Whatever it was, the very next day poltergeist-like phenomena began to show themselves wherever Eleonore happened to be. The first was lithobolia outwith the grandmother’s house; the second was movement of small objects which jumped about when Eleonore was present. Back at home, Eleonore continued to be the focus of similar activities – on one occasion, for example, a small bowl flew at a visitor and hit him on the head – and she found this so distressing that she sought refuge in a nearby monastery. Even there, however, the phenomena persisted and her family, losing what little patience it had with her, removed her thenceand committed her to an asylum.

By now, of course, gossip about her had ceased to be local and it was not long before the newspapers picked up her story, as a result of which she was sent back to the monastery and placed under close observation. It was while she was there that Countess Zoe Wassilko-Senecki, a young woman with a particular interest in both occult matters and psychoanalysis, came to visit her and was so taken with what she saw, and Eleonore’s personality, that the following year (1926) she brought the girl to live with her in Vienna. Here Eleonore settled down. Her previous experiences had, not unnaturally, made her unhappy and withdrawn and, as she had had little education, she often gave the impression of being somewhat young for her actual years. Now, however, under the Countess’s friendly care she became stable and her unhappiness seemed to disappear. But the poltergeistery did not, and the Countess kept a diary of its manifestations, including not only the displacement of objects but also the assaults which Eleonore was suffering upon her person: slapping, being thrown out of bed, having hair ripped out of her head, scratches and bitemarks on her face, neck, arms, and chest. These assaults did not cease when Eleonore left Vienna for a short stay in London in September 1926. There she was examined by various eminent witnesses both separately and conjointly, many of whom carefully wrote down what they had seen and heard. Thus, on Monday 4 October, Neil Gow recorded:

3.20. Eleonore cried out. Showed marks on back of left hand like teeth-marks which afterwards developed into deep weals. I got Eleonore to bite her right hand and noted the kind of marks caused by this bite, but could trace no similarity between this and the first alleged stigmata.

3.25. Eleonore gave a soft cry and pointed to her right wrist. She undid the sleeve of her blouse and rolled it up. I saw several freshly-made red marks like scratches. There were several of these, about five inches long. After a few moments they rose up into heavy white weals.

4.12. Eleonore was just raising a cup of tea to her lips, but suddenly gave a cry and put the cup down hastily; there was a mark on her right hand similar to those caused by a bite. Both rows of teeth were indicated.[73]

A fortnight later, Captain Seton-Kerr, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, noted: ‘I was present on October 5, when the so-called stigmatic markings appeared on the face, arms and forehead of Eleonore Zügun under conditions which absolutely precluded the possibility of Eleonore’s producing them by scratching or other normal means’; and a report made by the National Laboratory of Psychical Research also confirmed that in its opinion, ‘Eleonore was not consciously responsible for the production of the marks’, and that ‘under scientific test conditions, movements of small objects without physical contact undoubtedly took place’.[74] In Germany the following year, Eleonore was closely investigated by yet more doctors and psychiatrists and a documentary film of these corporeal phenomena was made in Munich, which seems to confirm the general opinion of her examiners that the phenomena were real and not produced by deception. One Munich doctor, Hans Rosenbuch, however, did not agree. He was quite sure Eleonore was a fraud and said so more than once in print, accusing both her and the Countess of manufacturing some of the scratches and marks on her person. But Alan Gauld thinks that Rosenbuch failed to prove his case. ‘It is worth noting’, he wrote, ‘as the Countess pointed out, that Rosenbuch has nothing to say about those occasions on which phenomena took place without any suspicious manoeuvres being observed by the attentive witnesses. He simply passes them by. He was pretty clearly one of those dedicated but tiresome persons, to be found alike amongst the sceptics and the credulous, who constantly chop and distort phenomena to fit them upon some preferred Procrustean bed.’[75]

