day a family friend, Mrs Scholes, took the gloves into the garden using a pair of fire tongs, drenched them in paraffin, then burned them.

The poltergeist known as Fred sounds like he has a sense of humour. Once, he removed a jug of milk from the fridge and poured it over the head of one of the children’s sceptical aunts.

However, Fred also had a violent side. He caused a few bruises and scratches, in particular to Diane. Later on, when Philip and Diane were leaving their teenage years, there was an event where Diane’s long hair suddenly stood on end and she was dragged kicking and screaming up the stairs. She was incredibly traumatised by this, and it left obvious fingermarks on her throat.

Accounts of the haunting also claim that doors slammed of their own volition, and apparitions of a hooded dark figure materialised in hallways or at the head of the staircase. Once, Jean was peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink and turned around to come face to face with the shadowy cowled figure, which had been standing quietly behind her. Strangely, she wasn’t afraid, and it disappeared. Perhaps she was too surprised to feel fear.

There was another event where Jean woke to find the shadowy monk floating over her bed, glaring at her.

The activity reached a peak between 1968 and 1969. One night all the lights in the house extinguished simultaneously and Diane screamed. After this, and after Diane had left home, the weird phenomena diminished a lot but never quite went away.

Ten years after the occurrences first started happening, a journalist with an interest in the Cluniac monks of Pontefract investigated the case, looking through old local newspaper reports, talking to friends, relatives, and neighbours, the local vicar, the mayor, and the Member of Parliament who had witnessed some bizarre stuff in the house. Neighbours had heard loud bangs coming from number 30, as well as lights flickering on and off in the small hours of morning.

People had reported sensations of being pushed or slapped by invisible hands, hearing guttural growls or chanting, and feeling sudden patches of coldness that moved through the house.

The haunting activity usually follows a pattern, beginning with small knocking sounds which build into chaos – especially during the night hours – without direct interaction or any response to human questioning.

EVPs (or electronic voice phenomena) captured in the house has contained threats such as “Get out,” and there have been shadowy figures seen in photographs taken there.

This haunting has scared residents and visitors so much that some of them have run out of the house in panic. It has drawn attention from the media, with the newspapers nicknaming the poltergeist “Mr Nobody” in 1968, though the family preferred to call it “Fred.” The house has had quite a few different owners and is a magnet for paranormal investigators. The current owner is Bil Bungay, an ad man who is a film producer.

The fact that the ghost or entity involved doesn’t respond to questions, and the tendency of the activity to follow a pattern, hints that this type of poltergeist may be a residual haunting – a loop of intensely emotional events that happened in the past, repeating themselves over and over. Residual hauntings are usually triggered by something, and in this case it seems to be set off by the presence of living humans on quiet evenings.

However, other behaviours of the poltergeist hint that it might not be residual and could be conscious. For example, after making a film about the haunting (When the Lights Went Out), Bil Bungay bought the house [and held a red carpet movie premiere there for it, with a red carpet leading up the garden path!] One day in February 2016, he was washing some dishes in the kitchen and felt the instinct to turn around. He turned in time to catch a tiny object forming over the dining room table, which then hurled itself at his head, missing by a hair, ricocheting off the window onto the kitchen floor. It was a wooden domino, and after Bil thanked “Fred” for showing him its ability to move objects, Fred kept on throwing small items at Bil: a marble, some screws, a red plastic ball, and Bil’s own hat.

The poltergeist didn’t only stick to number 30. It visited other homes in the neighbourhood and was sometimes seen passing outside. Carol, the next-door neighbour, was a psychic and could sometimes see “Fred”. She said the entity had visited her house a number of times.

Bil Bungay met two stars from the movie he’d helped to make – Hannah Clifford and Tasha Connor – and they tried to take a photo together at number 30 as a memento. However, Bil’s iPhone, though at 75% battery,  suddenly went flat. After recharging it, there was no sign of the photo in his gallery, but a few weeks later, the photo came back on his phone.

After that, Carol (who was by then the holder of the keys to the house) was hearing thumps and bangs through the wall at 3 or 4am, seeing blue balls of energy in the corridor – and once, the duvet on her son’s bed shaped itself into the outline of a man lying down. She also claimed to see the shadow of a tall dark entity passing through the wall into her home.

