A feud between neighboring families becomes the United Kingdom’s defining poltergeist case, attracting an interdisciplinary group of experts determined to resolve it.
Derek Grieve, 14, and his brother Jeffrey, 11, laughed as a growing flame smothered the bearded face and broad hat of an effigy (or dummy). November 3, 1974 was Guy Fawkes night, which by tradition was marked by burning effigies of Fawkes, whose notorious Gunpowder Plot was a failed assassination attempt on King James I. The annual ritual represented a perpetual symbolic curse or punishment against the public enemy. Concerned about more worldly problems such as uncontrolled explosions, the Glasgow Fire Brigade issued safety warnings during what they called “the most hectic Guy Fawkes night for many years.”
Guy Fawkes night, William Warby
Derek and Jeffrey watched the flames not far from where they lived in a council house comfortable if not luxurious housing built and rented at affordable rates by the local government–at 50 Northgate Quadrant in Balornock, a working-class district of Glasgow, Scotland. Unlike subsidized housing in the United States, which is associated with residents struggling financially, Scotland viewed council housing as a proud part of a society with egalitarian values, with an estimated 50% of households categorized as being part of council housing. The Grieves lived in a fairly typical, happy home, except they didn’t get along with their downstairs neighbors, the Keenans, particularly crotchety James Keenan, who always seemed to blame them for something.
While the effigy’s legs and torso disintegrated into ash and smoke, Derek made an offhand remark to his brother. “I wish that was Mr. Keenan there instead of Guy. Then our troubles would be over.”
Derek, a “serious, introspective” boy, swore later that he was joking. But as he acknowledged to investigators, that night marked the start of the trouble.
What followed was what the boys’ father described as “an unending nightmare,” with more than a year of reportedly strange, unexplained incidents. The case involved police officers, family doctors, a psychiatrist, a priest, two Church of Scotland ministers and theologians, newspaper reporters, and the country’s most esteemed astronomer. For believers, the case represented an unprecedented example of a purported poltergeist arising from animus between neighbors and a history of community trauma. By the time the horror ended, two families would be mentally and physically exhausted, and one man would be dead.
The Grieves and Keenans got along well enough at first. The council housing buildings at Northgate Quadrant had two units upstairs and two downstairs. David and Elizabeth Grieves moved into an upper unit when Derek was born. In the unit directly below them, James and Janet Keenan lived with their then-teenaged son, Gordon.
As they grew up, Derek and Jeffrey Grieves became rambunctious. They ran, jumped, and played. The Keenans grumbled about what they claimed was constant noise. Amplifying this was the fact that the Keenans’ son Gordon was sickly, and they considered a quiet home life a medical necessity. As James Keenan entered his sixties, he too became chronically ill, struggling with labored breathing.
For their part, the Grieve boys felt like prisoners in their home, having to tiptoe and whisper for fear of triggering ire from the family below. The boys’ father, David Grieve, who worked at an electrical supply store, would later say that if James Keenan wished him a good morning, he would think: “I wonder what that devil is getting up to now.”
Council house at Northgate Quadrant
Everything changed the night the Grieves attended the Guy Fawkes bonfires in the fall of 1974, where they joked about their troublesome neighbor dying. In their bedroom, at around 10 pm, after their parents said good night to them, the boys heard tappings and scratchings on their headboards. Banging noises shook one of the walls. Derek and Jeffrey rushed into the living room (which they called the lounge), where David and Elizabeth watched television. “We went into their bedroom,” David Grieve later explained, “and heard for ourselves those mysterious bangings on the wall. Then, tappings seemed to be coming from under the beds.” The banging sounded violent, as if someone were swinging a pick ax. They also heard a scratching noise that sounded like nails digging into wood.
