Invisible Stone Throwers: The Global Outbreak Of Poltergeist Attacks In 2024

From India to Zimbabwe to the Philippines, stones are falling from nowhere, fires are igniting without sources, and investigators remain baffled.

A reporter in Thailand was inspecting a family’s home on February 23, 2024, trying to figure out where the mysterious stones were coming from. He was walking through the house, looking at the gaps in the roof, the vents, the windows — all the places a stone might conceivably enter. And then one flew past his head. He looked around. Nobody was there. Nobody was anywhere nearby. The stone had simply appeared, mid-flight, from no discernible direction.

That reporter’s experience captures something essential about what happened across multiple continents throughout 2024 and into 2025. Families found themselves terrorized by stones that appeared to fall from nowhere. Houses ignited spontaneously without any identifiable source of flame. Invisible forces assaulted people in their own homes. And when authorities responded — deploying police patrols, installing CCTV cameras, flying drones overhead, stationing officers to keep watch through the night — the phenomena continued anyway. Sometimes right in front of the people sent to catch whoever was responsible.

The cases span India, Thailand, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Eswatini. The victims have nothing obvious in common. They live in different countries, practice different religions, come from different economic backgrounds. The common thread isn’t their geography or their circumstances. It’s the absolute, consistent failure of rational investigation to explain what’s happening to them.

THE THAI FAMILY WHO COVERED THEIR HEADS

The Nusalad family of Rayong Province, Thailand, had been living in their single-story concrete house for two years without any problems. The house sat in Soi Suwannahong in the Huai Pong district, surrounded by other homes and some open land with scattered trees. Nothing unusual about it. Nothing that would suggest what was coming.

Then in February 2023, 62-year-old Narong Nusalad was sitting behind his house at dusk, that particular time of evening when the sun is dropping toward the horizon and the light starts to change. He looked toward a nearby tree and saw a woman sitting beneath it. She had long hair. And she was waving at him — beckoning, really — gesturing for him to come closer.

Narong called to his family. Come look at this. Come see. But when they came outside to look, nobody else could see anything. Just an empty spot beneath the tree. After that encounter, something changed in Narong. He became withdrawn. He stopped talking much. His family noticed but didn’t know what to make of it.

A full year passed. Then on February 18, 2024, the stones started coming.

The projectiles came in all sizes — small rocks, brick pieces, cement fragments — and they flew into the home from every direction. They came through gaps in the roof, through vents, through windows, with what the family could only describe as impossible accuracy. These weren’t random trajectories. The stones found their way through small openings from multiple angles, all converging on people inside. And they hit. Family members suffered bruises and injuries. Narong himself was struck in the head multiple times, leaving visible bumps and wounds.

Narong’s 59-year-old wife Prasong told reporters that ten or more stones flew into the house each day. The intervals between attacks were short — sometimes only five to ten minutes apart. The family, seven or eight people living together, eventually started covering their heads with cloth whenever they moved around the house. It was the only protection they could think of.

Their 32-year-old son Chaiyapot had always thought of himself as a skeptic. He didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits or any of that. But after watching his father get struck repeatedly, he got angry. He spoke out loud, challenging whatever was doing this. Within seconds — literally seconds — a stone hit him directly in the head. That changed his perspective considerably.

The family tried spiritual remedies. They brought in a white five-headed Naga statue, a protective symbol in Thai Buddhist tradition, and placed it in the house. Shortly after, one of the statue’s heads broke off on its own. Nobody touched it. Nobody was near it. The head simply broke.

An 80-year-old neighbor came by to see what was happening. He told reporters he’d lived in the area his entire life — eight decades in that same community — and he’d never seen anything like this. He’d never even seen a basic ghost, he said. Nothing remotely supernatural. And now stones were flying through his neighbor’s house from invisible sources.

The family’s plea was simple: they wanted someone — anyone — to come and figure out whether this was something supernatural or whether it was somehow the work of human hands. They just wanted an answer. As of the last reports, they were still waiting for one.

VILLAGE MEETINGS AND FALLING STONES

About fifteen kilometers from the district headquarters in Dhamtari, in the Chhattisgarh state of India, there’s a village called Araud. It’s a modest place, home to around 2,000 people, the kind of village that doesn’t usually make the news. For three months in early 2024, though, Araud became the site of what residents could only call “stone rain.”

