Polterjacket

"She was taken there after she tried to commit suicide. Two weeks ago she threw herself into the Surrey Canal."

Every night for the past six weeks in the London hit A Queen Came By, Actress Thora Hird had spoken these lines in fear and trembling, while a sympathetic stage manageress stood in the wings with a glass of brandy at the ready. Whenever she spoke them, said Actress Hird, the second-hand Victorian jacket she wore in the third act tightened inexplicably about her neck and invisible hands seemed to choke her.

Television in the Bathroom. For some time Thora suffered in silence. But recently fiftyish Understudy Erica O'Foyle had to go on for her. Like many another understudy in her big moment, Erica was nervous, but she did fine for two acts. Then she put on the bewitched jacket and started the third. She went pale, choked and forgot her lines. "My throat went suddenly dry," she explained weakly after the curtain finally came down. "I felt a great hand clutching me from behind. It was horrible." She indignantly denied any suggestion that the trouble might have stemmed from her nerves--or her imagination.

That night impressionable Erica went home to her flat and fell into a troubled sleep. At midnight, she awoke to hear her pet cat screaming. Standing in her bathroom, she swore next morning, was a tall figure wearing the polterjacket. As Erica cried out in terror, the figure turned slowly to reveal the hideous face of an old crone. "I stared it away," reported Erica bravely. "It came up and then faded away like a television image."

Next day the producer's wife, a shrewd judge of publicity and an amateur spiritualist, packed Erica and the jacket off to a professional medium. Big, bosomy Medium Jane Harley quivered when she touched the possessed garment. Such a treasure was almost too good to be true. She dragged it over her plump arms and promptly went into hysterics. Then the stage manageress, an old trouper herself, had a go at it, and tore the garment off. "I'm choking!" she screamed, and a very convincing scream it was, too.

A woman reporter tried the jacket with no effect, but no one paid much attention to her. The curse of the jacket was for more sensitive folk. The very next time Actress O'Foyle put it on, she fainted dead away. "There were hands," she gasped on reviving, "very old hands and very gnarled. They had worked on the land."

Noises in the Corner. During the tests, Medium Harley was beside herself with excitement. In a corner her "contact" with the other side raised a hubbub in the loudspeaker through which Miss Harley got her spirit messages. The contact, however, spoke in Arabic, so little definite was learned. But Medium Harley said with a true spiritualist's authority, "whoever owned that jacket was strangled from behind and then drowned." With equal authority, Actress Hird commanded "that jacket is never to enter the theater again." The jacket stayed with Medium Harley, who hoped eventually to exorcise the evil spirit which had chosen to wear it.

The cast of A Queen Came By went back to their humdrum jobs--and a quick look at the racing form. A horse named Jacket was running in the fourth at Newmarket. The entire cast put their money on his nose. Jacket romped home, paying four to one.

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