This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 19, Issue 1, from 2006.

Given that the majority of smashed windscreens on the Portsmouth Road are likely to have been caused by loose road chippings, how is it that something so inoffensive could lead to a national mystery?

We believe that there are two crucial factors in the origins and level of interest in the phantom sniper incidents. These are: (1) the volume of traffic along the Portsmouth Road and (2) the campaigning nature of the Esher News and Advertiser.

When visiting modern-day Esher, one is immediately struck by how dominant the Portsmouth Road is within the village. This road is one of the main trunk routes from London to the south coast and it cuts through the middle of the village. Even now, years after the building of the Esher bypass road, it carries a massive volume of traffic along it creating much noise and congestion.

At the time of the sniper incidents there was a great deal of concern in Esher about the level of traffic running through the village and of the number of accidents this was generating. Practically every issue of the ENA was dominated by articles about the road. Each issue would carry several items concerning that week’s traffic accidents and each month there would be a tally of accidents in comparison with the previous month. Throughout the entire span of the phantom sniper the ENA showed extreme concern at what the traffic was doing to the village and was actively involved in the local campaign for a bypass road to be built.

Given that the Portsmouth Road was then the busiest highway in Britain (see The Skeptic, 18.4, Part Two) it is no wonder that traffic would be high on the list of concerns of locals and the council alike. This local obsession with traffic may have laid the foundations for the phantom sniper.

It is probably no coincidence that the first acknowledged shooting was a very high profile one involving the celebrity journalist Richard Dimbleby, who reported his broken windscreen to the Esher police. This would have made both local people and the ENA aware of the idea that there was a sharp shooter abroad on the Portsmouth Road. As further reports of smashed windscreens came in, so the ENA assumed that there was a connection between them and promoted the idea of a sniper.

Judging by the number of times that the ENA mentions the Esher Police Station, it would appear that the newspaper was getting most of its reports from a contact inside the Esher police station. This would explain not only how the ENA got to hear of so many broken windscreens but also why the incidents are so tightly clustered on the road between Esher and Cobham (see map). Anybody who received a damaged windscreen on this stretch of road, and who thought that they had been shot at, would automatically call in at the nearest police station which would be in either Esher (if heading northbound) or Cobham (southbound). Assuming that there was some communication between the Esher and Cobham police stations, the ENA would get to hear of all such incidents.

It is also noticeable that a good many of the drivers reporting these incidents lived locally. Local drivers who were aware of the sniper rumours would be more likely to report their damaged windscreens to the authorities than passing motorists who might put the incident down to loose stones.

After the start of the second wave of damaged windscreens the ENA started to take an interest not only in the ‘shootings’, but also actively campaign to get them looked at by the authorities. It would appear that this campaigning, which resulted in it carrying 40 articles on the matter in 36 months, caused a mild form of hysteria in which any windscreen damage from anywhere within a 20 kilometre radius around Esher, could get reported. The eventual involvement of the national press, the local council, the Minister for Transport and the Metropolitan Police was seen by the ENA as a vindication of its position on the matter. The editorial of the 20th June 1952 makes it clear that the ENA sees itself as having been crucial in the promotion of this affair, and they are probably correct in this.

Like all bouts of social delusion, there comes a point when the number of incidents peak and interest begins to fall away again. This seems to have been reached in about late September or early October 1952 when after over six months solid coverage the number of reports and news items began to decrease markedly. Although there was the odd burst of interest, the phantom sniper had become yesterday’s news.

The last piece of the puzzle concerns the large number of smashed windscreens on that one small stretch of the Portsmouth Road. By our count at least 43 windscreens were smashed over a 36 month period (this excludes windscreens that were broken outside the Esher area). It was this large number that drew the ENA’s attention in the first place and which helped perpetuate the idea of a local sniper. Is it really feasible that loose stones or structural failure could cause so many breakages in such a short space of time?

Unfortunately, we do not have the police incident books from Esher or Cobham, so it is impossible to know how many reports of windscreen damage they were receiving in the periods before and after the sniper incidents. We also know nothing of the road surface conditions. We do, however, have some other clues.

On average there were one or two windscreens a week being reported to the ENA during the peak period between March and October 1952. According to the traffic census and stone damage data quoted in the last issue, the number of incidents is perfectly within the bounds of normality. The levels of damage do not look excessive when compared with the volume of traffic and the susceptibility of car windscreens to damage from loose stones.

A comparison to other phantom sniper incidents

Given that the scenario outlined above relies on circumstances that are capable of being replicated elsewhere in the world, how does the Esher episode compare to other phantom sniper incidents?