The pattern — such as it was — defied any logical explanation. Stones fell from above at any time of day or night. They ranged from small pebbles that could fit between two fingers to rocks of considerable size and weight. They landed throughout the village, though they seemed to concentrate particularly in the Malik Para locality. One notable detail stands out consistently in the reports: the stones fell near people rather than hitting them directly. Close enough to be terrifying. Close enough to feel the wind of them passing. But not quite making contact. Despite the sheer volume of projectiles over three months, nobody was seriously injured.

A villager named Domaru Ram Sinha reported that during one village meeting, a small stone fell on him — one of the few instances of direct contact. His vehicle had been struck two or three times on previous occasions. Former Deputy Sarpanch Ganga Prasad Dhruv, a local official, confirmed the strange nature of the phenomena. The stones fell unpredictably, he said. Any time, any place. But they always landed beside people rather than on them. It was almost as if something was deliberately missing.

Multiple residents noticed something else: the phenomena intensified significantly whenever the village held official meetings. Gather people together to discuss village business, and the stones would come in greater numbers. The correlation was consistent enough that people started to dread calling meetings at all.

Police weren’t exempt from the attacks. During one investigation, stones rained down directly on a patrol car. Officers were present, watching, and still couldn’t identify where the projectiles were coming from.

Villagers explicitly ruled out the obvious explanations. There was no quarry blasting in the area that could account for flying debris. They didn’t believe antisocial elements — troublemakers, basically — were responsible, because whenever stones fell and people rushed outside to investigate, no one was visible. Not hiding. Not running away. Simply not there.

Bhishm Yadav, another resident, described how stones would fall on roof tiles, on ceilings, anywhere really, but the source remained completely invisible. Gulab Sahu confirmed the phenomena had continued for three solid months with no resolution in sight. The village had appealed to government and administrative authorities to investigate and free them from their fear. As far as anyone could tell, the fear remained.

POLICE ARMED WITH STICKS FOUND NO ONE

The situation in Tankara, Gujarat, in April 2024, escalated to the point where both police and local residents took to patrolling the streets carrying sticks. They were ready to catch whoever was throwing stones. They walked the area in groups, watching, waiting.

It made absolutely no difference.

Stones continued flying “out of nowhere” — that phrase kept appearing in reports — even when Home Guards were standing right there watching. The phenomena occurred repeatedly while authorities stood guard, while people clutched their sticks and scanned the darkness for any sign of a human thrower. Investigators couldn’t identify any suspects. They couldn’t even determine where the projectiles were originating from.

Local residents grew suspicious that some unknown individuals might be behind the attacks, but the inability to catch anyone in the act left both the community and the police deeply unsettled. The word used in local reports was “unsettled,” and it seems like an understatement. These were trained officers whose job was to solve exactly this kind of problem, and they had nothing. No leads, no suspects, no explanation.

DRONES, CCTV, AND TEMPLE REFUGE

Ottapalayam is a village in Kangayam Taluk, part of Tiruppur district in the Tamil Nadu state of India. It’s home to about 200 residents living in roughly 60 houses, many of them daily wage earners who travel to nearby Kangayam and Tiruppur for work. In July 2024, the village suffered ten consecutive days of stone attacks, and the response from authorities was as comprehensive as any rural Indian village could reasonably expect.

Once darkness fell each evening, stones rained down on houses. The damage was extensive, particularly to homes with asbestos roofing, which cracked and broke under the impacts. Residents reported to both the Revenue Department and the Police Department, describing their constant fear and their inability to determine where the stones were coming from.

Authorities deployed everything at their disposal. Police conducted night patrols, walking the village streets after dark. Drones flew overhead, providing aerial surveillance. CCTV cameras were installed to monitor nearly all 60 houses in the affected area. The village was, by rural standards, under intense observation.

None of it worked. The phenomena continued unabated. The stones kept falling. The cameras didn’t capture any perpetrators. The drones didn’t spot anyone throwing anything. The patrols encountered nothing suspicious.

Terrified families began abandoning their homes each evening. They would leave as darkness approached and take shelter at the nearby Karupparayan Temple, spending their nights there and returning home only after sunrise. These were working people who needed their sleep to earn their living the next day, and instead they were camping out at a temple because their own houses weren’t safe after dark.