The experience repeated “night after night,” as David described it. Elizabeth tried sleeping in her sons’ room, but the noise continued in her presence, nor did bringing the boys to stay in their bedroom solve the problem. Elizabeth reported that “our bedside table shuddered and everything fell on the floor including a table lamp, ashtray, [and] glass paperweight.” A travel alarm clock flew across the room–as it did, it instantly changed from 3:00 am to 3:15 am. At various points, clocks and watches in the home began to keep inaccurate times.
Cindy, their French poodle, who usually slept through anything, hurried from room to room. Overwhelmed, the Grieves called the police multiple times. Given past circumstances, the Grieves assumed the Keenans downstairs must have caused the racket, perhaps in misguided revenge for years of what the Keenans claimed was constant noise. The police heard the commotion themselves and warned the Keenans to stop. The Keenans claimed the Grieves were lying about the ordeal so that they could move to a better council house. More than once, the police found themselves separating the feuding families.
Finally, the police took the three members of the Keenan family to Springburn Station to question them about the disturbances. Back at 50 Northgate Quadrant, the Grieves settled in for what they hoped would be the first peaceful night since the trouble started.
But in a twist, even while the Keenans were at the police station, banging still shook the Grieves’ walls. Police could find no source for the noises in the Keenans’ unit, nor from any other unit in the building or others nearby. Officers began nightly visits. Even 50 feet from the house, officers heard the uproar from inside. Their reports included observations about inexplicable phenomena, noises, and movements, with sentences that were likely never included in a police document. At one point, an officer wrote, “The bed was proceeding in a northerly direction.” David recalled that “faces of doubt” on the police officers were soon “replaced by expressions of amazement.”
At first, the nightly noises appeared to be a random cacophony. But the Grieves had an ear for music, especially musically-trained Elizabeth and younger son Jeffrey, who both detected a deliberate pattern to the sounds. Once they isolated it, the rhythm was unmistakable and shocking: the solemn “Dead March” beat from George Frideric Handel’s iconic 18th-century oratorio Saul. In the story’s final act about Israel’s first and third kings, Saul and David’s funerals are punctuated with Handel’s march. The song became a staple at state funerals, including George Washington and Winston Churchill services.
Elizabeth crouched under the bed. Was it all, she thought, a sick practical joke?
“Who are you?” she asked.
The tappings resumed, again in the rhythm of the “Dead March.” Elizabeth was seized by fear and confusion.
After some trial and error, Elizabeth noticed that a specific noise followed when she said a letter. Then she tried slowly reciting the alphabet, documenting the noises that followed each letter. Through a process that David Grieve called “very slow and tiring,” they began to establish what seemed to be some kind of code for letters and certain common words such as “yes” and “no.”
Meanwhile, the phenomena continued. “At the height of the bangs,” David reported, “the house would shake, as if a sledgehammer was being used on the walls every four seconds.” Furniture rattled. Framed photographs flung from the walls. Even though the home had ample heat, when the incidents would hap pen, the rooms were described as suddenly extremely cold by the family and other wit nesses. Local authorities who examined the apartment brought electricians, plumbers, and contractors to explore the apartment and even replace the wiring and piping. The home was structurally sound, and no explanation could be found for the noise.
As Elizabeth and David deciphered the code, a startling message gradually emerged. The tappings claimed that a group of miners had died in a nearby “pit disaster” long before. A kind of plea came through the code: can’t rest.
Balornock, like much of Glasgow, had a vast labyrinth of old mines beneath the ground that had been exploited since at least the 18th century. Miners had worked in grueling conditions to improve their circumstances and those of their families, all while fighting the government and corporations for better and safer conditions.
David, who was bookish and interested in history, holed up at the Mitchell Library of Glasgow, one of the largest public libraries in Europe. If they kept trying to understand what was happening, David felt they could hope “that someday our nightmare would end.” He combed through old newspaper reports and confirmed a pit disaster in an undetermined underground location near Northgate Quad rant. A Motherwell Times article from April 1921 reported a 48-year-old miner named Alexander Craig was buried alive during a dig, leaving behind a wife and six children.