Fort’s Phantom Snipers:

Charles Fort mentions a number of phantom sniper incidents in his book Wild Talents. Most of these concern people who have been shot and the bullet found but not the sniper – these do not concern us here. There are, however, two apparent episodes of mass shootings that interest us that took place in London in April to May 1927 and Camden, New York from November 1927 to February 1928.

An investigation of local London papers revealed that the incidents listed by Fort were totally unconnected to each other and most involved genuine shootings in which real, not phantom, bullets were recovered. Through pressure of time, the New York incidents were not investigated but they superficially would appear to have more in common with the Esher incidents than the 1927 London ones.

The Seattle panic:

During March 1954, police in the city of Bellingham in north-west Washington State were baffled by reports that a ghostly sniper was shooting at car windscreens. The situation soon reached crisis proportions. Over a one-week period in early April over 1,500 windscreens were reported damaged. Despite the massive number of ‘attacks’, police chief William Breuer had no suspects and no tangible evidence. Authorities surmised that the most likely weapon ‘was a BB-gun barrel attached to a compressor in a spark-plug socket, fired from a moving car’.

At the height of the episode, people across the city of 34,000 placed various items, from newspapers to door masts and even plywood, over their windscreens for protection. Meanwhile, downtown parking garages were under heavy security. The phantom pellet-shooter seemed to be everywhere; even police cars reported being struck. In lieu of a lack of evidence for vandals, by mid-April local and national media began emphasising the mysterious nature of the damage. On April 12, a reporter for Life Magazine came to Bellingham and referred to the episode as ‘ghostly’ and the perpetrators as ‘phantom’-like. The next evening, the Seattle Times talked about ‘elusive BB-snipers’. In time, reports of the mysterious windscreen attacks moved closer to Seattle, Washington, 80 miles to the south. Reports of strange pit marks on windscreens first reached Seattle on the evening of April 14, and by the end of the next day, weary police had answered 242 phone calls from concerned residents reporting tiny pit marks on over 3,000 vehicles. In some cases, whole parking lots were reportedly affected. The reports quickly declined and ceased. On April 16 police logged 46 pitting claims, and 10 on the 17th, after which no more reports were received.

Nahum Medalia of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Otto Larsen of the University of Washington studied the episode. They stated that the most common damage report involved claims that tiny pit marks grew into dime-sized bubbles embedded within the glass, leading to a folk theory that sand flea eggs had somehow been deposited in the glass and later hatched. The sudden presence of the ‘pits’ created widespread anxiety as they were typically attributed to atomic fallout from hydrogen-bomb tests that had been recently conducted in the Pacific and received saturation media publicity. At the height of the incident on the night of April 15, the Seattle mayor even sought emergency assistance from US President Dwight Eisenhower.

In the wake of rumours such as the existence of radioactive fallout, and by a few initial cases amplified in the media, residents began looking at, instead of through, their windscreens. An analysis of the mysterious black, sooty grains that dotted many Seattle windscreens was carried out at the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Washington. The material was identified as cenospheres – tiny particles produced by the incomplete combustion of bituminous coal. The particles had been a common feature of everyday life in Seattle, and could not pit or penetrate windscreens.

Medalia and Larsen noted that as the pitting reports coincided with the H-bomb tests, media publicity on the windscreen damage seems to have reduced tension about the possible consequences of the bomb tests. Secondly, the very act of phoning police and appeals by the Mayor to the Governor and even President of the United States “served to give people the sense that they were ‘doing something’ about the danger that threatened”.

Although on a shorter time scale, the Seattle panic has clear similarities to the Esher one and is undoubtedly the best studied comparison that we could find.

Glasspox:

Three articles from 1950s editions of FATE magazine cover smashed windscreen incidents and refer to these epidemics as being due to ‘glasspox’. According to FATE, ‘glasspox’ was apparently a very common phenomenon in the 1950s. They make mention of mass windscreen damage in Pittsburgh and Rome as well as carrying several individual accounts from readers. Theories cited include sonic booms, a reaction to windscreen cleaning fluids, radioactivity, and even microscopic organisms attacking the glass! One reader even asked an Ouija board about the cause of glasspox; the ‘spirit’ placed the blame on airborne ‘bantom ash from radium deposits’.

Miscellaneous others:

Frank Edwards, in his book Stranger than Science, which carries a brief report on the Esher incidents, notes that ‘…in June of 1952, State police in both Indiana and Illinois found themselves chasing a phantom gunman who was fully as elusive as the one in England’. Attempts were not made to find these incidents although it is probable that Edwards heard of these through his connection with FATE magazine, as was the case with the Esher incidents.

