Obscure Occurrences : The Phenomena around Elenora Zugan, The Devil's Girl

 In the February of 1925, in the Talpa village of North Eastern Romania, an eleven-year-old girl named Elenora Zugan set out to visit her grandmother who lived in a neighboring village that took around two and a half hours to reach by foot. Such a long walk for a young girl is undoubtedly dangerous but for Eleonora, it proved to be dangerous in a way many would not expect. On her journey, Eleanor supposedly found a silver coin lying on the roadside and while finding money may seem innocent or even perceived as a divine sign by many, Romanian folklore teaches otherwise. In line with traditional folk beliefs and superstitions, objects on the roadside or at crossroads may very well be magically contaminated, discarded by witches after spell work or intentionally placed there to pass a curse onto whoever interacts with them.

 When it comes to coins, in particular, it is believed that they could contain a familiar spirit that once belonged to a witch who wanted to get rid of them. Thus, throwing them away to pass them on to someone else but such superstitions meant little to an impoverished eleven-year-old child with a sweet tooth. For Eleonora, the silver coin that seemed to have fallen from the sky would turn out to be the catalyst for poltergeist phenomena that would torment her and terrify those around her for the next two years and eventually cause her to be known and remembered as the devil's girl.

Commencing of Poltergeist Activity 

 Upon arriving in her grandmother's village little Eleonora spent the money she found on the roadside on sweets which she ate all by herself. Her cousin who was also visiting her grandmother during that time became very upset that Eleonora did not share the sweets with her and so the two girls began quarreling. Hearing the heated argument, their grandmother who was a 105-year-old witch intervened and told Eleonora that the sweets had been bought with money left by the devil and that by eating them she had swallowed the devil too. Thus, she would no longer be free of him.

 The very next day poltergeist phenomena began targeting and surrounding Eleanor with some locals even suggesting that it was her own grandmother who had cursed her. At first, it was small things, objects in Eleanor's proximity flying and stones being hurtled against the house from the outside breaking windows. Unable to forget the roadside coin, Elenora's grandmother became convinced that her granddaughter was demonically possessed, a belief that became very popular among the locals. As such, Eleonora was quickly sent back to her village where just three days later the paranormal phenomena broke out again.

 Supposedly, the phenomena at her home consisted of strange apparitions and disembodied wails of unknown origin. When Eleanora would enter a room, all metal objects began moving and heavy pots would start to levitate. When she would walk around the village, the waters of the river crossing the location would start to boil and hailstone rain would then descend upon her house; sensational and dramatic occurrences that seemed to defy explanation.

The Devil's Girl in the Monastery of Gorovei

 Understandably, panic soon overtook the small village of Talpa. Several locals supposedly attempted to help Eleonora's father manage the situation and guided him to find help within the orthodox church. Elenora's mother had died years prior and he had become overwhelmed by the circumstance. On one occasion, Eleonora was taken to the holy relics of saint John, one of the most venerated saints in Eastern Romania. Many miracles are associated with his relics and so Eleanor's father and neighbours believed that they could also work wonders on her. But it was to no avail, with some reports claiming chillingly that the efforts only double the diabolical manifestations.

 Determined to find a way to help his daughter, Eleonora's father decided to take her to a priest in a nearby village assisted in his endeavour by several neighbours and the schoolmaster in the village. After praying over Eleonora for two days and having witnessed a series of objects moving on their own, it became clear to the priest and those present that the phenomena surrounding Eleonora were the result of an unseen force. Thus, Eleonora was taken to the monastery of Gorovei where she spent three weeks being observed by the clergy and preparing for exorcism.

Letter of the Abbot of the Monastery of Gorovei

 The abbot of the monastery wrote a letter to one of the doctors involved in the case later, in which he claimed that he and several clergymen and priests witnessed over 400 paranormal phenomena. most of which were floating objects around Eleanor. he also described that on Wednesday during the passion week of that year, at eight o'clock in the evening, a wooden spoon from the monastery kitchen some 50 meters away from Eleanor's location traveled all the way to hit Eleonora in the head as a priest was praying over her. That same night as she slept, Eleonora was violently thrown out of her bed twice and hit by objects in her proximity such as nails from the walls sugar cubes a candlestick and a bottle.

