Olive pressing season in Uvaral is also poltergeist season, and the town no longer pretends otherwise. The oldest account comes from the friars at Dourenha. Their cellarer wrote, in a year nobody dated, that forty jars of new oil had crossed the cellar overnight and stood in one stack, heaviest at the bottom, with no jar cracked. He blamed the novices. The novices were shut in the chapel for a week, and on the fourth night the stack was built again.
The next account is two centuries nearer and fifteen miles down the valley. By then the thing had followed the oil trade to Uvaral and settled in the press-houses and the kitchens of the families who ran them. Filomena Casteira, a widow who kept bees and a school notebook, recorded that it took lids and never jars. One morning she found every lid from her pantry sunk in the rain barrel, the jars standing open and unspilled. She wrote beneath it, in a hand gone small with temper, that it had at least spared the good ladle.
Households in the valley rub the underside of every shelf with vinegar and crushed olive leaf, since the poltergeist is said to hate anything sour that it cannot knock over. Heavy pots live on the floor. Its leavings are easy to read. Drawers stand open two fingers wide, never more. Chairs are stacked tallest at the bottom, and a cold patch low on the wall, at about the height of a child's knee, marks where it has been standing. Milk kept in that room turns by noon.
I saw it once, in the lower cellar at Dourenha, by the light of a lamp set on the floor. It stands nearly seven feet in height and stoops to fit under the vault. A rotted linen apron hangs from its shoulders over a gray shroud. The left arm is longer than the right, and the fingers reach below the knee. One eye is larger than the other and neither blinks. Around its neck, on a length of plain twine, hangs a clay jar lid chipped at one edge. Nobody in either town claims it was one of theirs. It did not move toward me. The shelf beside it did, a jar at a time, sliding to the lip and holding there. When I raised the lamp it was gone, and a single lid lay on the flagstones, still turning on its rim.
- Classification
- Restless spirit, household haunt
- Habitat
- Cellars, pantries, olive press-houses
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- Nearly 7 ft, stooped under vaults
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Haunted kitchens and cellars
- Binomial
- Umbra strepitans
- Diet
- None; sours milk and oil
- Temperament
- Spiteful, restless, petty