When thirty eight year old fruit picker’s mate Barry Pints had gone to bed at eleven o’clock in his Trowbridge home, the toilet in his en suite bathroom had been newly flushed, with a gleaming white clean pan. But barely an hour later, he was wakened to what sounded like terrible moaning sounds coming from the bathroom, followed by a loud squelching noise and a huge splash. Seeing light showing under the door, even though he was sure that he had switched off the bathroom light before retiring, Pint leaped out of bed and rushed into the bathroom, only to find it empty, save for a turd so huge that its top was poking out of the toilet bowl. “Apart from the fact that it had appeared from nowhere – there was nobody else in the house when it was deposited – it was no ordinary turd. For one thing, it refused to flush away – no matter how much it was battered with a toilet brush or how hard the toilet was flushed, it just stayed there, stinking the whole place out with its evil stench. After four days of this, Barry finally called me in,” with Halloween approaching, top UK ghost hunter and occult investigator John Stirrup has been talking to The Sleaze about some of the most perplexing hauntings that he has investigated in recent years. “It seemed obvious to me that this was some kind of ‘ghost turd’, composed not of regular shit, but ectoplasm – it immediately occurred to me that this might be a case of a spirit re-enacting some traumatic event that happened in the house prior to Pints’ occupation of the property. Perhaps a previous owner had even died on that toilet, passing a humongous stool.”
Stirrup’s first priority was to deal with the turd – which had resisted the efforts not just of Barry Pints, but also operatives from Dyno-Rod to dislodge it – which he did so by calling in an ordained priest to bless the water in the cistern and say a prayed over the bowl, before attempting another flush. “At first we thought that it still wasn’t going to budge, but finally there was some movement and it began to spin, before sinking below the water and vanishing around the bend,” he recalls. “While we might have got rid of it that time, I suspected that, unless we exorcised the entity that created it, Barry would suffer a re-occurence of the phantom crapper.” There was indeed another manifestation, but this time it took a far more personal and sinister form. “A few days after the en suite incident, Barry was again awakened in the early hours of the morning by a strange moaning sound – but this time there was no light showing under the bathroom door. Instead, he felt an ominous warm feeling in the bed and sensed that there was something lying there with him,” explains Stirrup. “He threw back the bedclothes to find a huge turd, even bigger than the first, in the bed with him!” The stains left on the sheets – which Stirrup claimed looked like a straining face, possibly that of the phantom shitter himself trying to pass a huge turd – wouldn’t wash out, leaving Pints with no choice but to burn them. Stirrup flew into action, sending Pints to stay in a hotel while he set up his equipment in his house. “For three nights I stayed there, monitoring the infra red cameras and microphones I had installed in every room,” he says. “But nothing at all happened! Not even a disembodied fart!” His research shed no light on the mystery, either. “The house had only been built a few years earlier and nobody had ever died there,” says the ghost hunter. “Let alone shit themselves to death!”
A solution offered itself when Pints moved back into the house, while Stirrup still monitored the situation. “Everything was quiet, Barry was in bed asleep and I was adjusting my cameras, when there was suddenly a cry of terror from the kitchen and a horrible smell engulfed the house,” claims Stirrup. “I rushed in there to find a horrified Barry standing there, his pyjama trousers around his ankles, staring at a huge turd that was filling the entire kitchen sink!” The answer now seemed obvious to Stirrup – Barry himself was being possessed by an evil spirit as a vessel for producing the ectoplasmic ghost turds. “I can only imagine that the spirit emanated from a building that had been on the site previously – the whole housing estate had been built on the site of a defunct sewage treatment works,” he muses. “Who knows why it had manifested itself when it did – perhaps the building work had disturbed it? We’ll never know!” The manifestations ceased when Pints decided to move out and sell the property – the new owners have reported no nocturnal turd-related incidents. Stirrup bridles at the suggestion – levelled by sceptics – that there was no supernatural agency involved and that Pints was simply sleep-walking and shitting, with no waking memory of his actions. “All I’ll say in response is that those spouting this nonsense didn’t see those spectral turds,” he opines. “Believe me, no normal human anus could have passed them unscathed – only one possessed by evil!”
Indeed, Stirrup claims there is precedent for anal hauntings, recalling a case he investigated in Plymouth several years ago. “It actually began in similar fashion to the Barry Pints business, with the sleep of a house’s occupants being disturbed by strange nocturnal effusions,” he explains. “In this case, a family was awakened by ear-splitting farting noises rocking their house – the noise was deafening, shaking the walls and rattling the windows. So bad was the disturbance that even their neighbours could hear and feel the phantom postern blasts – pictures were knocked off of walls and ornaments fell off of shelves. It was all accompanied by a rancid odour that filled the house.” Naturally, suspicion fell on the occupants themselves, with accusations of abnormal sleep flatulence being levelled at each of them in turn. “But even when they were all awake, in sight of each other, the sounds continued unabated,” says Stirrup, “During the day they ceased, but every night they would start again!” Called in for his expertise, Stirrup set up shop in the house with his equipment. “It seemed that the sounds were emanating from a cupboard under the stairs. Bizarelly, when recorded and played back at a slower speed, they seemed to form words! I distinctly heard the phrases ‘Get out and walk, Donald’ and ‘More tea vicar?’”, he muses. “I decided to put dry ice in the cupboard during the disturbances – the vapours rising from it allowed me to see the outline of a disembodied arse – a pair of cheeks and an anus!” As with the later Pints case, the house itself was a new build, with no history of deaths on site, leaving the origin of the spirit a mystery. Equally mysteriously, the nocturnal anal explosions stopped as abruptly as they had started, never to re-occur,
Most of the hauntings investigated by Stirrup seem to have occurred in new build properties, leaving the paranormal investigator to speculate that the spirits causing them may have been displaced from their traditional haunts and are looking for new homes themselves. “The more old buildings we pull down and redevelop, the more spirits we evict,” he muses, “They have to go somewhere, so they find their way into new homes and cause mischief.” This was certainly the case in a recent haunting he investigated in Minehead. “The owner of a brand new house there was being awakened in night by the sound of his washing machine running, accompanied by ear-splitting wailing,” he says. “When I investigated, I clearly saw the spectre of a medieval nun walk through his kitchen, sit on the washing machine and put it onto the spin cycle to give herself a supernatural orgasm! I’m convinced that she originated in the old nunnery that had stood down the road until it was demolished a few months earlier, to make way for a new Tesco!” She was eventually exorcised by the setting up of a battery of vibrators in the kitchen. “They gave her an orgasm powerful enough to carry her to the other side,” Stirrup says. “Her scream of pleasure as she saw the light was so loud that it cracked glass and set off car alarms several streets away!”