And finally…

The search through four years’ worth of the ENA produced one other item of interest. This concerns two UFO sightings that were reported in the ENA, both of which are extremely tame in comparison to today’s surgically obsessed extraterrestrials. We can only agree with the author of a letter to the ENA who says of the UFO: “It is a pity that your eyewitness did not notice which side of the road the object flew along so that we might have gathered whether the aircraft was British or Continental?”

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank staff at the Esher Library, British Newspaper Library, D M S Watson Science Library, Automobile Association, The Esher News and FATE Magazine.

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 18, Issue 4, from 2005.

The last issue of The Skeptic outlined the panic and mayhem that ensued when the small English town of Esher apparently became the target of a mysterious sniper. The phantom gunman based himself on a four kilometre stretch of road between Esher and Cobham and, between December 1950 and December 1953, was alleged to have shot out the windscreens of at least 51 motor vehicles. A suspect was never even seen, let alone caught, and no bullets were ever recovered. As the number of incidents mounted so did the sense of hysteria in Esher, but who or what could be responsible?

What was happening on Hellfire Pass?

Trying to solve the mystery of the phantom sniper of Esher was no easy task. No firm solutions were offered at the time and no further work has been done in the fifty years since the trouble began. During this time much valuable evidence, in the form of local police records, has been destroyed. Nonetheless, the authors have the detailed records from the Esher News and Advertiser (ENA) and a few scraps of evidence from other sources (see The Skeptic, 18.3). From these we believe it is possible to test some of the possible solutions to the phantom sniper mystery and ultimately to offer our own opinion as to what exactly did occur on the Portsmouth Road during the early 1950s.

In this section we will test the four main theories put forward as the cause of the broken windows. More minor ideas, such as the ghostly highwayman and falling pinecones, are excluded because they are unworkable.

1. Supersonic booms

Early on, during the second wave of windscreen shattering, a national newspaper put forward the idea that sonic booms from low-flying military aircraft may have been responsible for shattering the windscreens on the Portsmouth Road. This idea was picked up by both the ENA and some of its readers.

The first acknowledged breaking of the sound barrier occurred in October 1947, only a few years before the Esher incidents. In the years following this achievement the term ‘supersonic’ entered popular culture as a euphemism for anything that was fantastic or great. There was, however, also concern over the effect of supersonic booms on local property, especially windows which could potentially shatter as a consequence. Although few, if any, people in Esher could ever have heard a supersonic boom at this time, there was already talk about the possibility of these noises being heard in the region, and the town itself is on the flight path from nearby Heathrow. It is probably for this reason that this theory gained local popularity. It is, however, a poor idea in practice.

The pattern of the windscreen shattering, as reported by the ENA and others, does not suggest a supersonic cause. Surely cars from a wider area would be affected as would the windows of houses, let alone the side windows of cars. It is also questionable as to how many supersonic aircraft there would have been operating in the area at that time. With the aid of hindsight we now also know that supersonic aircraft may well rattle a few windows, but they very rarely break them and then certainly not the toughened glass of car windscreens. Even the ENA rejects this idea itself.

2. Lone gunmen and naughty schoolboys

A chief reason for rejecting the supersonic boom theory is that in a large majority of cases motorists actually reported hearing an object strike their windscreen and in a number of cases there is clear evidence in the form of circular pock marks in the glass (e.g. Robert Bruce had a circular crack in his windscreen after driving along the Portsmouth Road on 4th June 1952). In the majority of cases it seems as though a missile of some kind is the most likely explanation. It is the origin of these missiles that forms the mystery.

Throughout its coverage of the windscreen incidents, the ENA favoured the idea of there being a genuine sniper hiding at the roadside and taking pot shots at passing cars. In favour of this idea are the tight distribution of incidents, most of which occur along the same short section of the Portsmouth Road, and the sound of a gun shot that accompanied many of the broken windscreens. With reports like that of Mr Tickner, who said he saw a flash and then heard an explosion just prior to his windscreen shattering, it is no wonder that a gunman was suspected. It is clear that at least some members of the local constabulary favoured this idea too, judging by their willingness to comb the surrounding countryside for evidence.

However, the one consistent problem with this theory has been the lack of a single bullet to be recovered from either inside the car or from the roadside. At other incidents where windows or cars have been shot at, the bullet is normally quite easy to find. The ENA and members of the local council overcame the problem of a lack of bullets by consistently advocating that an airgun must have been used.

