The Musical Ghost and the Manchester Policemen

 

"When a ghost is not engaged in his employment 

Or maturing his spectral little plans

His capacity for innocent enjoyment

Is just as great as any corporeal man's.

Our feelings we with difficulty smother

When constabulary duty's to be done

Ah, take one consideration with another

A policeman's lot is oft a spooky one."

~With apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan

Police officers regularly have to deal with the world not just at its worst, but at its weirdest.  However, I doubt many of them have been called upon to fingerprint a ghost.

Allow me to explain.

Our little tale opens in the spring of 1959, at a typical middle-class home in South Manchester, England, which housed a widow and her two teenage children.  Well, it was a typical middle-class home, until the family received an unexpected house guest.  During the nights, the widow's son, who was learning to play the violin, would find the ghost of an old man (whom the family dubbed "Nicholas") coming into his bedroom and playing on the violin.  (Nicholas was partial to Ravel's "Bolero," which must have added a special horror to the haunting.)  On a regular basis, "Bolero" would often be heard coming from the room, even when the violin was locked in its case.

After several months of this, the family had had more than enough, and they contacted the Manchester Psychical Research Society.  If these paranormal experts could not get rid of Nicholas, perhaps they could at least persuade him to vary his repertoire.

The Society's chief investigation officer, David Cohen, was delighted to hear of this bizarre haunting, and immediately organized a series of seances to get in touch with the musical spook.  These were so successful that by early 1961, a pair of ghostly hands--presumably those of Nicholas--began to materialize in front of the sitters.  Cohen wished to compare the prints of "Nicholas" with those of the corporeal members of the household, to make sure no trickery was involved.  Accordingly, he contacted a policeman named Tony Fletcher, of the Manchester Police's Fingerprint Bureau.  Would Fletcher be willing to attend one of their seances and take prints of these spirit hands?  

Alas, Fletcher did not believe in ghosts, and felt participating in such a scheme would accomplish nothing except making himself look like an idiot.  He declined the offer.  Fortunately, a colleague of his, Rowland Mason, had a more open-minded attitude.  Mason attended two of Cohen's seances, which were enough to convince him that something genuinely weird was going on.  As he and Cohen would sit around a table with the widow and her children, the table would slowly rise high into the air, and then shake violently as loud knocks reverberated through the room.  A luminous tambourine would whirl through the air too swiftly for human hands to be responsible for the motion.  During the second seance, the hands of "Nicholas" appeared, touching Mason on the arms and shoulders.

At the third seance, Mason resolved to try fingerprinting the ghost.  Before the sitting, he secretly dusted the tambourine with mercury powder, leaving the duster lying on the sideboard.  At the start of the seance, somebody--or something--threw this duster in his face.  There were the usual levitations and rappings, and the tambourine flew through the air.  At the end of the seance, Mason immediately checked the tambourine for prints.  He was baffled not to find any.  It was completely clean.  

During a subsequent seance, "Nicholas" was asked if he would consent to be fingerprinted.  The ghost responded with a series of raps on the table which were interpreted as a "yes."  Mason put a fingerprinting pad and chemically treated paper on the table and when the ghostly hands appeared, he was able to grab one (it was described as feeling "dry and scaly") and place it on the pad and paper.

Mason was puzzled by the results.  Instead of human fingerprints, "Nicholas" had left a series of small parallel scratches.  Tony Fletcher described the marks as resembling those made by a bird's claw, or fingernails scratching the paper.

Mason, who was becoming increasingly intrigued by the mystery, resolved to try to photograph the ghost.  He persuaded a police photographer named John Cheetham to join in on this paranormal fun.  Before one of the seances, Cheetham set up an infra-red camera on a tripod, aiming it at an empty armchair in a corner.  During the sitting, "Nicholas" was invited to take a seat, and Cheetham took a photo using a cable-release.

Unfortunately, the resulting photograph was just as inconclusive as the fingerprinting.  Most people who studied the photo saw nothing more than an empty chair.  However, Tony Fletcher and several others believed they saw the outline of a very old, bearded man on the chair's cushion.  

By this point, the media caught wind of the interesting fact that members of the Greater Manchester Police were spending their off-hours investigating a musical ghost.  The resulting newspaper publicity was not pleasing to the top brass.  The Chief Superintendent ordered Mason and Cheetham to file official reports on their activities, and then close the books on this supernatural moonlighting.  David Cohen also moved on to other cases, leaving the mystery of "Nicholas" unresolved.  Tony Fletcher, who wrote about the strange experience in his autobiography "Memories of Murder," commented, "If you were now to ask me if I believe in ghosts, I would reply that I do not readily disbelieve in the supernatural and that there are probably two reports still on file in police archives which bear witness to the events I have just related."