With the onset of Eleonore’s menstruation in 1927, however, all her phenomena ceased and, as far as we know, never returned; ‘as far as we know’, because after 1930 Eleonore returned to Romania and set up as a hairdresser, after which she disappears from historical view. Eleonore thus runs counter to two theories often associated with poltergeistery: that the phenomena begin and are particularly focussed upon young girls at about the time of their menstruation and self-conscious sexuality, and that they are most remarkable in the presence of emotionally unstable and unhappy teenagers, especially girls. The parallels with Christina are interesting. Both, for example, had unhappy childhoods, but found a degree of stability later on – Eleonore while she was a teenager, Christina in her twenties – under the protection of an amiable adult willing to take them as they found them. Both attributed their sufferings to a demon. In Christina’s case, she referred frequently to the Devil who was biting her and attacking her and uplifting objects, including herself, high in the air; for Eleonore, it was dracu – perhaps the Devil himself about whom her grandmother had warned her, or perhaps some other demon – and here it is worth recording two curious incidents noted by the Countess in her diary and later published in the short-lived British Journal of Psychical Research.

Once I entered my room and looked at the window. Eleonore was standing behind me. Suddenly I saw a shadow which glided down slowly in front of the window and not straight, but zigzag … Another time I was sitting with Mr Klein at the round table, while Eleonore stood with a cat in her arms at the bookstand. Mr Klein unintentionally looked at the girl, and on this occasion noticed a dark grey shadow come from behind her, pass along her right side and fall under our table upon the cushion at our feet. It was a tin box which had before stood on the washstand on the other side of the room. I had always the impression that a returning object of the kind was only again submitted to the normal laws of the physical world when it was perfectly itself again … The foregoing shadow has nothing at all to do with the appearance of the object itself. I think that the impression which this moving riddle makes is best described by the words: ‘Hole in the world’, which I used for it’.[76]

The second of these was clearly connected with the tin box even if, as the Countess says, it did not correspond to the shape of the box itself. The Countess herself does not connect the two incidents and does not suggest that the zigzagging shadow necessarily had anything to do with Eleonore, but connection there may have been subconsciously and connection there certainly could be in the mind of anyone disposed to remember Eleonore’s dracu and willing to believe, with her, that the phenomena plaguing her were demoninduced or at any rate demon-inspired. Both she and Christina, of course, came from deeply religious societies and cultures in which such reference to otherworld entities in terms of Christian theology was entirely natural. This sense of community between the worlds offers perhaps the greatest difficulty for modern Western commentators on occult phenomena, but one which it is essential for them to overcome, otherwise the older mentality (not to mention the living mentality of much of the rest of the world today) will remain a puzzle and a darkness, insoluble on the one hand and impenetrable on the other. For all their chronological and cultural differences, then, Christina and Eleonore would have understood each other the moment they discussed what had happened and was happening to them because for each the Devil and the dracu were real, comprehensible presences and the suspected, indeed the expected source of all their tribulations.

These tribulations, too, were similar: lithobolia, personal physical assault, objects flying through the air, signs of being bitten, and other marks appearing spontaneously on the body – and in both cases, in spite of possible reservations about some of the episodes in Christina’s life, the core phenomena involving both women seem to have been genuine. As Herbert Thurston points out anent Christina but with equal validity, mutatis mutandis, anent Eleonore, ‘This was not a case in which we have merely the report of what Christina believed she had experienced when alone. The circumstances were witnessed and attested not only by the little group of her own family circle and her devoted associates, but also by the Benedictine monks of Brauweiler and by Dominicans of Cologne.’[77] So also Eleonore was witnessed and closely examined by doctors and psychiatrists who were prepared to be sceptical, as well as by friends and admirers, and even when a ‘scientific’ explanation for the phenomena was offered, it does not stand up to scrutiny. The Countess, who was undoubtedly a friendly admirer, nevertheless thought that the bites and other marks were somehow produced by Eleonore’s unconscious mind as a form of selfpunishment for powerfully developed sexual urges she fixated on her father. However, as Colin Wilson observes, ‘A girl does not go on scratching and biting herself for two years because she feels guilty about her sexual desires, particularly if she finds herself transformed, like Cinderella, into the protégée of a wealthy countess.’[78] Moreover, even if one were to adhere to the notion of subconscious mind over matter, whether guilty or not, there is no accurate telling either which powers of Eleonore’s subconscious mind were at work, or indeed whether the subconscious mind in question belonged to her or to someone or something else.[79] But we are here in the realms of Freudian and Jungian theorising and neither is particularly helpful in explaining Eleonore or Christina in historical terms. Rather more pertinent in Christina’s case is the Church’s apparent reluctance to canonise her in spite of her visions and stigmata and constant devotion to God in the midst of continual and unrelenting suffering at the hands of what she and her contemporaries called the Devil. Indeed, it may very well be precisely because of all those manifestations that the Church viewed and has continued to view her case with reservation. In sum, religion lies at the heart of the cases we have been discussing.

