Lithobolia, or "Oh @#$%, demon rocks!"

In all of my time around rocks, I have never seen one move.

I like rocks. I collect them. I have a ton, too -- interesting fossils, gemstones, even just weird-looking concretions I've picked up hiking. I spent a lot of time around rocks when I worked for an environmental lab, too.

Moving rocks, though? Not a one. Not a stone, not a pebble, not even a chip.

I feel cheated, frankly. There are plenty of stories of moving rocks, so you think I would've come across at least one. Of course, considering 99% of these involve rock-hurling demons, I probably shouldn't complain to much.

I'm talking about lithoboly, or the phenomenon of having rocks thrown at you from an unseen source. Victims of it claim to be struck by hails of stones raining down from the sky, or even stones appearing suddenly in a room with them. It is often considered a symptom of a witch's curse or demonic possession. The term lithobolia was given to a particular flavor of poltergeist (best known as the noisy, mischievous ghosts that show up chiefly in places inhabited by teenagers) with an affinity for tossing rocks.

A very notable case occurred in New Hampshire in 1682. A home owned by a man named George Walton experienced stones flung against the outside of the house, in some of its rooms, and even at its occupants. Aside from the stone-throwing, Walton also found that objects inside and outside of his house moved mysteriously.

A man named Richard Chamberlain wrote about the story 17 years later. In his account, he claimed that an elderly woman named Hannah Jones was the root of Walton's misfortune -- as a witch, she had clearly been plaguing the Walton home with demonic hails of stones (for old lady reasons, I guess).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jones just happened to own some land Walton had his eye on. On the flip side, Walton was a Quaker tavern owner with two Native American employees and a long list of rowdy regular customers, so he and pretty much everyone he knew was considered an undesirable by his white Puritan neighbors at the time. If someone was hurling rocks at Walton's place, it probably didn't come as a surprise to anyone.
Funny thing is, the stories of mysterious hails of stones stopped once Chamberlain left town and investigators were getting ready to question the parties involved. Imagine that!

Lest you think that all cases of lithoboly are caused by crap dudes trying to muscle in on some grandma's turf with accusations of witchcraft, I'd like to point your attention to several hundred years later.

Picture it: New Jersey. 1956. A mysterious, unseen phantom hurls stones from a treeline, striking several houses and driving fear into the hearts of residents. It is a ghost? A demon? Some irresponsible kid messing around? Some miscreant with a grudge against the locals (or a real hateboner for residential architecture)? A very small sasquatch with weird ideas about what it means to have hobbies?

Nobody knows. What is known is that, after the police responded by machine-gunning the trees, the barrage of stones started right back up again. So, whoever the rock-throwing devil may be, he was either immune to bullets or had an absolutely ludicrously large set of (purely metaphorical) stones of his own. Nobody was apprehended at the time -- it's unknown whether or not someone came forward and admitted to the crime.
On a related note, Westville does seem to have more than its fair share of hauntings going on, so that's neat.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, there aren't really modern cases of lithoboly in the U.S. (at least, none that have warranted gunning down some trees and searching for ghosts afterward). It's a fascinating subject, but one that hasn't gotten a whole lot of attention recently. Have the ghosts moved on? Are demons focusing harder on kids reading Harry Potter and teenagers boning down in the woods? Are there just fewer chuckable rocks around than there used to be?

I don't know. One things for certain, though -- if I ever figure out how to invisibly fling rocks witchcraft-style, there are some people whose aluminum siding is totally screwed.