This remarkable photograph was taken in 1955 by newspaper men who had been called to investigate an alleged poltergeist case near the French-Italian border.

The terrified occupants of a French farmhouse in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne claimed that they were under assault by a “noisy spirit”, who on more than one occasion moved objects about the house. This photograph, which the journalists presented as genuine, depicts a saucepan, its lid, a pair of scissors and a telegraph form shoot into the air. The only other people in the room – the mother and baby, and a man from the village – were all said to be too far from the objects to have touched them. 

With a young child in the house, the activities connected with this unseen force would have undoubtedly been horrifying, and raises the question of motive if fraudulent.