An airgun is a light rifle which uses compressed air to fire light bullets, pellets or even stones over relatively short distances. They are low-powered and their ammunition fragile so whilst it might be possible for an airgun shot to break or damage a windscreen, the bullet itself would probably not survive the impact and certainly wouldn’t penetrate the glass to land inside the car. This would adequately explain the lack of a bullet at the scene of the crime. In addition, airguns are light, cheap and did not require the owner to a hold licence and so could easily have been operated by a local youth or other mischief-maker.

Although airguns vary in power and accuracy, it is reasonably certain that if fired from close range a pellet or rock from one could shatter a windscreen. Several experiments have been performed with airguns and windscreens, the results of which all show that airgun pellets can indeed shatter all types of windscreen glass.

Whilst it is certainly possible that there was indeed a sniper with an airgun hiding in the bushes surrounding the Portsmouth Road, there are a certain number of problems with this idea.

The first of these concerns the accuracy available from an airgun. Being low-powered, the effective range of most airguns is only a few hundred metres and, like all guns, their accuracy decreases with increasing distance from the target and with increased wind and rain. Despite all these factors the sniper seems to have been an uncannily good shot under all types of light and weather conditions. The sniper managed to shoot out the windscreens of dozens of cars accurately, without missing and hitting other parts of the car, most notably the bodywork and side windows.

On top of this the sniper was capable of doing it at night and in all weather conditions including on one occasion a snowstorm blizzard! To accomplish this, the sniper would have to be very close to the roadside indeed, and yet he or she was never once spotted by passing motorists, police patrols or people who have pulled over after having had their windscreens shattered. This seems very strange indeed.

The strongest piece of evidence in favour of a sniper is the case of Mr Frank Smith whose car was apparently hit on the driver’s door by a .317 bullet which left a sizeable hole (see The Skeptic, 18.3). All this would seem to point strongly in favour of Mr Smith having been shot at, but there are some strange inconsistencies noticeable in the reporting of this incident.

Firstly there is the calibre of the bullet which, at .317, is much larger and more powerful than the airgun pellets hitherto believed to be responsible for the other broken windscreens. Either the sniper had changed his means of operating or was using a different gun for this one occasion.

More puzzling though is the lack of any mention of a bullet being found embedded in the door even though, according to the ENA article, a ‘ballistic expert’ was involved in the case. However, the article never states that the ballistic expert actually examined the car, merely that he suggests that it could be a .317 bullet. Stranger still his assertion that the bullet could have “ricochetted [sic] off the road surface before hitting the panel”.

Does this imply that the angle of entry was such that the missile had to come from a downward direction, which would seem to be very odd indeed? We are not given enough information to decide, but this case has enough inconsistencies to suggest that either a bullet was not involved or that maybe this shooting is not related to the other windscreen incidents.

It is also interesting that despite this apparent prima facie case of a shooting along the Portsmouth Road, for several months afterward the police still maintained that there was no evidence of malicious damage to any of the cars involved in the sniper incidents.

A further suggestion made on a number of occasions was that schoolboys with catapults were responsible for the damage. A good catapult with a stone or steel ball-bearing could easily damage a car windscreen and could even be more powerful than some airguns. The suggestion that schoolboys could be involved came early on in the second wave of incidents, when a police sergeant told the ENA: “Perhaps it will stop when the children go back to school”.

However, the catapult theory, which was suggested on more than one occasion, has all the same problems of accuracy in adverse conditions as the airguns do. There is also the prolonged period of time over which the incidents occurred and the wide spread of incidents beyond the Portsmouth Road. All these work against the theory of non-mobile children with catapults. There is also only one windscreen broken at a time which suggests a remarkable patience for impudent children.

Interestingly, during some library research in Esher, one of the authors was approached by a local woman (to whom we shall afford anonymity) who said she was around the age of 12 when the sniper was in full swing. She claimed that many of the incidents were down to herself and her friends throwing tomatoes at passing cars, something that does not tie in with any of the ENA reports. She also mentioned that she knew of ‘older boys’ who were using airguns to take shots at car windscreens, but her stories sounded remarkably like those that are reflected in the ENA’s letter columns and may well have been based on local gossip at the time.

Although the sniper theory has some credibility to it, there are massive problems with the feasibility of carrying out this task with such accuracy over such a long period of time. It was a theory that was eventually dismissed by the police and is not favoured here either.

3. Inferior glass

The Automobile Association (AA) is quoted as saying that the damage was most likely to be due to inferior glass. The AA was consulted over this but could provide no further help, being unable to find any reference to the Esher incidents in their newsletters or press releases of the time.

It is unknown how inferior glass could be responsible for the Esher incidents except possibly being in conjunction with movements in the frame of the vehicle causing the glass to flex and crack. This, however, would not explain the starred windscreens or indeed the other evidence of impact that most people reported.