Poltergeist's, telekinesis, stigmata, exorcism and supernatural phenomena, are as mysterious and as fascinating today as they have been to people many centuries ago. As yet we can not prove that such events are accurate or true, however neither can we disprove them with absolute certainty either. One such case that I find particularly interesting is that of  the 'Poltergeist girl' 

Eleonore Zugun was born in a small Romanian village called Talpa in 1914 and the first 12 years of her life were pretty ordinary and uneventful. However before she reached her teenage years she moved to Buhai, also in Romania, to go to live with her grandparents. Before long strange and unexplained phenomena began to happen around the young girl and as news began to spread amongst the people of the village, she became known as the 'Devil girl' and the 'poltergeist girl'.

Legend has it that inanimate objects would seemingly move unaided and land on the floor close to where Eleonore sat or stood. Rocks and china would get thrown through the windows of her grandparents cottage in great showers of shrapnel. During one notable occasion a priest had came to visit the troubled household, he picked up a whet stone that had been an object of such an attack, branded it with the sign of the cross, blessed it and throw it into a near by river. It is said that the same stone, not more then an hour later, was launched back into the building.

Gossip, stories and speculation continued to escalate and the rumors surrounding Elenore Zugun, soon began to travel beyond Romania. As the abnormal activity continued and as the situation became more and more difficult to deal with, in desperation, Eleonore was incarcerated in an asylum. Sent to a convent where she was put into confinement. She also went through an attempted exorcism, but all to no avail. It appeared for a time that there was nothing more that could be done for the poor girl, and she would be left with the plight of being an outcast for the rest of her living days. Which not only was affecting herself, but her relatives as well.

Psychical research had become a past time for Countess Zoe Wassilko-Serecki, who had heard of Eleonore's extraordinary story and experiences. Intrigued and convinced enough of it's authenticity she decided to look after Eleonore, and took her back to her flat in Vienna. She wanted to study her further and try to discover more about the unexplainable incidents that seemed to be happening to and around her.

Another paranormal investigator of the time Harry Price had also come across word of Eleonore and the spooky goings on. He visited the countess at her home, to check out her case for himself. After witnessing some occasions that he believed to be of interest in the field he arranged to bring Eleonore to London, Zoe agreed and went with them to conduct further tests at his laboratory.

Scientists like Dr Theodore B. Hyslop, Professor William McDougall, the Hon. Everard Fielding, Professor Hans Thirring and Harry Price, documented 'spontaneous movement', in the October of 1927. During the time of these early scientific observations, it was also noted that Eleonore suffered painful stigmata, biting and scratching (probably from biting herself) and weals, that would occasionally appear and then recover back to normal. Objects continued to move on there own accord around her, and it seems that the evidence of this case could be one of the most credible.

Just a year later when Eleonore began her monthly womans cycle, all the paranormal activity unexpectedly seized. She returned to Romania and lived in Czernowitz, as a hairdresser and owned her own womans salon. What bought on the mysterious circumstances in the first place I could not trace and what happened in her later years is not recorded, I can only conclude that she went on to live a normal existence back in her home country.