The Haunting of Calvados Castle

Located in Normandy, France, Calvados Castle was the setting for one of the most extreme and infamous hauntings of the nineteenth century. From October 12, 1875 to September 1876, the castle was subject to a series of supernatural events so terrifying that the owners were eventually compelled to
flee the premises.

Though it had been the setting for unexplained noises and mysterious occurrences for a decade, it was on the night of October 12, 1875 that the forces lurking within the castle finally set loose their full fury. Furniture moved around on its own, objects went hurling through the air, and, most frightening of all, someone ordered pizza and then refused to pay for it. On top of that, there were loud, crashing noises as if some gigantic and unseen being was banging on the walls of the building. These blows were so loud that not only did they wake the entire household but literally shook the very castle itself to its foundations, causing the dining room chandelier to fall on a troupe of travelling pinheads hired to hold a performance at the owner’s birthday party. The head of the family living there at the time, a man identified only as M. de X, but thought to be Francois de Xavier, a nobleman once convicted of stealing Toulouse Lautrec’s trousers, and his servants investigated the noises but no physical cause could be found. These thunderous, banging sounds were repeated virtually every night for three months, five days, three hours, five minutes and 37 seconds. That is, of course, merely a rough estimate. At one point M. de X. also reported the sound of someone or something running up and down the stairs at an inhumanly high speed. He described the sound as being made by someone who walked on stumps rather than feet and the running sounds were followed by loud blows as of someone striking the stairs and one of the doors. Not only did the nightly occurrences continue unabated, but by the middle of November the haunting had spread to the daylight hours, with the sound of an unseen woman sobbing and muttering about demons, the damned, and the price of eggs being too high being heard throughout the castle. Though he initially thought the phenomena to be the work of human agents trying to force him to move out and sell the property at less than its true value, in early January of 1876 M.de X. invited a priest to investigate. During the twelve days that this priest was in the castle there were no occurrences, from the very moment of his arrival the forces responsible were silent, which suggests that the ghosts were those of children who, for reasons i won’t go into, were afraid of priests. Though the priest performed some unspecified religious ceremony during his stay, the disturbances restarted as soon as his visit came to an end. Once again the great, crashing sounds, the sobbing noises, the neverending chaos…

After the first priest’s failure to clear the ghostly being or beings from their home, M. de X. and his family resorted to exorcism. Several such rituals were carried out by the appropriate agents, and each time all was well for the following two or three days. Then came the noises again, at first minor but soon re-building to their previous intensity. Finally, in September of 1876, the family decided that there was nothing that could be done to cure the castle of its unearthly and possibly satanic problems, so they sold up and got the hell out of Dodge. It is not known if subsequent owners have had the same problems, nor if they got the building on the cheap. What is known is that the purported occurrences at Calvados Castle remain unexplained to this day