Police investigators remained baffled, having trouble letting go of the idea that the downstairs neighbors were responsible. The Keenans, according to a news report in the Glasgow Herald, “were awakened several times by the police” and taken to the nearby Springburn station, where at one point they were charged, despite the lack of evidence against them. The down stairs portion of the house occupied by the Keenans now also seemed besieged by unexplained incidents. The charges against them were dropped, though the hassle did nothing to help encourage peace between the family.
A young woman who was a friend of the family had heard what the Grieves were experiencing and was confident she could find a natural explanation. On her visit, she heard the noises and, like many others, could find no source. At one point, she put her ear to the headboard of the boys’ bed, which was not connected to anything else. She was shocked to find the noises coming from inside the headboard pieces. Then she felt what seemed to be “an electric shock.” She ran from the house in terror. Still frantic by the next day, she had to be sedated.
Like the family friend, others, such as David’s boss, were also convinced. His boss phoned friends. “How does one go about [removing] a poltergeist?”
Investigators called in reinforcements whose expertise might transcend everyday experiences. Reverend Murdo Ewen Macdonald, 60, was known for his interest in the paranormal. A hardscrabble man with a broad smile, he was a former middleweight boxer turned gifted Church of Scotland minister whose service in World War II included a two-and a-half-year stint as a prisoner of war in a Nazi camp. While there, he ministered to imprisoned American forces and later received the Bronze Star. As a professor of practical theology at the University of Glasgow’s Trinity College, Macdonald never backed down from the call of service.
Reverand Macdonald
One of the police officers briefed Reverend Macdonald: “There is something strange in that house, something we cannot logically explain.” The officer’s plan seemed to involve supernatural law enforcement. “You get it to materialize, and I will lock it up.”
When Reverend Macdonald met the Grieves, he reported finding the “family, especially the parents, in a state bordering on hysteria,” noticing that “the strain showed visibly on their faces.” The minister wanted to rule out natural explanations. At nightfall, he en tered the bedroom where the disturbances first occurred, echoing others’ observations. “On opening the bedroom door,” he recalled, “I was struck by the low temperature. It was like entering a refrigerator.” He flicked off the light, and tappings immediately pinged from behind the headboard and the walls.
He continued through the house, documenting doors shutting inexplicably and alarm clocks blaring at random moments. While standing in the kitchen, the minister who survived a prison camp “had a most uncanny and eerie feeling. The hair on the back of my neck bristled. I had a tingling feeling down my spine and two arms.”
In addition to Macdonald, the team recruited Rever end Max Magee, chaplain at Glasgow’s University of Strathclyde. Macdonald and Magee performed a kind of improvised exorcism, a rare Protestant rite, and did not have a standard format in the Church of Scotland as it did in the Catholic Church. Macdonald began by reading Matthew 5: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” He continued reading the Beatitudes—a sequence of blessings calling for mercy and peace for those persecuted—while Reverend Magee went around and laid his hands on each member of the Grieve family in turn, praying for them.
Finally, Macdonald pivoted from his calm, methodical tone to a pointed demand: he called for the entity—whatever it was that had infested this home—to depart and leave this family in peace.
Armed with theological guidelines, the Grieves began to carry Bibles around their house when possible. At one point, Elizabeth was holding one when she started to feel it yanked by what felt like an “unseen hand.” She described struggling to hold onto it and reaching a drawer into which she forced the Bible. At that moment, her bangle bracelet tore from her wrist and ended up warped and bent on the floor.
Another time, David brought a Bible into the boys’ room when they were ready for bed and recited the Lord’s Prayer. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us… Deliver us from evil.” The Grieves spent the next two hours in prayer together. Suddenly, David reported, the beds were “vibrating so violently that the legs of the beds left the floor alternately.” Derek and Jeffrey screamed in terror. As they rushed away with Elizabeth, David was stricken with a fit of uncontrolled trembling while an icy coldness rushed through his body. Unable to break what felt like a trance, he pleaded with Elizabeth to hit him across the face. She did this multiple times until he began to return to normal. “Strangely enough,” David later reported, “there were no marks of any kind left on my face at all.”