Kangayam Tahsildar Mayilsamy — the local administrative official — urged villagers not to believe in paranormal activity. The handiwork of miscreants couldn’t be ruled out, he said. Troublemakers. Vandals. Some human explanation. The problem was that these supposed miscreants remained spectacularly uncatchable despite drones, cameras, patrols, and a community on high alert. At some point, “miscreants” starts to feel like a placeholder for “we don’t know.”

THE WITCH OF MUZAFFARPUR

In Jaiprakash Nagar, a neighborhood in the Ahiyapur police station area of Muzaffarpur, Bihar, the stone attacks started in October 2024 and continued for approximately one and a half months. The location was specific: a single lane near the Naveen Vidya Niketan school. Every night, as soon as darkness fell, stones would rain down on the houses along that lane.

The projectiles were distinctive. Residents described them as the type of stones used on railway lines — those chunky, angular pieces of ballast rock. They fell in large numbers, and the attacks happened every single night without exception for six weeks straight.

Local women had their own explanation: a witch was responsible. Other residents suspected a criminal gang known locally as “Smakeeya.” Neither theory led anywhere useful. No witch was identified. No gang members were caught.

A resident named Amarendra reported the situation to SSP Rakesh Kumar, the Senior Superintendent of Police for the district. Kumar ordered the Ahiyapur police station to investigate. Officers came to the neighborhood and examined the evidence: residents had been collecting the stones that fell on their houses, gathering them into sacks. The police looked at the sacks. They looked at the stones. They conducted their investigation. The source remained a mystery.

The atmosphere of fear in that neighborhood became all-consuming. Women and children began confining themselves indoors from evening onward, not venturing outside until daylight returned. An entire community had restructured their daily lives around the nightly attacks, and still nobody could explain what was happening or why it was happening to them specifically.

A HOUSE THAT IGNITED FORTY TIMES

Poltergeist phenomena don’t always involve thrown objects. Sometimes they involve fire. In Sikandarpur village, located in the Raebareli district of Uttar Pradesh, the Suryabhan Singh family experienced something that defies easy categorization: their house ignited approximately 30 to 40 times between Monday morning and Tuesday of the same week in October 2024. That’s potentially dozens of separate fires in a roughly 48-hour period.

Suryabhan Singh, the family patriarch, explained the timing to reporters. The fires began immediately after the family returned from Siddhpura in Gujarat’s Patan district, where they had traveled to perform his mother’s shraddha ceremony — a Hindu ritual honoring the deceased. Whether that timing was coincidental or somehow connected, nobody could say.

The fires struck different materials throughout the house. Curtains ignited. Clothes caught flame. Household materials burned to ash. The family’s terror was compounded by the sheer inexplicability of what was happening. Fires were breaking out in their home, over and over, and they couldn’t identify any cause.

Authorities took what seemed like an obvious step: they disconnected the home’s electrical supply. No electricity, no electrical fault, no fire. That was the theory anyway.

The fires continued.

Sikandarpur village head Dabbu Singh confirmed that cutting the power had no effect whatsoever. The mysterious fires kept breaking out in different locations throughout the house, with no electrical source to explain them.

Suryabhan’s son Ankit Singh had always considered himself a rational person, not someone who put stock in superstition or supernatural explanations. But he was forced to reconsider his worldview. He described watching smoke suddenly rise from clothes stored inside closed suitcases and wardrobes — sealed containers with no apparent ignition source — and then the materials would begin burning. Vehicle keys bent on their own. Electronic items broke spontaneously. These weren’t things that should happen. They weren’t things that made sense in a rational framework. And yet they kept happening.

The family was forced to abandon their home entirely. They camped outside, sleeping under the open sky, because staying inside meant being surrounded by fires they couldn’t predict or prevent. Kotwali Balendra Gautam arrived with a police team to inspect the scene. He examined the burned materials and surveyed the house, then stationed officers there to investigate the cause. Whether they ever found one wasn’t reported.

BASTAULI: FIFTEEN FIRES IN FORTY-EIGHT HOURS

A strikingly similar case occurred in Bastauli village, in the Kotwali Mohammadi area of Lakhimpur Kheri, Uttar Pradesh, just a few months earlier in July 2024. A family there reported their house igniting more than fifteen separate times within a forty-eight hour period.

