The Stratford Knockings (Phelps Mansion)

The house at the centre of the Stratford Knockings was built in 1826 by Matthias Nicoll for his daughter Elizah and her husband, Captain George Dowdall (some sources spell it Dowell), a sea captain who had made money in the China trade. In 1848 it was bought by the Rev. Eliakim Phelps, a retired clergyman – described as Congregational in some accounts and Presbyterian in others – who moved in with his much younger second wife, her three children from an earlier marriage, and an infant of their own. Grown children from his first marriage lived elsewhere.

On Sunday, 10 March 1850 the family came home from church to find the house in disorder. Doors stood open, clothes were flung about and drawers had been emptied, yet silver and cash lying in plain view were untouched. Over the following weeks the household reported objects that moved or vanished, windows that broke, raps on the walls and furniture, and rooms in which clothing had been arranged into figures – in one widely repeated account, a number of stuffed shapes in the family’s clothes kneeling around open Bibles. The two stepchildren in the house, a teenage girl and an eleven-year-old boy (named Harry or Henry in different retellings), were said to be the main targets; the boy was reportedly lifted from his chair.

The story arrived at a moment of great public appetite. The Fox sisters had made rapping spirits a national sensation in 1848, and Phelps – respected, educated and apparently unwilling to be laughed at – let reporters and curious neighbours into the house. A Hartford newspaper account of April 1850 gave a detailed description, and local editors who spent the night reported that they could not explain what they saw. Phelps tried to speak to the knocking by a code of raps. The answers he received were inconsistent, and the “spirit” declared at one point that it was causing mischief simply for fun. In September 1850 three Shakers from the Mount Lebanon community, who had been in contact with the family, travelled to Stratford to visit the household.

The family left Stratford within a few years (accounts give 1852 or 1858). Moses Y. Beach, the publisher of the New York Sun, later owned the house, and the disturbances faded from the record. The case was retold in Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms (1855) and has been revived by regional writers ever since. The mansion later served as a home for the elderly and was demolished in 1974, so the “haunted house” itself is gone and the case survives only in newspapers, memoirs and local lore.

Rooms ransacked with nothing stolen, objects thrown or carried between rooms, windows broken, rapping on walls, clothing arranged into human-shaped figures, items vanishing from locked places and reappearing, and a child said to be lifted from his chair.

The Phelps house in Stratford, mainly the upstairs bedrooms and the dining room, centred on the children of the household. Activity was reported from March 1850 and, in some accounts, again after the family returned from Philadelphia in 1851.

The Stratford Knockings are one of the best-known 19th-century American poltergeist cases and are often cited in histories of the Spiritualist movement. They have been retold in New England folklore podcasts, local-history articles and anthologies of Connecticut ghost stories.