What Knocks at Night

Something is knocking in the wall. And it is answering back.

What Knocks at Night explores twelve reported British hauntings and poltergeist cases, pairing contemporary witness accounts with the older ghost lore that came before them.

In an Andover bedroom, knocks answered questions. In a Scottish classroom, a teacher watched a desk lid rise. Behind the panelling of an Isle of Man farmhouse, a voice claimed to be a mongoose. Centuries earlier, a Wiltshire household reported mysterious drumming after a travelling man's drum was confiscated.

Twelve cases and their older echoes

From England, Scotland and Wales to Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man, Adrian Mereford follows the evidence through ordinary homes, a busy workshop and the vaults beneath Edinburgh. Alongside these cases stand the Drummer of Tedworth, the Devil of Glenluce, the Cock Lane Ghost and the Wesleys' Old Jeffrey.

• A Cardiff workshop where stones reportedly flew for fourteen years and returned when thrown
• Six hundred signatures attributed to the dead on a teenager's bedroom wall
• A BBC Micro exchanging messages with an alleged Tudor correspondent
• A Glasgow family blamed for mysterious noises that continued after they moved out
• Two hundred volunteers searching for explanations beneath Edinburgh's South Bridge

What was witnessed? What was added later?

Every chapter distinguishes contemporary evidence from later retellings, weighs ordinary explanations and compares the case with seven recurring features drawn from a seventeenth-century haunting. Some disturbances reveal ordinary causes. Others leave questions the surviving record cannot settle.

For readers interested in paranormal investigation, haunted places and the history of Britain's ghost stories, this is a journey through the evidence and the lives behind the legends.

Book 3 of The Older Story

Each book can be read independently. Includes chapter-by-chapter sources and a practical afterword on unexplained disturbances at home.