 The abbot even went on to describe to the doctor how he picked up every object himself and took them to his chamber next door. Once the objects were removed the attacks on Eleanor ceased, only for the abbot to become their new recipient. A pair of boots, a coffee grinder, a matchbox, clothes from the hangar and a 20-kilogram sack of flour were all thrown into the door of his chamber. Then the light in his hands was extinguished and a pillow flew at his head. At the same time, Eleonora is said to have claimed that the force was hitting her as if “with fists in her chest”. The abbot stated that the ordeal lasted from eight o'clock that evening, and ended at a quarter to twelve. The next morning, he found three nails under the sheets of the bed in which he had slept.

 Whatever the cause of these happenings, the force responsible appeared to possess a remarkable ability to move objects. Not merely were the items about the monastery relocated thrown and manifested by unseen hands, but they were moved seemingly with precision and purpose after all. Later that day, four people standing in the kitchen with Eleonora are said to have witnessed a pot full of tea rising up from the oven up to a meter in the air and thrown on the floor, all without spilling a single drop of it. That night at dinner, a pot of hot soup flew from the oven, this time, spilling the contents on the feet of the eight people present with Eleonora, being the one who was burnt the worst. A little while later, sugar flew into the lamp and rained over the table, a glass of wine shattered and on the veranda, a coffee cup and its dish shattered as well. The rather chaotic dinner ended with a box of lit matches flying through the open doors of the guest room and the kitchen into the grocery cellar, burning everything without fire or wind.

 Without a doubt in the minds of those present, there were diabolical forces at work. Further proof of this seemed to be provided sometime in the following days when Eleonora was hit in the back by a mysterious coin. Upon fetching and cleaning it, the abbot noticed that the coin was 108 years old. He gave it to Eleanor who, buried it in the ground and put a brick on top of it. After finishing her little ritual, she turned to leave however, after just a few steps the coin hit her in the back again. Shocked, the abbot and Eleanor removed the brick and dug under it to find that the coin had indeed vanished and seemed to have been the very same old coin that struck Eleonora for a second time. The abbot, put the coin in his pocket to see if the phenomenon would repeat itself and half an hour later when the abbot decided to touch the coin in his pocket, he found that it had vanished with its new location unknown.

Experiences of a Secretary and his Driver

 Upon reading the varied and sensational phenomena recorded in the abbot’s letter, the doctor sent his sceptical secretary to the monastery hoping for an easy conclusion to the case. Yet when they arrived, like the abbot before them, they recorded a series of inexplicable occurrences. In particular, the secretary was supposedly most unnerved when the cork of a wine bottle that Eleonora had been holding sprung on its own sprinkling wine into his face and causing him to want to leave immediately. His driver, however, felt dizzy for about 10 minutes thereafter. When he came to his senses, he supposedly attempted for half an hour to turn the vehicle around with the car being pushed by an unseen force back to its initial position each and every time.

From the Monastery to a Mental Asylum

 However, the eeriest phenomena happened during one of the exorcism sessions on Eleanor. In line with the accounts of those present, a lightning bolt that manifested out of nowhere shattered the stained-glass window of the church and hit the priest leading the exorcism right in the face. The priest had to be immediately transported to the hospital. After three weeks, the clergyman at the monastery concluded that the exorcisms had to stop. This decision was not only because of the potential dangers but, also because a diabolical contagion seemed to have spread among the clergy who believed that Eleonora was soon going to be fully possessed by an inferior devil of sorts and not necessarily a demon in the traditional Christian sense.

 Their fears were supposedly enforced by the press, as Eleanor's case became the subject of news with superstition and scepticism coming head-to-head and giving way to much controversy. Eleonora was admitted to a mental asylum where the paranormal phenomena continued with it being freely acknowledged by the medical professionals there. In an attempt to keep both her and the other patients safe, they kept Elenora isolated. Although locked in her chamber and constantly supervised, on the 2nd of May, Eleanor vanished from her room with the staff at the asylum later commenting on the incident “we don't know what Eleanor Zugan had become”. In many ways, the happenings were out of control.