The fires broke out in curtains, in bedding, in wooden cupboards, in stored grains, in medicines, in various other household materials. The sequence of events closely matched what would happen in Sikandarpur a few months later. Disconnecting the electricity did nothing to stop the phenomena. The power was cut, and the fires continued anyway.

By the time the two days were over, all the belongings inside the home had been destroyed. Everything the family owned was either burned or damaged beyond use. They were forced to live outdoors, camping outside their own house for two days because the interior wasn’t safe.

Local police and officials came to inspect the site. Crowds gathered too, drawn by word of the ongoing unexplained fires. Everyone watched. Nobody could explain what they were seeing.

THE DEMON CALLED JAPAN

In Msahweni, near Matsamo in Eswatini — the small southern African nation formerly known as Swaziland — a family’s ordeal centered on a 13-year-old boy named Jama. Beginning in September 2024, the boy became the apparent focus of escalating supernatural activity that would eventually make national news.

The phenomena started with the kinds of disturbances that appear in classic poltergeist accounts. Stones flew through the air without any visible source. Lights flickered on and off for no apparent reason. Pots of cooked food overturned by themselves while sitting on stable surfaces. Human waste — feces — appeared on beds, placed there by unseen hands. The family home was repeatedly ransacked and thrown into disarray, with no sign of forced entry or human intruders.

Then the incidents escalated. Jama’s schoolbooks were reportedly snatched by an unseen force and thrown into a nearby river, destroying them. The boy would enter trance-like states, his eyes going blank, his manner changing completely. During these episodes, he exhibited what witnesses described as “super strength” — physical power that seemed impossible for a 13-year-old boy.

Communication from whatever entity was tormenting the family took concrete form. A piece of paper appeared with words scrawled on it: “utakufa Jama.” In the local language, that means “Jama will die.” A voice began speaking — seemingly from nowhere, seemingly from the air itself — identifying itself as “Japan” and claiming to be from an area in northern Hhohho, a region in Eswatini. This voice allegedly urged the boy to commit self-harm.

Jama’s mother Jackie witnessed these events along with other family members. The Times of Swaziland reported on the case in December 2024, documenting a family living in fear of forces they couldn’t understand, control, or escape.

GOBLINS OF MAGWEGWE NORTH

In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, three children aged 8, 10, and 12 lived with their elderly grandparents in a home that family members would later describe as something from a horror film. The phenomena began in November 2023 and escalated through February 2024, and the family attributed what was happening to “goblins” — malevolent supernatural entities in Zimbabwean folklore.

The disturbances started with the kinds of things that might, individually, have mundane explanations. Objects vanished without explanation — they’d set something down, turn around, and it would be gone. Unexplained noises reverberated through the walls at odd hours. Doors and windows opened and closed on their own. Lights flickered. Food disappeared while cooking, vanishing from pots on the stove.

But then the physical assaults began, and there was nothing ambiguous about those.

One morning, the family awoke to find that the children’s heads had been mysteriously shaved during the night. Someone — or something — had cut their hair while they slept, and nobody had heard or seen anything. The family hoped it was a one-time occurrence, some bizarre anomaly that wouldn’t repeat. It repeated.

The next night, the youngest child woke up screaming in the middle of the night. When his grandparents rushed to him, they discovered he had been stabbed in the leg with a knife. An actual knife wound, bleeding and painful, inflicted by invisible hands while the child slept. His head had been shaved again too.

The family sought help from every source they could think of. They consulted prophets and traditional healers, seeking spiritual intervention. Instead of improving, the situation worsened after each attempt. Doors and windows would fly open inexplicably. The children’s clothes — especially their school uniforms — were torn and shredded, leaving them unable to attend school. Following one cleansing ceremony conducted by a spiritual healer, the house mysteriously caught fire. The flames consumed only the bedrooms. The kitchen and dining room remained completely untouched, as if the fire had been precisely targeted.

Desperate to protect the children, the family sent them to stay with their maternal grandmother in South Africa. They hoped that distance — crossing an international border — might break whatever connection existed between the children and the entities tormenting them.

The phenomena followed them there within three days.

While in South Africa, the children were again beaten by unseen forces. Food was tampered with. Windows were broken. Clothes were scattered around the house. Money mysteriously vanished. The situation was no better than it had been in Zimbabwe. The children were brought back home.

