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In December of 1961, newspapers in the small town of Mena,
Arkansas reported on some odd happenings at a farm just outside of town. According
to the newspaper article, Ed Shinn's farm seemed to be the site of some ongoing
paranormal activity. Ed Shinn, a farmer in his 70s lived on the farm with his
wife and his teenage grandson. Sometime in the previous year, strange things
had started happening at the Shinn farm - things that were impossible to explain.
The story came to light when Ed Shinn recounted the tale to the town's butcher,
a friend of his. He talked about biscuits flying through the air at the dinner
table, and blankets being pulled off of him at night. Alvin Dilbeck was later
to tell reporters that it was all his fault that the case became a media sensation,
but when he sent a neighbor out to the Shinn farm his only concern was for the
welfare of his friend, Ed. Unfortunately, the result was that stories started
to spread about all the odd things happening out at the farm. For the Shinns, the ordeal had begun
about a year previous with rattling windows and rapping on the walls - two of
the most common first manifestations of a poltergeist. The tapping and banging
on the glass windows was accompanied by a loud buzzing sound in the ceilings
overhead. At night, the elderly couple frequently woke to find their sheets
and blankets being yanked off their bed. In the past year, they - and several
family members had also witnessed other unexplainable things: the aforementioned
biscuits floating in the air, for instance. Furniture moved around the rooms
by itself, light bulbs shattered in their sockets, Venetian blinds were yanked
off of windows and plates and utensils were thrown through the air. The publicity for the case turned
out to be even more of a nuisance than the incidents themselves. Mr. Shinn told
reporters that complete strangers started showing up at the house in the hope
of seeing a sign of paranormal or poltergeist activity. It was so bad that one
night, ten people just showed up, walked through the front door and walked through
the house without saying a word. "You can see why we'd be upset,"
Mr. Shinn said. Not long after the newspaper reports
- and the sudden onslaught of rude non-supernatural visitors - 15 year old Charles
Schaeffer, the grandson, confessed to police that he had faked all the incidents
that had been reported. "I didn't mean to cause so much trouble,"
he told a reporter. He'd just started it as a joke, but once he started the
prank, he said, he didn't know how to stop. The only problem with Charles' confession
was that no one believed it. Literally dozens of witnesses had seen the unexplained
poltergeist activity. While Charles' detailed confession explained how he had
managed the tapping on windows and some of the night time manifestations, the
boy could neither explain nor duplicate some of the other tricks that had been
witnessed by neighbors and friends over the past several weeks. He could not,
in broad daylight, even begin to make things fly about or lift and hurl themselves
across the room. Nor could he reproduce the sounds that neighbors heard when
they visited. It was, surprisingly, the newspapers
and reporters that refused to accept Charles' confession. Wrote one columnist
for the local newspaper, "Personally, we believe he took the rap so that
everyone could get some peace." Was there any truth to the Mena
poltergeist? According to scientists who study paranormal phenomena, it may
very well have been the grandson causing the manifestations - but not in any
physical way. While most poltergeist cases involve pubescent girls, there have
been a handful of reported cases that centered around a young boy just reaching
adolescence. When it's happened, it's often been a socially awkward or backward
boy who is having trouble dealing with the pressures of his own awakening adult
urges and sexuality. And in fact, while newspaper reports
refer to young Charles as a 'superior student', photographs taken at the time
show an overweight young man with thick glasses who could conceivably have been
shy and awkward around people. A later news story notes that the Shinns had
lived on their farm for 15 years without a hint of anything unusual. It was
only a few years after young Charles came to live with them at the age of eleven
that odd things started happening. In the end, it's a mystery - and
no one who was involved is inclined to clear things up. If it was a hoax, the
Mena poltergeist was one so clever that even skeptical newspaper reporters refused
to believe a logical confession by an awkward boy looking for attention.
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