Phoenix, 1898: the Seventh Street house where warm stones fell from nowhere.

What the paper reported

At a house on Seventh Street, small stones from an invisible source broke the windows and rattled against the walls; some were warm, some almost ice cold. An officer saw one fall and found it warm. More than 200 people came to watch in a single day, and nobody found a hoax.

Exhibit A · Transcription

This is a wierd ghost story. But all ghost stories are wierd. This one is well authenticated in that, though there have been scores of Phoenix witnesses the hoax has not been discovered if there be a hoax.

Later in the same article (not in the image)

Small stones hurled from an invisible source broke the windows of the house or rattled against the outer wall. … She picked the stones from the ground and found some warm and others almost ice cold.

Later in the same article (not in the image)

Yesterday the interest grew so intense that until 9 o’clock last night (the hour when the stone throwing ceases), more than 200 people visited … Some of them saw the flying stones, heard them crash through windows or bang against the side of the house and fall to the ground. Many were picked up and carried off. So the stones have substance, though the thrower is disembodied.

Later in the same article (not in the image)

…saw a stone dropping on the old woman’s shoulder and fall thence to the ground. He picked it up and it was warm.

Transcribed from the page image, spelling as printed (“wierd”); line-end hyphens joined. The image shows the article’s opening paragraph. The heading on the image caption is ours; we don’t reproduce the paper’s 1898 headline. “…” marks words we left out, including every name. Checked word by word against the Library of Congress’s OCR text.

Newspaper

Arizona Republican

Published in

Phoenix, Arizona

Date

September 23, 1898

Page

8

Permalink

www.loc.gov/resource/sn84020558/1898-09-23/ed-1/?sp=8

Source

Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Public domain (published 1898).