The activity had been simmering away before Bil took possession of number 30 (though he didn’t live in it). There would be the sound of a TV playing loudly in the house while it was empty of living occupants.

After Bil bought the house, a documentary was being made about it. He visited the production crew on their last day of filming, and heard about some of the phenomena the crew had witnessed: a kettle switching on and overheating of its own accord, a remote thermostat constantly going missing, a researcher having the sensation of something pinning him down onto the bed, and a bunch of keys belonging to the producer going astray. Eventually the keys were found inside an old (unused) vacuum cleaner that was obtained from a charity shop to “dress” the house.

That last one was an interesting coincidence. When the Pritchards were living there, a set of keys to all doors in the house fell out of the chimney while Jean Pritchard was cleaning the flue. One of the keys was a large medieval door key.

At 2am on Bil’s visit to the production crew, everyone left except for him and two other people who were tidying things up. Bil went into the garden to clear up litter and noticed one side of a double gate was open, so he closed it – dropping the plunger into the hole, then moving a concrete block against the gate to secure it. The last couple of people left through the kitchen door, ready to get away from the place… but somehow the keys had gone missing again, and when Bil glanced around, the gate he had just closed was suddenly open again at 90 degrees, the concrete block pushed to one side. Bil’s colleagues were busy installing a lampshade upstairs before that, so they weren’t likely to have been able to open the gate as a prank.

The next day, Carol admitted to Bil that the gate opening was Fred’s doing, and that Fred did it a lot of the time. Neighbours told Bil that they saw Fred passing their windows in the dark hours.

Other visitors to number 30 experienced columns of icy air in the corridors, every radiator in the building somehow turning themselves up full overnight, and the cupboard under the stairs sometimes being impossible to open.

One afternoon, Bil was having hot drinks in the living room of number 30 with Carol and some of her friends, recounting earlier incidents and laughing, when they heard a popping sound like something plastic dropping onto the kitchen floor. On investigation they found Carol’s granddaughter, who had just entered through the front door, biting into a fake orange made out of polystyrene. When asked how she got it, the girl simply said a “man in black” had given it to her out of the fruit bowl.

But what was it that happened in the past that gave rise to Fred?

Stories say that the house is on the site of a medieval monastery (the Priory of Saint John the Evangelist), where a Cluniac monk was hanged for rape and murder near the property in the 16th century. Local legends talk about a “Black Monk” haunting the area. The house is at the top of the hill where the gallows once stood, and there was supposedly a stream with a small bridge over it in that location (poltergeists have been associated with underground running water, and the stream was buried long ago).

There is an old well below the house where the monk is believed to have been thrown after he was executed (along with the bodies of his victims, who also had their tongues cut out by the monk to silence them). The well causes a damp smell.

One of the monk’s victims was a girl about the same age as Diane. Perhaps that was what led the entity to target her.

Parties of 1 to 4 people can book a stay at number 30 East Drive, if they are insane enough. No alcohol is permitted and visitors have to sign a waiver before entering. Recently, Fred trashed a bed in the small room (that used to be Diane’s) at 3 am. There are 288 recent weird phenomena reported at the house. You can find those listed here.

The house has its own website here:

30eastdrive.com

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Sources

thehorrorcollection.com

Home

https://ghostwatch.com/paranormal-report/poltergeist-activity/england/the-black-monk-of-pontefract/

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Back in 2023, there was a viral trend on TikTok concerning a horror movie named “Untold.” But how did it start and where did it originate from? Was it even a real film?

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Untold the horror movie was said to be on Netflix. Indie horror films have had an easier time gaining attention on the internet in recent years, and fans of the genre are often on the hunt for something that might have slipped under their radar when it was initially released.

The TikTok account “MR. MOVIE” first mentioned the movie Untold, uploading a video in which he explained everything he claimed to know about the film, with a poster for the film in the background. The poster had a ghost in the centre and text saying it was based on a true story, and on the bottom it gave a website for the film and the release date of March the 7th. Mr. Movie said Untold was added to Netflix in March 2023. He also said the film was so terrifying that, according to a “Netflix algorithm report” 96% of viewers of it stopped watching 9 minutes and 45 seconds into it. Mr. Movie said he was one of the people who actually managed to see it all the way through, and that it was the most frightening thing he’d ever seen.