4. Stones on the road

An obvious explanation for the broken windscreens is that loose stones on the road were being flicked into the air by passing traffic and then impacting into the windscreens of other cars. This possibility was suggested right from the outset of the Esher incidents and was repeated many times by many different people. It is also clear that the local authorities favoured this theory when they sent a sweeper lorry to clear the Portsmouth Road, and that the police and Ministry of Transport, with their insistence that there was no evidence of malicious damage, also favoured an explanation along these lines. There is little doubt that flying stones can cause the kind of damage seen along the Portsmouth Road, but given the large number of incidents in such a short space of time, how likely is it?

When looking at the likelihood of stones being the cause of the Esher incidents, it is necessary to take a number of factors into account including the volume of traffic, the pattern of windscreen breakage and the type of glass used in cars of the day. We shall deal with these points individually.

i) Volume of traffic on the Portsmouth Road

During the early 1950s the Portsmouth Road (then the A3 road) was the major route for driving between London and south coast cities such as Portsmouth, Brighton and Southampton. It was therefore very busy indeed and the ENA had been campaigning for some time on the issue of traffic accidents and pollution through Esher itself, and with good cause (this is dealt with more fully in part three of this study). In September 1951 a census by the Automobile Association showed that there was an average of 987 cars an hour passing through Esher during the daytime, making that stretch of the Portsmouth Road officially Britain’s busiest highway. Allowing for slack periods at night, that would mean that around 12,000 to 15,000 vehicles a day passed through Esher town centre, a staggering number for an old Roman Road not designed for the purpose.

Given that somewhere in the region of 84,000 vehicles were travelling along the Portsmouth Road in a week, the occurrence of one or two stone-damaged windscreens does not make that look statistically unlikely. When one realises that during the three years in which the “phantom sniper” operated, something like over 12,000,000 cars must have travelled the road, then the 51 recorded damaged windscreens during this time actually looks statistically quite low (it equates to a 0.004% chance of a car along the Portsmouth Road being damaged during this time). In other words, the damage occurring to the windscreens is not that statistically unusual.

ii) Damaged windscreen statistics

There are statistics for everything in this world, including stone damage to windscreens. In 1998 Edgeguard International, an American glass manufacturer, undertook a survey of nearly 4,000 parked cars; 45% showed evidence of stone damage on their windscreen. This survey was backed up with another statistic which states that ‘stones cause 90% of windshield replacements’.

The seriousness of stone damage was also outlined in a report for the Ministry of Transportation and Highways of British Columbia, Canada, where loose aggregate on roads was causing a serious problem with broken and damaged windscreens. They recommended using smaller aggregate during their winter road gritting programme.

These results would appear to suggest that windscreen damage by loose stones is very common indeed with up to half of all cars showing evidence of stone damage. When these statistics are put together with the huge volume of traffic seen on the Portsmouth Road, the number of incidents again does not look statistically abnormal.

iii) Patterns of windscreen damage and windscreen type

One reason that the Esher incidents look so abnormal is because of the large number of windscreens that are not just chipped or starred, but actually shattered. According to the information given in the ENA and others, of the 51 damaged vehicles 32 actually had their windscreens completely destroyed. Although much was made of this destruction at the time, this may come down to the windscreen types being used in the 1950s.

Virtually all modern cars have laminated windscreens which have a thin layer of rubbery plastic sandwiched between two layers of glass. When hit by an object a laminated windscreen will not shatter or frost over, it will merely produce a spider-web pattern. However, laminated glass was only just coming into regular use in the early 1950s and a great many cars travelling along the Portsmouth Road would have had windscreens that were made of tempered glass which, when hit by an object, shatters into thousands of small pieces. It is this shattering that produces the characteristic ‘frosted over’ effect that can still be seen in broken side and rear windows of modern cars.

This difference in design leaves tempered glass more open to shattering than laminated glass. The fact that in the early 1950s tempered glass was more common than laminated glass would explain why so many windscreens were shattered. The glass type is only mentioned in two of the Esher incidents; both of these were laminated windscreens and both received only minor damage, not shattering which, whilst not conclusive, does follow the above pattern.

Further evidence in favour of loose stones comes from the pattern of the windscreen damage. For a start, most of the damage was to windscreens suggesting that the missile was coming towards the vehicle. Whilst a sniper could hit windscreens, it would be more likely that they would end up taking out side windows instead. Only one side shot was reported and that was the ‘bullet hole’ in Frank Smith’s car door. A second piece of evidence comes from the area in which the windscreen was hit. Of the four reports in which the area of impact is listed, all are on the driver’s side of the car. This is significant because stones flicked into the air are usually done so by traffic going in the opposite direction, which means that the stones are most liable to hit the driver’s side. However, stones lifted by a car in front can hit the windscreen anywhere at all.