Reverend Magee brought in another investigator at the top of a different field. Dr. Archibald Edmiston Roy, 51, was an astronomer and pioneer in archaeoastronomy who taught at Glasgow University. He consulted on NASA’s lunar ten meant staying until five or six o’clock program, with his foundational work considered essential for the 1969 moon landing. Beloved by students and colleagues, Roy was full of unusual talents, including playing the organ and reciting poetry from memory. He used the fact that he was ambidextrous to awe students as he drew two pristine circles on the chalkboard at the same time.
Roy was also an avid paranormal researcher who had been building a sizable file on poltergeist cases. Having studied dozens of other purported supernatural phenomena, Roy observed the depth of the Grieves’ trauma. “It was perfectly obvious that this was a family that was in terror. They were getting gaunt, thin through lack of sleep.” And the family now seemed physiologically connected to the incidents. Just before the incidents would happen, David would feel a terrible headache coming over him, and Elizabeth would feel a “knot-like” tightness in her stomach. They had established a signal to relatives living across the street to flash their kitchen light six times in an emergency.
Reverend Magee and Dr. Roy alternated spending nights with the family, which “often meant staying until five or six o’clock the next morning.” Roy noted that he “could feel the vibration in your boots” when noises filled the house.
Professor Roy
With the investigators comprising practically an interdisciplinary committee of science and theology, it was natural there were heated debates about what could be behind the phenomena. Regarding clues about the lost miners, Reverend Magee remarked that “there might indeed be unquiet souls who were needing help,” but “there had to be something else at work as well.”
As the investigators observed and documented ongoing incidents, Magee described the events surrounding the family as “a constant and arduous struggle.” The events ranged from minor–pillows seemingly tugged from beneath sleeping heads and sleeping bags unzipping–to the dramatic, as when Elizabeth’s bed reportedly shook before pulling into the center of the room, then slam backward against the wall. One day, when the boys returned home from school with their parents, they discovered that the armchair cushions had bizarrely switched positions with drawers from a sideboard, the drawers ending up on the chair and the cushions inside the sideboard. A strange book suddenly appeared in the house, and then disappeared when they looked for it again. A gonk (or troll-like) doll on top of the television became animated and spun around at will, and other toys scattered about, with one metal toy car smashing through a window and crashing into the garden in front of the house, years before the groundbreaking Hollywood horror film Poltergeist dramatized a similar incident. At another point, a polystyrene mannequin head on a cabinet with a wig ended up on a bed on the pillow, even though reportedly nobody was inside that part of the house. “I nearly died,” reported Elizabeth’s mother, who witnessed this.
One day, the Grieves arrived home after being out. As they opened the door, it slammed back shut, with a lock engaging from inside. After finally gaining entry, they found the home ransacked inside.
Another disturbing moment came as Elizabeth continued to attempt to decipher the coded patterns behind the sounds. The messages included a horrifying command: strangle James Keenan.
The Grieves asked for a housing transfer but public officials denied the request, since granting the request would be equivalent to affirming that ghosts were real. They faced a Catch-22, plagued by unexplained phenomena but limited in their choices because they could not explain the incidents. Derek and Jeffrey struggled in school. As an investigator noted, at school Jeffery’s “pencil had danced across his desk, doors had closed in his face.” Peers mocked the boys. Jeffrey was given the moniker “Ghostie Grieves” at Knockburn Primary School.
The family tried to avoid public attention. They removed their name from the phone book. But a reporter for the Glasgow Herald caught wind of the situation at 50 North gate Quadrant and published a short article. Truly*Horror spoke with a former Balornock resident whose “bedroom window looked out directly on [the Grieve] house.” Once the inexplicable events were described and pieces of evidence shared, they struck a chord with neighbors. “People doubted the stories until the newspaper article came out.” Everyone was on edge. Across the border in Northeast England, another set of families went public to complain about a surge of unexplained phenomena in council housing “built over an old coal mine.”