Mr. Movie’s video about Untold went viral.

However, Mr. Movie is in fact a movie parody account, and it has posted many spoof videos. Untold isn’t a real film. There were various clues in the video that revealed this: the so-called “Netflix report” about the film was actually a bit of paperwork from a cat clinic, with the vet’s letterhead visible in the shot. The website for the film was defunct.

If you were to look at Mr. Movie’s other videos, you’d find other weird fake movie reviews including one for Joe’s Noodles supposedly starring Brad Pitt.

Commentators on the video either expressed their curiosity and frustration at not being able to find the film, or played along with the joke by saying they had seen it and adding other details. One comment said Untold was “about a movie that doesn’t really exist and everyone looking for it becomes crazy and murderous”.

Related to this viral phenomenon, there was a rumour going around on TikTok about Netflix having a mysterious “Schmunguss” category, that was believed to feature a collection of films that had the word Schmunguss in their titles. This rumour was also circulating in 2023, but was more obviously untrue (what the hell even is a “Schmunguss” anyway?)

The idea for Untold could have been inspired by horror films like The Ring (released in 2002, about a journalist who discovers a cursed video tape that causes anyone who views it to die seven days later).

Ironically enough, in 2025, a psychological horror film entitled “Untold” was released. One could argue that the film did exist, but was just chronologically challenged:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untold_(film)

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Sources

screenrant.com

decider.com

thecinemaholic.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untold_(film)

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Since the dawn of civilisation in Japan, there have been spirits and deities known as kami, which became part of the ancient Shinto religion. There are thousands of different types of kami, categorised in different ways.

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The Japanese kami (or kamigami in the plural) are not only gods, goddesses, and ghosts. They can be personifications of elements in the landscape (mountains, rivers, lakes) or forces of nature (e.g. earthquakes, typhoons, floods, volcanic eruptions) or the spirits of revered dead people – or even the spirits of family ancestors. Traditionally, leaders like the Emperor could become kami after they died.

Some kami are thought of as the ancient forebears of entire clans. Some kamigami can be yokai as well (for example, the tengu, which I did some research on a few weeks ago), though the yokai are something a little bit different to kami.

Hidden from human eyes in the world known as shinkai, kami possess both good and evil qualities. They are manifestations of musubi or the energy of the cosmos. They’re in charge of the awesome aspects of nature and are sequestered in sacred places, natural phenomena, or the people during rituals that ask for their blessing. Kami never stay in one place of worship, but are always moving from place to place. Like the gods of ancient Greece  or the Norse gods, kami have flaws and aren’t always omniscient or omnipotent. They are incapable of ignoble actions though.

The Shinto religion has no known founder, main doctrine, or religious texts. The Records of Ancient Matters, written in 712 AD, contains some of the earliest records of creation myth, and also describes kami.

Being capable of both extreme good and extreme evil, kami have two minds or two souls – a nurturing, loving mindset or nigi-mitama if respected and paid attention to, and a destructive mindset or ara-mitama if they are disrespected or ignored.

In Yamakage Shinto, kami have an extra two souls on top of the first couple – happy (saki-mitama) and mysterious (kushi-mitama).

The Records of Ancient Matters list 300 different classes of kami, all with different functions, e.g. the kami of winds, the kami of roads, and so on. This book and the Chronicles of Japan in 720 AD recorded ancient myths and laid out genealogies for the main kami, especially those thought to be related to the Imperial Family. These books also describe how the kami shaped the world and human society.

In return for humans keeping them content, the kami have a duty to enact the function of the place, object, or idea they reside in. The number of kami has grown throughout the centuries since the Record of Ancient Matters was written – in contemporary times, there are over 2,446000 kami enshrined in Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine alone.

Various kami have had their roles change over time as well. The kami originally in charge of smallpox became responsible for all contagious illnesses, and the kami of boils and growths became responsible for cancers and cancer treatments.