Experiences of Fritz Grunewald

 Her story reached Fritz Grunewald, an engineer and parapsychologist from Germany who was “particularly interested in the physical phenomena of mediumship and the problems of instrumentally recording them”. As his interest peaked, Grunewald set out for Romania enlisting the help of Kuby Klein, a journalist from the area who had written sympathetically about Eleanor. The man contrived to have her removed from the asylum and returned to the monastery of Gorovei to observe the paranormal phenomena at leisure.

 Thus, between the 9th and the 18th of May, Grunewald is said to have recorded no less than 187 paranormal happenings at the monastery with his shorthand notes today being revered as the fullest minute-by-minute record of poltergeist phenomena prior to the invention of the tape recorder. According to his notes, the main locations of the poltergeist activity were the monastery kitchen and the guest house in which he and Eleonora were accommodated. He also noted that the most common type of phenomena around Eleanor was moving objects ranging from “the slow tilting of a large pot on the oven to violent hurlings of moderate-sized objects at or near people. There were also apports, occasional raps, and, on one or two occasions, the mysterious conflagration of matches”. Sometimes, as a foreshadowing of things to come, Eleonora seemingly was seen to be struck by invisible hands.

 The phenomenon that Grunewald deemed the most valuable in his nearly two-week investigation, was recorded on the 15th of May. As he sat opposite to Elenora at the table, a small coin fell onto it. Elenora had her hands on the table as he saw the coin fall from a height of about 20 centimetres. He sat upright with his gaze deliberately fixed on Eleonora, so that he observed closely. Supposedly, Eleanor shrank a little when the coin fell. As for Grunewald, he believed it was quite impossible for her to have thrown it onto the table since she had both of her hands placed on it. He continued to sit opposite her and watched closely for the next half an hour or so when something came from Eleanor's back about 80 centimetres above the table and 20 centimetres above her head. The object went away towards her left side and fell to the floor.

 He noticed that it was a silver necklace with a blue stone, a gift that Eleonora had received from Klein but which she gave in turn to the cook at the monastery. So Grunewald concluded that the object could have only come from the kitchen as the cook was there at that time. Grunewald stressed that this incident was particularly valuable as he saw the necklace float over Eleonora's head in steady motion while she was sitting still at the table. Undoubtedly, Grunewald was left affected and fascinated by the numerous phenomena that he observed and so when he returned to Germany, he made arrangements for Eleonora to live under his supervision in Berlin. Sadly, he passed away only a month later as a heart attack claimed him at only 41 years old.

Eleanor acquainted with Zoe the Countess

 Grunewald's plans had not gone forward and Eleanor was left in the hands of her family until the September of that year when countess Zoe Wassilko von Serecki, an acquaintance of Klein took her under her protection. The countess was a renowned parapsychologist and astrologer of her time. When she visited Eleanor for the first time, she said that she found her dirty, wretchedly clothed and thoroughly frightened. The countess observed and documented the paranormal phenomena until January 1926 when she was able to bring Eleonora to live with her in Vienna.

 It is reported that the young girl adjusted quickly to her new surroundings and was pleased with her new and more civilized life. Now living together, the countess was able to learn more about Eleanor and not just the phenomena that followed her. She deemed her a bright and intelligent child that was in some ways emotionally backward for “she delighted in toys designed for children much younger than she was, perhaps because such things had not often come her way in her own impoverished childhood”.

 During her time with the countess, Elenora was also examined by a nerve specialist who deemed her healthy and in no way abnormal except for an unusual sensitivity of the skin. The countess also compelled Elenora to participate in mediumistic sittings and seances which she arranged. But by all accounts, Eleanor was allowed to live a more or less ordinary life with her attending classes to become a hairdresser. All the while, the countess continued to document what she believed was poltergeist activity.

 According to her notes, object movements and apports were common and often occurred in good light. Even outdoors in the noontide sunshine, she witnessed objects falling out of thin air and landing with loud noises, sometimes after having ostensibly come through closed doors or out of locked cupboards. On one occasion, the countess made a note of an incident that seemed curious even to her and unlike everything that had been reported before. It described a shadow that glided down slowly in front of the window and not straight but in a zigzag line in one of the rooms thereafter, she supposedly heard a low sound of something falling.