The family tried one more thing: having the children stay with neighbors, reasoning that perhaps the problem was tied to the house itself rather than the children. One night at a neighbor’s house, the disturbances followed them there too. The children were soaked with water from an unknown source — drenched, as if someone had dumped buckets on them, but no one had.

Mayinesi Chongwe, the children’s 80-year-old great-grandmother, found herself facing an additional burden on top of everything else. The community had begun labeling her a witch. Neighbors whispered that she must be responsible for the misfortunes plaguing her own family. She denied it tearfully, telling reporters that throughout her 80-year existence, she had remained a devout Christian. She had never practiced witchcraft or used any charms. But the accusations made getting help harder still. When fire broke out at the home during one incident, neighbors reportedly just watched rather than assisting. They were afraid of being associated with whatever curse they believed hung over that family.

The family pleaded publicly for any help they could get. They released a phone number for anyone willing to offer assistance.

Then, in April 2024, a local church decided to intervene. Members visited the home and spent time with the family. They concluded that a spirit was haunting them, and they proposed a remedy: intense prayer and fasting, conducted together, to drive out whatever entity had attached itself to the household.

They prayed. They fasted. And according to Mayinesi Chongwe, normalcy returned.

She told reporters she was happy that peace had finally returned to their house. The unseen creatures seemed to have been “sent back from where they came,” she said. Property that had been stolen during the haunting appeared to have been recovered. The family was living peacefully again, grateful for the church’s help.

Whether the resolution was permanent, and what exactly had changed, remained open questions. Some observers raised concerns that the “haunting” might have been a cover for real-world physical abuse — that the injuries to the children might have more mundane and more troubling explanations. No official investigation into that possibility was reported.

THE RIVERSIDE ATTACKS OF MANGALDAN

On the opposite side of the world, in Sitio Riverside within Barangay Embarcadero, Mangaldan, Pangasinan, Philippines, residents began reporting stone attacks in October 2025. The phenomena had a familiar pattern by now: loud impacts on rooftops at night, disrupted sleep, and an inability to identify who or what was responsible.

The community raised the issue with local authorities. Investigators did their work and actually identified a suspect — someone they believed might be responsible for throwing stones at houses. They interviewed this person on October 28, 2025.

Within days, the stone throwing resumed. And this time, it was more frequent and more disruptive than before.

A resident named Beverly Embornal described what it was like to live through the attacks. The disturbance to sleep was significant, she said. The sudden loud crashes on the rooftops, coming without warning, made it nearly impossible to rest properly. Residents would be lying in bed, finally drifting off, and then a tremendous bang would jolt them awake. This happened repeatedly, night after night.

Residents captured video of the attacks. The footage recorded the sound of stones striking rooftops — that distinctive crack of rock hitting material, over and over. One house sustained a broken window from repeated impacts. The stones weren’t just landing on roofs; they were hitting hard enough to shatter glass.

A woman named Shirley Biagtan reported that her 16-year-old child was struck by a ricocheting stone. The projectile hit their door first, bounced off, and then struck the teenager. Biagtan said she was furious when she found out. She wanted to confront whoever was responsible, to go out and find them and demand they stop. But her child told her about the injury too late — by the time she knew, there was no one to confront.

By November 2025, the situation had deteriorated to the point where frightened and exhausted residents rushed to the barangay hall — the local government office — to ask for help and protection. Large rocks were found scattered on rooftops and around houses throughout the community. Residents expressed fear that the stones could break through their roofs entirely, injure someone seriously, or cause major damage to their homes. The sound alone was causing panic and sleepless nights, especially for children and elderly residents who were particularly affected by the constant stress.

Barangay Chairperson Teofilo Frianieza Jr. stated that the attacks typically occurred between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. — a window of about three hours each evening when the community was under siege. The barangay council and police intensified their patrols, maintaining a presence from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. while the investigation continued.

The barangay also proposed funding for new CCTV cameras, hoping that better surveillance technology might help identify whoever — or whatever — was responsible for the attacks. As of the most recent reports, the investigation was ongoing, and the community was still waiting for answers.

BUDIRIRO: THE LANDLORD CONNECTION

An earlier case in Budiriro, a suburb of Harare, Zimbabwe, from April 2019 adds another layer to this pattern. A woman identified as Mai Munashe claimed that stones were pouring mysteriously from the roof of the apartment she and her husband rented. The attacks frightened her so badly that she gathered up her property and dumped it at a rank — a taxi stand — in the city center where her husband Paul worked as a tout, a person who solicits customers for transportation.