History

In the early Shinto or Koshinto animistic beliefs that occurred before Buddhism arrived (during the Jomon period, 10,000 BC – 300 BC) kami were earth spirits assisting the hunter-gatherers in daily life. They were gods of the mountains and sea, ghosts, the sun, waterfalls, boulders, animals, trees, grasses, thunder, echoes, foxes or fox spirits, or Asian dragons.

As the growing of rice became more widespread in Japan, the kami were held responsible for things needed for growing crops and sustenance, such as rain, rice, and earth. Ceremonies were conducted to persuade the kami to help grow and protect the harvest, and these rituals were a symbol of strength and power for the Emperors.

There is one early story of the first Emperor being the grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu. The goddess sent him down to Earth with five grains of rice from the fields of heaven, which he used to cultivate the wilderness.

The sacred spirit kami or Goryo came along a bit later, after social and political strife. The Goryo were angry spirits of the dead whose lives ended too soon, but the worship from followers of Shinto quelled them. Nowadays, they are believed to punish the people who disrespect the kami.

As time went on, the worship of Kami incorporated elements from Buddhism and other foreign religions. Dead heroes, emperors, and scholars became enshrined and expanded the roster of divine beings.

The ancestral spirits who are kami include ancestors of the Imperial House of Japan, ancestors of noble families, as well as the ancestors of all people. Other spirits who are kami are spirits of the land, skills, and occupations, spirits of heroes or of those who have done great deeds or shown great virtue, or who have helped human welfare, culture or civilisation in some way, those who have died for the community, and the “pitiable dead.” (Spirits that are weaker than humans are also considered kami, not just spirits superior to humans.)

There are three main types of kami: Amatsukami, (the heavenly deities), Kunitsukami (the earthly gods), and Magatsukami (the destructive or evil kami). Deceased humans who become kami are classified as Hitogami (human kami). These types aren’t rigidly set in stone because kami have flexible and constantly evolving natures.

Examples of Kami

• The sun goddess and chief goddess of Shinto, Amaterasu Omikami
• Ebisu (one of the seven gods of fortune)
• Fujin (god of the wind, half-human, half-demon. Brother of Raijin / Raiden)
• Hachiman (god of war, was originally god of fishing and agriculture)
• Inari Okami (goddess of agriculture and rice, business, fertility, and the protection of women. Associated with foxes or the kitsune, the many-tailed fox messenger)
• Izanagi-no-Mikoto (the first human male)
• Izanami-no-Mikoto (the first human female)
• Kotoamatsukami (the primary kami trinity, progenitors that appeared from nothing, created the world)
• Omoikane (god of wisdom)
• Raijin / Raiden (god of thunder, lightning, and storms)
• Ryujin (dragon god of the sea and storms, the ancestor of Jinmu, the first Emperor of Japan in the myths)
• Susanoo-no-Mikoto (god of the sea and storms, also a trickster god)
• Sarutahiko Okami (the kami of earth)
• Tenjin (god of poetry and scholarship)
• Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto (the moon god)
• Suijin (kami of water. Associated with dragons, snakes, and Kappa)

More major and minor kami are listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_deities

Appearances and Powers

Kami don’t have fixed anthropomorphic forms like the gods of Western religions. Unseen, they are perceived through their effects or symbolised by objects or places.

For example, the sun goddess Amaterasu is symbolised by mirrors or the red circle on the Japanese flag. Hachiman is symbolised by a pigeon. Tenjin is represented by an ox.

The huge cedars on Yakushima Island are treated as living kami, embodying the spirit of the Earth. They are an example of yorishiro, temporary vessels kami are called to descend into to worship them. Other such vessels can be mirrors, stones, mountains…

However, in art and myth, some kami are shown with humanoid shapes or animal traits like the fox messengers of Inari.

As well as controlling events in nature, kami are believed to give good luck, health, protection, or inspire creativity or bravery.

Kami have been included in animes like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. They have inspired mangas, video games, and traditional art.

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Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kami

What Is Kami? Shinto Gods & Sacred Spirits in Japan Explained

https://www.kanpai-japan.com/religion-and-spirituality-in-japan/the-main-shinto-gods

https://japaneserituals.com/kami/

https://japan-avenue.com/blogs/japan/kami

Kami