While visiting their elderly grandmother in the village Budai, Romania one day in February 1925, 12 years old Eleanor Zugun and her sister were having a fight. The girls had found some money lying on the street and Eleanor snatched it up before her sister could and bought candies for herself. Their grandmother told the selfish girl that the Devil left the money there to cause discord. That night, her suspicious seemed verified when rocks began bouncing off of the house. The next morning, she sent the girls home to the nearby village of Tulpa.
A few days later, the odd stone throwing started again around Eleanor and priest was called in, reinforcing the delusion that something diabolical was going on. The clergyman suggested she stay with a relative so that her sister would''t be possessed as well. At the neighbor's house, the young girls was beaten and demeaned; after all, that's one way to get rid of the demon. The neighbors insisted they were not beating the girl, but the demon inside of her. Understandably, her father recalled her, but in a few days there was an exorcism performed on the girl and a special mass was said the home; it didn't help. She was sent to a covenant, and the phenomena followed her. Furniture began to move and the table even levitated in front of the nuns. Another exorcism was performed, to no avail. Unsure of what else to do, everyone agreed it would be best to send the girl to the insane asylum.
The events attracted the attention of German psychical researcher Fritz Grunewald who convinced the girl's father to bring her home. Sadly, he died soon after interviewing the girl. But this would prove to be a stroke of luck for the young girl because a wealthy woman from Vienna, Countess Zoe Wassiko-Serecki, who had a interest in the paranormal, officially adopted her in 1925 and took her out of life of poverty. Soon after she moved into her new home, scratches and bites mark began to appear on Eleanor's skin, mostly in places where she could not done it to herself. Shoes would be found with pools of water in them, books were mutilated and rugs were wildly twisted.
The paranormal enthusiast and original ghost hunter Harry Price appeared in the scene in April 1926 to find the rough girl turned into a respectable young lady with eloquent manners. He invited the two to his National laboratory for Psychical Research in London so that Eleanor could be studied. However, since all of these adults kept calling her grandmother's story hogwash, the girl eventually decided the Devil was in no way involved and the phenomena stopped completely.
No comments:
Post a Comment