Mai Munashe had a theory about what was happening. She suspected her husband was involved, or at least knew something about it. Her reasoning: he had been unusually close with their now-deceased landlord. The two men had traveled together frequently, always going places together, and she never knew exactly where they went or what they did. When the landlord died and the stone attacks began, she connected the dots — or thought she did.

She also noticed something strange about the pattern of attacks. The stones only targeted her family and the landlord’s family. Another tenant in the same building was completely unaffected. Whatever was throwing stones, it seemed to be selective about its victims.

Her husband Paul refused to comment when reporters approached him. He told them his wife had all the information, and he had nothing to add.

But other people at the taxi rank told a different story. The touts who worked there contradicted Mai Munashe’s account. According to them, it was actually the landlord — before his death, presumably — who had come to dump the property at the rank. The reason was the same: stones were raining at the house, and someone wanted to escape them.

The conflicting accounts left the truth unclear. Someone was being pelted with stones from an invisible source. Someone was frightened enough to abandon their belongings. Beyond that, the details remained murky.

THE GENDERUWO OF BANYUWANGI

In Aging village, located in Purwoharjo District within Banyuwangi Regency, Indonesia, residents reported nightly stone attacks in June 2024. The regency sits at the eastern tip of Java, near the strait separating the island from Bali. It’s an area with a rich tradition of folklore and supernatural belief, which shaped how residents interpreted what was happening to them.

Stones and gravel struck homes between 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. each night — roughly the same time window that would later be reported in the Philippines. The projectiles hit roofs and walls, creating noise and causing residents to lose sleep.

Initial suspicions focused on a “Genderuwo” — a mythical Javanese spirit. In Indonesian folklore, the Genderuwo is typically described as a large, hairy, ape-like creature associated with mischief and sometimes sexual harassment of women. Whether such an entity was actually responsible for the stone throwing was, of course, impossible to verify.

Local residents weren’t content to simply accept a supernatural explanation and do nothing. They formed guard groups and took turns maintaining watch at night. They wanted to catch whoever or whatever was responsible. But despite their vigilance, they couldn’t catch anyone. The stones kept coming even while people stood there watching and waiting. The throwing continued in the presence of observers who never saw a thrower.

Local police investigated the incidents under the theory that human perpetrators were using slingshots or catapults to launch stones from a distance, beyond the sight of the guards. It was a reasonable hypothesis — humans with projectile weapons could theoretically hit targets without being seen if they were far enough away and hidden well enough. The problem was that no suspects were ever identified. The investigation produced no arrests, no explanations, no resolution.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: THE STONE-THROWING DEVIL

The phenomena documented in these 2024-2025 cases aren’t new. Stone-throwing poltergeist activity is among the oldest documented supernatural phenomena in recorded history, appearing in accounts that span centuries and continents.

The earliest recorded cases date to 530 CE, when supernatural stone throwing was reported in the home of the chief physician to Ostrogoth King Theodoric in what is now Italy. In 858 CE, stone attacks occurred in the town of Bingen on the Rhine during conflicts between Romans and Gauls. These accounts are fragmentary and difficult to verify, but they establish that people have been reporting this specific type of phenomenon for at least 1,500 years.

The most famous early American case occurred in 1682 on Great Island — now New Castle, New Hampshire — where George Walton’s tavern was bombarded with hundreds of stones over several months. This case was documented in unusual detail because one of the witnesses happened to be Richard Chamberlain, the secretary to the Province of New Hampshire. Chamberlain was staying at Walton’s tavern when the attacks occurred, and he later published a pamphlet describing what he’d seen. He called it “Lithobolia, or the Stone-Throwing Devil.”

Chamberlain described stones of all sizes — from small pebbles to rocks weighing over 30 pounds — that seemed to penetrate walls without causing structural damage and materialize indoors to strike furniture and surfaces. George Walton himself claimed to have been struck by more than 40 stones in a single day. The injuries he sustained affected him for the rest of his life.

The case attracted attention at the time. Multiple witnesses observed the phenomena, including the governor of West Jersey, who signed a sworn statement attesting to what he’d seen. Despite this attention and investigation, no human agent was ever identified. Nobody could explain where the stones were coming from or how they were being thrown.

