Rocks Fell Through a Ceiling That Had No Holes

The first rocks came flying out of the darkness while everyone was sitting outside. Someone was obviously throwing them, so the people at the house shouted into the yard and told whoever was doing it to come out.

Nobody answered. They searched around the property but couldn’t find anyone, so they finally went back inside.

That’s when rocks started falling inside the house too.

The Gravel Kept Coming

It was early 1998 in Humpty Doo, a small town near Darwin, Australia. Five adults were sharing a rented house on McMinns Drive, along with a baby girl named Jasmine.

The residents included Andrew and Kirsty Agius, Dave Clark, Jill Summerville and their friend Doug Murphy. They had lived there without any problems until the strange activity began.

At first, it was mostly small rocks. They landed on the floors, furniture and beds, sometimes falling right in front of people. The gravel looked exactly like the rocks covering the long driveway outside.

But there was something odd about it. The driveway was soaking wet from the tropical rain, while the rocks appearing inside were completely dry. Some even felt warm.

The residents climbed into the space above the ceiling to look for holes. They couldn’t find any, and when they opened the access hatch, more rocks reportedly fell onto their faces.

Bigger Things Started Flying

Before long, the rocks were joined by batteries, bottles, knives and pieces of broken glass. Things flew across rooms, struck walls and sometimes smashed windows.

Mattresses were found overturned, household appliances were knocked from shelves, and strange scraping noises came from inside the walls. The people living there were frightened, especially when the activity started happening at night.

Kirsty and Jill were having trouble sleeping. They wanted to leave, but finding somewhere else to live wasn’t easy.

The situation became even stranger when words started appearing around the house. Sometimes they were spelled out with Scrabble tiles, while others were made from small rocks carefully arranged on the floor.

Among the words were FIRE, SKIN, CAR, HELP and TROY. The residents connected some of them to a friend who had died in a car accident earlier that year. They began wondering whether whoever was throwing the rocks was also trying to tell them something.

The Priests Came to Help

The family eventually turned to the local church. Father Stephen de Souza from Darwin’s St Mary’s Cathedral was one of the first priests to visit.

During his visit, he reportedly saw a knife fly toward him from near a microwave. He said it stopped in midair, about half a metre from his chest, before dropping to the floor.

De Souza prayed over the house, and for three days, everything seemed to settle down. The family finally began to relax, but the disturbances soon returned.

Another priest, Father Tom English, came to investigate. He later described seeing an empty cartridge fall near his feet and a medicine bottle fly out of a room where nobody was standing.

English blessed the house and sprinkled holy water throughout the rooms. Things continued moving, and his crucifix reportedly kept disappearing from wherever he put it.

A Greek Orthodox priest also visited. He set up an altar on the kitchen table and began praying, but said something grabbed at his prayer book and twisted his arm behind his back. None of the visits brought a lasting end to the trouble.

The Television Cameras Arrived

By April, people across Australia were hearing about the house in Humpty Doo. Reporters began visiting, and Channel Seven sent a television crew to spend a week filming there.

The crew brought several cameras and hoped to catch some of the activity. But things had an annoying habit of happening just outside the camera’s view.

When the crew left cameras running inside an empty, locked house, very little happened. Once people returned or the camera operators stepped away, they would hear crashes from another room. The residents also claimed that messages appeared telling the crew to leave, including NO CAMERAS and NO TV.

Eventually, the television program aired a segment suggesting that one of the residents had been caught throwing an object. The family was furious and insisted the crew hadn’t captured what was really happening.

The story might have ended there, but two men who had been investigating strange events for years decided to visit.

Two Investigators Spent Four Days Inside

Paul Cropper and Tony Healy had heard Father English discussing the case on the radio. They changed their travel plans and arrived in Humpty Doo on April 27, 1998.

Within minutes of arriving, they heard something hit the ground behind them. A yellow light bulb was rolling across the concrete patio. It appeared to have fallen from above, bounced on the hard surface and somehow survived without breaking.

About twenty minutes later, Cropper was sitting near the kitchen while two women worked at the sink. He heard rocks hitting the metal roof, followed by a rattling sound inside the room. Thirteen pieces of gravel were scattered across the kitchen floor.

Cropper had been watching both women and hadn’t seen either of them throw anything. He began taking careful notes, recording where everyone was standing whenever something happened.

Over the following days, he watched more strange incidents. Batteries struck walls, small objects appeared in empty rooms, and a mattress kept turning up twisted out of place.

On one occasion, a small crucifix flew across a room while Cropper was standing alone. Another time, an empty bullet casing dropped onto his crossed legs while he was having coffee.

Andrew, who was sitting across from him, said he had watched the casing appear above Cropper’s shoulder just before it fell.

The Rocks Started Falling on Cropper

One of Cropper’s strangest experiences happened while he was sitting alone at the kitchen table. He suddenly felt something tapping the top of his head. Small pieces of gravel were falling onto him, but so gently that they didn’t hurt.

He looked up, expecting to find someone dropping them through an opening. There was nobody else in the room, and the ceiling above him was completely intact.

Healy had a frightening encounter of his own when a knife flew past his ear and struck a nearby wall. Other objects continued turning up around the house, sometimes while the investigators were watching the people who lived there.

Both men were becoming convinced that something very unusual was happening. They had arrived knowing about the television crew’s accusations, but now they were experiencing incidents themselves.

By April 30, their visit was coming to an end. Cropper and Kirsty were elsewhere in the house, leaving Healy alone in the main room. Healy decided to challenge whatever was causing the trouble to give him a sign.

He made the request in his head without saying a word.

Three Scrabble tiles fell from above and spelled ASS.