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Staff and volunteers who work at Torquay Museum are convinced that the playful ghost of crime writer Agatha Christie may be behind frequent poltergeist activity in the gift shop.

The oldest museum in Devon has long been rumoured to be haunted and previously released CCTV footage showing leaflets mysteriously flying off shelves.

Now staff insist they have witnessed frequent poltergeist activity. They have seen Agatha Christie being launched across the room and wonder if the Queen of Crime is haunting the gift shop which contains many of her books.

The Museum holds the UK's only Agatha Christie collection, with relics of her childhood days at Ashfield, a beautiful detached villa in Barton Road which was demolished in the 1960s much to the author's distress.

Flying books are not the only signs of ghosts at the 175 year old exhibition space, which has previously embraced its reputation as Devon's most haunted museum and hosts 'Night at the Museum' style paranormal nights.

During one overnight ghost hunt the image of a young girl was photographed, bearing a striking resemblance to the young Agatha.

The staff who have seen flying books think the strange phenomenon is linked to an enormous ladder in the corner of the same room. It is made from wooden floorboards salvaged during the demolition of Ashfield, which young Agatha used to play on.

In the most recent paranormal incident last week shop manager Francesa Ferrara and volunteer Stuart Scott both witnessed two books fly off different shelves and hit a customer.

And when we asked if the video showing the flying books was a hoax both insisted: "No it's true - it happens all the time. It's spooky."

(Image: Colleen Smith)

Gift shop manager Francesca said: "Every time books fly off the shelves, it's always Agatha Christie books.

"It has happened so many times. The most recent was last Tuesday. This poor woman was walking by and one of the Agatha Christie books came flying at her. Then she walked over to the other stand and another Agatha Christie book hit her.

"She said she believes in ghosts and said 'You can tell them to go away if you don't want them here - but I don't mind'.

"We have a large collection of historic Agatha Christie books and first editions and it's only her which fly off."

(Image: Colleen Smith)

Stuart believes the shop is haunted: "We were both standing over on the opposite side of the room and saw it happen. The customer was walking by just here and the first book came flying off. Then she walked around to the other side and a different Agatha Christie book from another shelf flew off.

"I've seen similar things happen twice now. I believe in ghosts - there's got to be something out there."

Museum curator Clare Howe, whose scientific background is in archeology, is a non-believer. She said: "I think it happens when we have parties of schoolchildren running around upstairs."

But Francesca and Stuart both remain adamant that they are witnessing paranormal activity.

(Image: Colleen Smith)

Francesca said: "I've seen it happen four times in a year. It seems odd that it's always the Agatha Christie books - especially as we are the only Agatha Christie museum in the country and we have the ladder made from the floorboards standing there in the corner of the gift shop. She would have run around on those very floorboards at her childhood home."

(Image: Colleen Smith)

Back in 2016 Torquay Museum staff released this CCTV footage which showed the moment when leaflets flew off shelves:

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In a string of paranormal events, ghost hunters were left stunned in May 2016 after finger and thumb prints appeared on the inside of an unopened child's mummy case.

The event run by the museum and the Real Investigators of the Paranormal. Carl Smith from the museum said he was at a loss to explain how the fingerprints appeared on the inside of the mummy’s sarcophagus case.

“The weirdest thing was that we have a mummy, which we believe is Devon’s only human mummy. During the night on the inside of the case we saw what we believe were handprints on the inside. It was a pretty clear two fingers and a thumb."

(Image: Carl Smith)

The case had not been opened for seven years and he said it took seven men to lift the case open.

“It was definitely the highlight of the evening and something that we cannot explain. It freaked a few people out,”Mr Smith said.

And in a previous ghost hunt a startling image of a young woman was captured in the old Devon farmhouse exhibit.

In her old age, Agatha Christie said she never dreamed of Greenway, her home on the River Dart.

It was Ashfield, the elegant Torquay villa where she was born in 1890, that her dreams took her back to.

At the end of her autobiography, the crimewriter fondly recalled: “How well I know every detail there: the frayed red curtain leading to the kitchen, the sunflower brass fender in the hall grate, the Turkey carpet on the stairs, the big, shabby schoolroom with its dark blue and gold embossed wallpaper.”

Ashfield was the setting for a happy childhood. It was also where her daughter Rosalind was born and where the author’s parents lived out their lives. She begged her mother to keep it on after the death of her father, Frederick, when she was 11 years old.

But in 1938 Dame Agatha sold the Barton Road property and bought Greenway at Galmpton for £6,000.

“Ashfield, my home, has changed,” she lamented.

Torquay Boys Grammar School in Barton Road had been built during the previous decade and blocked the views down to the sea which she loved in her youth.

“Once it had been all countryside out of Torquay: three villas up the hill and then the road petered out into country. The lush green fields where I used to go to look at the lambs in spring had given way to a mass of small houses. No one we knew lived in our road any longer.”

In 1960, developers unveiled a scheme to bulldoze Ashfield and a neighbouring villa and replace them with blocks of flats and a petrol station. The proposal was turned down because of objections to the filling station, but the principle of new homes was agreed.

Dame Agatha heard about the designs on her former home and rushed to her solicitor to see if she could buy back the property and make a gift of it, perhaps as an old people’s home. But it was too late – the process of creating a new “estate” had begun.

(Image: Herald Express)

More than a year later, she summoned up the resolution to drive to Barton Road, where she wrote of “the meanest, shoddiest little houses I had ever seen".

There was nothing left except for “the defiant remains of what had been a monkey puzzle, struggling to exist in a cluttered back yard”.

She said that Ashfield and everything that went with it was over: "Only a ghost of a little girl playing with a hoop would linger in the place where she had once been so happy."

Avid Christie fan Bret Hawthorne believes Ashfield was the custodian of many of the keys to unlocking the character of Dame Agatha, but “incredibly, in perhaps the most colossal lack of foresight ever perpetrated by a local council” Torquay planners allowed the property to be obliterated.

(Image: Ed Oldfield)

Today only a blue plaque, fixed to a stone beside a pavement, commemorates the birthplace of the world’s most famous crime writer.