In Glasgow, the history of mining was rife with tragedy, with workers crushed, drowned, burnt, and caved in upon. The folklore and legends included various beliefs about spirits trapped underground. Similar lore was shared by cultures worldwide, in some cases depicting spirits accompanied in underground mines by demons or the devil itself, as was the case of El Tío, who was said to rule the Bolivian mines. English tales specified that anger and infighting amid the living would trigger the spirits’ ire.
In some examples of the mining folklore, the trapped spirits demanded sacrifices or tributes.
Whatever the origin of the phenomena in the Grieves’ home, the disturbances were becoming more frequent and dangerous. Faucets turned on and seemed locked in the on position, alternating between the kitchen faucet and the bathroom. The rooms flooded. A plumber would secure one water source, but an hour later, it reopened. He had to grasp the wrench with both hands to stop the flow. As soon as one faucet was finally forced off, an other would switch on. Likewise, fires erupted from wiring, which multiple electricians could not explain.
One night, when the boys tried sleeping on the floor, the fire in the fireplace suddenly burst forward, coming close to lighting up Derek’s sleeping bag. Suddenly, a decorative piece of art, with a painting on one side and a mirror on the other, swiveled around to point the mirror at the boys. As the “bewildered” family gathered, wisps of smoke came not from the fireplace but seemingly out of nowhere, as though someone was smoking a cigarette, causing them to choke and cough. At that moment, a model windmill, a music box, began to spin, and the music played. At another point, a coffee table was described as rising into the air and seemed levitating. David reported pushing down with both hands to return it to the floor. A chair that a relative of the Grieves had been sitting on reportedly “rose several feet in the air, traveled across the room, and crashed to the ground.”
Most startling of all, the behavior of Derek and Jeffrey Grieve abruptly changed. They became oddly aggressive and strong. As observed by investigators, they seemed unable to control their actions. On one occasion, “one of the boys seems to have had the knowledge of a foreign tongue that he had not been taught.” Dr. Roy’s notes documented strange actions by the boys, too, as “suddenly one of them would begin to be twisted into all kinds of positions.” The other would bounce up from a lying position “as if he was on a trampoline, and he would rise to about two feet from the surface of the bed.” The boys were not athletically gifted and certainly not gymnasts or contortionists, and witnesses thought the movements hardly seemed possible.
Dr. Roy reported that “the boys seemed to mimic the noises [from the walls] by twisting round in their beds and hammering their feet on the walls.” Derek effortlessly knocked over an entire large cabinet with a flick of his foot.
Reverend Magee recorded booming noises rocking the walls. The vibrations rattled the entire house: glass shook, and photographs dropped from the walls.
One time, Magee was so frustrated that he yelled out, “We’ll beat this thing yet,” after which a booming series of noises rang out in the walls as if in response.
“So what were we dealing with here?” Magee reflected in his notes. “A mischievous spirit of some kind, an impersonal bundle of psychic energy, some kind of primitive entity from another world, some force from the depths of the collective or personal unconscious, whatever it was, we knew that we must not show fear.”
All the while downstairs, James Keenan grew ever more ill. The investigators tried to approach the Keenans, making “a distinct effort to get to know them.” But the Keenans remained hostile, blaming everything on the Grieves and accusing them of orchestrating the ordeal “to gain publicity” despite evidence to the contrary. The feuding between the families only grew.
The team of investigators tried moving the Grieves to safe locales. However, to their shock, unexplained incidents followed them, suggesting to them that the forces at play had attached themselves to the family members. While staying elsewhere, one of the Grieve boys made a strange comment to their father. He said that Reverend Magee had told them “everything would be finished by midnight.”
Magee could not remember making such a claim. However, as though on cue back at 50 Northgate Quadrant, “a series of knocks and bangs came seconds before midnight, and thereafter, there was silence.” After more than a year, the phenomena halted.