The noise of a stone hitting a windscreen, from first-hand experience, is like a loud, sudden crack. Some people associated this noise with the shot of a gun, but given that the weapon most commonly cited was an airgun, and that the noise always came with the damage, this is again better evidence of a stone than a gunman. A shot would be expected to be heard after the damage if the shot came from some distance away.

It is also possible that there was something wrong with the road surface between Esher and Cobham which led to a greater than usual amount of loose stones on the road although, given the large volume of traffic, an abnormal road surface would not be necessary to produce the level of damage seen.

Conclusions

Given the evidence cited here we feel that at least the majority, if not all, the incidents along the Portsmouth Road can be explained by loose stones on the road being flicked into the path of other cars.

This might well explain what caused the physical damage to the cars but it does not offer an insight as to why the town of Esher acted in the way it did when faced with a few damaged windscreens. In the next issue we shall look for an explanation behind this episode of mass panic and look at other incidents round the world where broken windscreens have lead to civil unrest.

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 18, Issue 3, from 2005.

In the 1950’s the English town of Esher was apparently subjected to a three-year reign of terror by a phantom sniper. This lone gunman is alleged to have shot at dozens of motorists as they passed through the town, smashing their windscreens and causing other damage. No bullets or other missiles were found that could account for the damage and, despite a police manhunt, no suspect was ever brought to book.

The shootings raised serious concerns in the local community and the story even managed to make it into the national press. Despite its brief moment of fame, the actions of the phantom sniper were quickly forgotten and would have likely escaped attention altogether if the authors hadn’t spotted a reference to it in the book Stranger than Science written by Frank Edwards in 1959.

Edwards’ brief report led the authors to track down further references and eventually to uncover a whole series of events that, as far as we know, have remained hitherto uncommented upon by social historians. We will, over three issues of The Skeptic, fully document the Esher phantom sniper incidents, offer an explanation as to their cause, and briefly compare them to other similar incidents world-wide.

The start of the trouble

Esher is a small town located on the outskirts of south-west London in the county of Surrey. It is an ancient settlement built around an old Roman road which is now a major highway. This road, known as the Portsmouth Road or the old A3, runs north-south through Esher’s town centre and is a direct link between London and the south coast cities of Brighton and Portsmouth and was the focus of the phantom sniper incidents.

The geography and population of this region has changed little since the early 1950s. Although a bypass road, built in the 1960s, takes much of the traffic away from Esher, the Portsmouth Road remains a busy thoroughfare. The focus of the phantom sniper incidents was a 4 km stretch of the Portsmouth Road that runs between Esher in the north, to the town of Cobham in the south. Despite high population densities in the Surrey region, this stretch of road runs through largely unpopulated heath and common land before reaching the outskirts of Cobham. Other incidents mostly occurred in the more populated area to the north of Esher either on the Portsmouth Road or on some of the other large routes linking the Portsmouth Road with other London satellite towns such as Kingston, Surbiton and Thames Ditton.

The story of the phantom sniper is almost exclusively documented through the pages of The Esher News and Advertiser (ENA), a local weekly paper that was to become obsessed with this mystery. The ENA’s first mention of the phantom sniper comes from its edition of 12th January 1951. Under the title Hell-Fire Pass? a brief article mentions that since the beginning of December there had a been a spate of car windscreens being spontaneously shattered on the same short stretch of the Portsmouth Road between the towns of Esher and Cobham. The road had been nick-named by some motorists as ‘Hell-Fire Pass’. The ENA lists three incidents and interviews one of the drivers, a Mr H Tickner of Esher, whose description of his experience would come to characterise those of many people in the months to come:

On Tuesday morning Mr Tickner, of 90, High-Street, Esher, was driving his car towards Cobham when, as he was passing along the Fairmile, he saw a sudden flash, heard an explosion and his windscreen was starred so much that he was forced to pull up. A piece of the windscreen the size of a sixpence fell inside the car, and the spring holding the licence holder in position was shot on to the back seat. At the time no cars were coming towards him, but one had just passed him on the way to Cobham. He got out of the car, but could find no trace of any missile.

The other two witnesses are not interviewed but it is significant that the first person that the ENA cites as having been a victim of the sniper is the political journalist and well-known broadcaster Richard Dimbleby. The article indicates that Mr Dimbleby’s experience was well-known stating that: “it will be remembered that early last December Mr Richard Dimbleby, the well-known broadcaster, reported to Esher police that his windscreen had been hit, and it was at first supposed the missile was a .22 bullet”.