Suspicions eventually fell on an elderly neighbor named Hannah Jones, who was embroiled in a land dispute with Walton. She was accused of witchcraft — of using supernatural means to attack her enemy. She denied it and turned the accusation around, claiming Walton was a wizard. Both accusations were serious in colonial New England, where the Salem witch trials were less than a decade away. Before authorities could render a verdict, though, the phenomena abruptly stopped. The stones ceased falling as suddenly as they had begun, and the case was never resolved.

The term “lithobolia” — derived from Greek words meaning “stone-throwing” — has since been applied to this specific type of poltergeist activity. It distinguishes stone-throwing entities from other supernatural creatures like the kobold, which in folklore typically occupies mines and underground spaces.

THE FIRE CONNECTION

Researcher Michael Harrison, in his 1976 book “Fire From Heaven,” proposed a connection that might explain the Indian fire cases. He argued that poltergeist activity and spontaneous fires might share a common mechanism. If objects could move or be thrown through poltergeist activity, Harrison reasoned, perhaps they could also be ignited. He even extended this theory to spontaneous human combustion — the controversial phenomenon of human bodies apparently catching fire without external ignition sources.

The 2024 cases from India seem to support at least part of this connection. In both the Sikandarpur and Bastauli cases, fires broke out repeatedly in enclosed spaces — inside wardrobes, within closed suitcases — without any identifiable ignition source. Cutting electrical power, which would eliminate the most obvious potential cause, had no effect. The fires continued anyway, as if electricity had never been the issue.

Harrison wasn’t the only researcher to notice patterns connecting different types of poltergeist phenomena. An earlier case from Talladega, Alabama in 1958 involved a family named Tuck — Calvin, his wife Willie Bell, and their six children — who were living in poverty when they began experiencing small, unexplained fires around their home. The fires appeared repeatedly over an extended period, matching the pattern that would later be seen in India. In the Tuck case, witnesses also reported the smell of sulfur — a detail that appears in various other paranormal accounts, from poltergeist cases to alleged demonic encounters.

Whether these connections are meaningful or coincidental remains a matter of debate. The phenomena, however, don’t occur in isolation. The same families and communities that experience stone throwing sometimes also experience unexplained fires, object movement, physical assaults, and other disturbances. The cases cluster in ways that suggest related causes, even if those causes remain unexplained.

PATTERNS AND QUESTIONS

Examining all of these cases together, certain patterns emerge. The stone-throwing phenomena overwhelmingly occur at night, typically between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. — that three-hour window appears repeatedly across different countries and cultures. Surveillance consistently fails to identify perpetrators, whether that surveillance involves human observers, CCTV cameras, or drones. In several cases, attacks intensify during official gatherings or investigations, as if whatever is responsible knows it’s being watched and wants to demonstrate its immunity to observation. The stones often strike near people without hitting them directly, though there are notable exceptions where victims suffered real injuries.

Authorities consistently propose human perpetrators using slingshots, catapults, or similar projectile devices from concealed positions. It’s a reasonable hypothesis — Occam’s razor suggests we should look for mundane explanations before entertaining supernatural ones. The problem is that these hypotheses never lead anywhere. The perpetrators are never caught. The concealed positions are never found. The slingshots and catapults remain theoretical.

These explanations also fail to account for several aspects of the phenomena. How do stones appear inside enclosed spaces? How do they move through solid barriers without causing structural damage? How do attacks continue when entire communities are on alert, when police and guards and drones are all watching? How do fires break out inside closed suitcases?

The families affected by these phenomena continue to live with the consequences. They have damaged homes to repair, physical injuries to heal from, and disrupted lives to rebuild. They have the knowledge that whatever happened to them remains unexplained, and that it could, presumably, happen again at any time.

Whether these cases represent elaborate hoaxes that somehow evaded detection, psychological contagion spreading through communities, misinterpretation of natural phenomena, or something genuinely beyond current scientific understanding is a question each observer must answer for themselves. What’s documented is that across at least four continents, in countries with vastly different cultures and belief systems, people reported strikingly similar phenomena throughout 2024 and 2025. Official investigations were conducted. Authorities responded. Surveillance was deployed.

And still, nobody could catch whoever was throwing the stones.

REFERENCES

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.