 When she looked, she realized that a domino box made of iron had fallen to the floor and while the box was still locked some of the dominoes that had been inside of it were now lying next to it on the floor. Similarly, when Klein visited the two in Vienna, he noticed Elenora standing with a cat in her arms at the bookcase as “a dark grey shadow came from behind her, passing along her right side and falling under the table” upon the cushion at his feet. On more rare occasions, the countess claimed to have heard disembodied and “breathy toneless voices” in Eleanor's presence but, any effort she made to communicate with them failed. Considering the shadow and believing it to be the force that was tormenting Eleonora, the countess helped her to develop an ability for automatic writing to channel messages from it. Yet, based on the writings, the intellect of the supposed entity seemed to correspond precisely with that of the child herself and not as had been anticipated of some higher darker malevolent force.

 As time went by, it was difficult for those exposed to the happenings to conclude anything other than malevolent involvement. After all, whilst under the supervision of the countess, the entity that was fairly spiteful to Eleonora until then evolved to become alarmingly violent. In the full-scale poltergeist assault that followed, Eleanor's fingers were supposedly pricked as if by needles. She would be roughly scratched on the face neck arms and chest leaving painful wheels on her hyper-sensitive skin and she was also supposedly sharply bitten on her hands and arms with the bite mark sometimes being damp. The countess was certain that these events she had witnessed herself occurred under conditions in which fraud would have been impossible. Something unseen was tormenting Elenora and seemed to have no intention of stopping.

Harry Price's Investigation

 On the 30th of April, the phenomena around Eleanor were witnessed for the first time by Harry Price the prominent British psychical researcher and friend of Grunewald. Price had seen Eleonora on three occasions at the apartment she lived in with the countess in Vienna. There he is said to have observed object movements and the appearance of scratch and bite marks. He was convinced that some of the telekinetic phenomena witnessed were not the work of normal forces. He claimed to have seen in one instance, a cushion move off a chair when both the cushion and Eleonora were in his line of vision. Interested to study them further, he invited Eleonora and the countess to his national laboratory of psychical research in London. There he was able to observe Eleonora for two weeks, a time in which she was mostly allowed to play with toys and amuse herself while price members of the laboratory and certain members of the press documented the phenomena. The laboratory council concluded that under scientific test conditions, movements of small objects without physical contact undoubtedly took place. In some cases, objects were even imported from fairly distant rooms in which Eleonora had never set foot. The bite and scratch marks however continued to be frequent, the more striking ones being reported on the afternoon of the 5th of October under the supervision of two members of the laboratory, a representative of the daily news and two other witnesses.

 According to one account, Eleonora was tying up a box when she gave a gasp and moved her right hand towards her left as distinct teeth marks appeared on her wrist then, scores like scratches appeared on her right forearm, cheeks and forehead. Shortly after, a series of marks like some form of letters appeared on her left forearm all rising to distinct inflammatory swellings and within three or four minutes faded slowly. They also claimed that Eleonora was under close observation and could not have produced them by herself by any normal means.

Investigations in Berlin

 Curiously, after Eleanor's return to the continent, the telekinetic and apport phenomena dwindled away while the bite and scratch marks evolved gaining the addition of “copious quantities of highly offensive spittle”. These phenomena were investigated from November 1926 to January 1927 by a committee established in Berlin consisting of a zoologist and four medical professionals. Under their strict examination conditions and in bright light they witnessed the phenomena manifesting in Eleanor's hands as each of her hands were held by a controller on either side of her. The spittle that frequently appeared on her was also examined and it was found not to be the secretion of her skin nor saliva fresh from her mouth as the latter was relatively free of microorganisms while the substance found on her skin swarmed with the bacteria staphylococci. They also witnessed Elenora attempting to help the phenomena which they deemed to stem not from systematic and malign deceitfulness but, from childish bad manners.

Transforming from The Devil's Girl to a Normal Girl

 Eleanor soon lost her powers, whatever they may have been, with “the onset of the menses in the early summer of 1927”. She also lost much of the attention that had been on her until then and so, she returned to Romania. In 2015, her surviving nephew told the press that his aunt Eleanora never offered to speak of what happened to her in her childhood and that it was very difficult to get her to say anything about the case. From 1927 until her death in 1996, she supposedly lived a normal life and did not report any more paranormal activity. She married twice, never had children, and had her own businesses as a hairdresser and later a seamstress. Her family described her as good at heart saying that they enjoyed her company and that there was nothing evil about her.