Around that same time, James Keenan had died downstairs. After being treated for a “malignant condition of the throat,” the official cause of death was bronchial carcinoma. The disease shut down his breathing, in essence strangling him, an eerie echo of the alleged coded message deciphered by Elizabeth.
A professor from the Department of Psychiatry at Dundee University who had become involved in the case reported his conclusion: “The findings are suggestive… that the strikingly sudden onset of the poltergeist phenomena, upstairs, was in synchronistic relation to the inherently sudden moment of malignant transformation in the bronchial tissues of the elderly gentleman downstairs.” In other words, the unexplained forces had somehow become intertwined with the man’s health at the center of the families’ feud.
Although the London case known as the Enfield Poltergeist would gain renown several years later in part because of the participation of the paranormalists Ed and Lorraine Warren, the alleged haunting in Balornock is considered by those in the tight-knit parapsychology community in the United Kingdom as a more compelling and better-documented series of events.
Stewart Lamont, a veteran journalist who specialized in stories of religion and purported spiritual phenomena, remarked that the Balornock case made others “look mild in comparison.”
For those who track alleged poltergeist cases, the alarm clock turning to 3:15 AM stands out, one of many details published for the first time by Truly*Horror.
The number evokes Genesis 3:15, part of the depiction of the Garden of Eden, which Christian theology interprets as a warning to the devil that Jesus would later come to battle evil (the verse itself is addressed to the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel”). More generally, the 3:00 AM hour has been considered by some as the “devil’s hour,” an inverse to the hour of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion.
3:15 AM, in particular, was memorialized as a paranormal touchpoint with the publication of the book Amityville Horror, which claimed that the Lutz family in Long Island, New York, reported their clocks stopping at 3:15 AM, supposedly echoing the time of a murder that once occurred in their house, as well as alluding to a perversion of the crucifixion. The Grieves’ report predated the Lutzes’ experiences in the infamous Long Island house.
David Grieve and Reverend Magee made tape recordings of the noises at the Grieve home, though it remains unclear whether the tapes have survived. When he listened back to his recordings, Magee was confounded by the “crackles and bangs” that warped the ambiance. Other sounds seemed strangely muted when he played back the tapes.
Reverend Macdonald remained shaken by his experiences. Reflecting on his part in investigations, he felt he “had direct experience of poltergeist phenomena” and that unexplained phenomena “play sheer havoc with our traditional understanding of cause and effect.”
All in all, roughly 50 people reportedly witnessed the unexplained events at 50 Northgate Quadrant.
The Grieves and Keenans never reconciled.
The Grieves sent a Christmas card to Dr. Roy each year. Typically, they ended with a few sentences of thanks for how the investigators put their lives on hold to save the family. Dr. Roy said that the Balornock case was the case in his career that most stood out for him. The case taught him that “if you embark upon such an investigation, you must sign on for the duration, for a family in the middle of the poltergeist hurricane desperately needs support and sympathy.”
One year, Roy received a card from the Grieves with one phrase: “All is well.” Each word was underlined several times.
For the most part, David and Elizabeth refused to speak about the case. They did report that one day, they both saw a group of miners standing in their home for a few moments. The Grieves insisted the miners appeared to be real before they vanished.
In the early 1980s, United Kingdom policies on council housing changed to allow residents to purchase their homes, generating economic schisms between residents and leaving many who believed in a more egalitarian society feeling betrayed, much as generations of coal miners had felt abandoned and betrayed when promises of improving their families’ lot faded.
To this day, home buyers in Balornock often find property inspections come with the caution that “the property is situated in an area of past mining activity,” indicating that tunnels and caves could remain underneath. In 2002, a Glasgow teenager died after falling into a pit shaft that had opened up beneath the ground of a cemetery where he was walking. The Glasgow Corporation eventually demolished 50 Northgate Quadrant. The proper ty sat empty for several years before a new building was constructed. It is unknown if later residents knew its history.