In a later article the ENA again asserts that the first acknowledged smashed windscreen was that of Richard Dimbleby, and gives an exact date of the 2nd December 1950 for the incident. Given the national fame of Mr Dimbleby, we wondered whether his encounter might not have been reported in other local or national papers. However, a search produced only one very brief mention of the incident in the 8th December edition of the London Evening Standard in which, at the bottom of an article about a BBC coach being hit by a bullet near Birmingham, it adds that: “recently Sonia Holm and her husband, and Richard Dimbleby were shot at when travelling in their cars”.

The recognition that there may be a serial sniper at work on ‘Hell-Fire Pass’ led to the ENA running two further articles on smashed windscreen incidents on the 26th January and 9th February 1951. In these articles it lists another four incidents to have occurred along ‘Hell-Fire Pass’ and speculates that either a sniper or loose stones on the road could be responsible. An editorial requests that either the highway authority or the police look into the issue as a matter of urgency. After this there is a break in the coverage of these incidents of several months.

The height of the panic

A sustained number of sniper incidents began on the 15th December 1951 when Mr S Jay, a teacher from Cobham, was driving south along the Portsmouth Road when he “heard a crack like a pistol and saw his complete windscreen frost over”. This was again covered by the ENA which blames a person with a “catapult, air-gun or a .22 rifle”.

Mr Jay’s smashed windscreen was to be the beginning of a prolonged period of local, and eventually national, interest in the strange happenings along the Portsmouth Road. By the 11th January 1952 the ENA had recorded 12 sniper incidents from the same stretch of the Portsmouth Road. By mid-March this total had risen to 14 and the nature of the ENA’s reporting had taken on a more serious tone with one article asking the authorities: “When will action be taken to end this menace at Esher?”

By now the ENA was firmly backing the idea of a sniper with an airgun being responsible, a position that would seem to be justified by the incident that occurred on the 20th March. On this date a Mr Frank C Smith from Thames Ditton was driving north along the Portsmouth Road when he “felt the car rock and pulled up to find out what happened”. On examining his car he was shocked to find a 9 mm hole in the driver’s door, about 8 cm below the door handle. It appeared as though somebody had taken a pot shot at him. The ENA ran a picture of a worried looking Mr Smith sitting in his damaged car and commented on the case:

A ballistic expert has since said that it was probably a .317 bullet, an unusual calibre for a British gun, but one quite common in Italy. If it was fired from a high bank along the side of the road, it might have ricochetted [sic] off the road surface before hitting the panel. If the gun had been aimed at the door, the bullet would have killed the driver.

Mr Smith’s incident marks a turning point in the history of the phantom sniper. From this moment on the concerns of the ENA and the local community were to be taken seriously by the police and the local council.

After the next series of smashed windscreens, which were reported within two weeks of Mr Smith’s shooting, the police began to patrol the Portsmouth Road and even instigated a detailed search of the surrounding common land. However, this did nothing to lessen the activities of the phantom sniper and by the 16th May the ENA had recorded a total of 20 incidents. It was at around this point that interest in the happenings at Hell-Fire Pass began to attract attention from outside the region. The shattered windscreen of Mr Eric Sykes, which occurred on the 9th May, is the first of the phantom sniper incidents to make it into the back pages of the London Evening Standard where the newspaper glibly states that the police are “looking for someone with a gun”.

During the following weeks yet more reports of damaged cars came flooding in. For the first time a car windscreen was shattered, not on the Portsmouth Road, but a couple of kilometres to the east on Copsem Lane which leads into the town of Oxshott. Not only was the phantom sniper spreading further afield, he was also becoming more adventurous in his shooting, hitting not only windscreens but also the headlights of an ambulance and a private motorist. In the light of these revelations the local council swept the Portsmouth Road between Esher and West-End Lane in the hope that loose stones, and not a gunman, might be the cause of the trouble.

The first national coverage came at this time in the form of an article which is referred to by the ENA. We could not track down where this national article was published, but the ENA reports that it put forward the idea that the sonic boom from low flying aircraft might be to blame. In an editorial on the matter, the ENA comments on this idea and ultimately rejects it in favour of a lone gunman stalking the Portsmouth Road. It also summarises its involvement in the development of the phantom sniper mystery:

Months ago, when we started to report it, we were alone. Then, via the county and evening Press, the affair reached the nationals. Last month, over eighteen months after the first incident, Esher Council took official notice of the matter. We are now waiting with bated breath for a question to be asked in Parliament. That, our readers will be interested to learn, is how the machinery of democracy creaks to an ultimate solution. But what an awful time it takes!

Again, incidents of broken windscreens kept on being reported but the sniper was also being held responsible for other crimes too, including the smashing of a shop and a pub window in Esher itself. Some of these incidents were accompanied by intense police activity, such as the broken windscreen of Mr V J Wood, which prompted ten constables to search surrounding woodland and undergrowth.

Complaints from local residents spurred the council to demand a statement from the Metropolitan Police on their plans to catch the sniper. “The ratepayers are entitled to know what actions are being taken,” wrote councillor N. Jones. The request eventually produced a reply from the Police Commissioner who said that a “special observation had been kept on the road by selected officers, and would be continued for a further period, but that at present there was no evidence to support the theory that the damage was being caused maliciously”. It was also mentioned that the Ministry of Transport had plans to investigate the matter. It is clear from these statements that the Metropolitan Police did not favour the sniper theory, but instead looked more kindly on the idea of loose stones causing the damage. Members of the council disagreed, and during a debate on the matter several councillors expressed their concern at the police’s attitude towards the problem. Councillor E Royston said, “There is a solid basis of concern, and it would be wrong for us to shrug our shoulders or laugh at it, and wrong to say that we know what the cause is”.

By September 1952 the number of incidents had reached at least 33 but there was yet to be found a single bullet, pellet or other missile in connection with these broken windows. To explain this, readers of the ENA were coming forward with their own theories including catapults, falling pine cones, and pellets made from frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice) that would melt on contact. Following attention from the national press, the police and the council, local interest was probably at a maximum during the period between May and September, but it was to tail off at the beginning of

October when the number of articles in the ENA decreased in number. It is noticeable that during August to October the reports of shattered windscreens came from not only the Portsmouth Road, but also from surrounding areas including East Molesey, Thames Ditton and Hinchley Wood. Between the 16th October and 1^st December 1952 there were no reports of shattered windscreens at all, the longest period of quiet in nearly a year.

The final phase

The six weeks of quiet from the phantom sniper of Esher was in fact only a lull before he committed himself to one final burst of activity. In December 1952 five reports of broken windscreens were recorded in the ENA. More incidents in January begged the ENA to ask if a new phase of shootings was beginning, but despite this blip in activity, the number of reports was to only be a trickle in comparison to the previous year with the most serious incident being four windscreens shattered in the same week in April.

Other theories continued to be put forward. In February the Metropolitan Police informed the council that “in spite of intensive observation over a prolonged period, the police have no evidence that the damage is being caused maliciously”. In other words the police did not favour the sniper theory. Other theories were not so cautious. Gordon Slyfield wrote to the ENA to suggest an esoteric solution to the mystery:

The metaphysical theory must not therefore be ruled out. I am familiar with the physical results attached to psychical phenomena of the séance room. If there is a powerful spiritualist medium dwelling on this road, he or she may be ignorant and need not go into a trance… A rod of ectoplasm proceeding from the medium is strong enough so that an entity can lift physical objects. This is what happens with poltergeist phenomena in the presence of adolescents.

If such an entity were the spirit of a dastardly highwayman, might not he still operate against lawful users of the highway? It may therefore be a case for the Institute of Psychical Research to lay an unhappy spirit.

In a reply to this, G Bird says: “Why stop at earthbound highwaymen firing ectoplasmic bullets; why not the vibrations of harps twanged by little men landing from flying saucers?” Mr Bird goes on to express local belief in a gunman and suggests that local patrols could be the answer to catching the culprit. These debates in May 1953 largely mark the end of the incidents on the Portsmouth Road. After this time there was only to be another five reports of broken windscreens, three of which did not occur in the local region. As the number of weeks increased between articles, one definitely gets the impression that local interest in the matter had died, and the ENA was reduced to making the odd report near the back of the paper. The last report is from their 11th December 1953 issue, when a Mrs L Perry reported having her windscreen shattered while driving in Ealing, a location many kilometres north-west of Esher. There was also a brief mention in FATE of aeroplane windscreens being broken whilst flying over Esher, but no further references could be found for this.

By our reckoning the phantom sniper of Esher was active over a period of almost exactly three years, during which time at least 51 individual incidents were recorded. A single bullet was never recovered, nor a culprit seen, let alone apprehended. Interest in the mystery was rapidly forgotten, although a series of articles did appear on it in FATE magazine upon which Frank Edwards wrote a small section for his book Stranger than Science which was in turn the basis of one further article in the Fortean Times.

So, after three years of intense activity by both the sniper and the press, the mystery was no nearer to being resolved. Who or what was breaking the windscreens? There was no shortage of theories, both rational and irrational, and these will be the subject of our next article.