Matthew Manning was already a familiar name to British parapsychologists by the time he arrived at Oakham School as a teenage boarder. Poltergeist-type disturbances had been reported at his family's homes in Cambridge and later Linton, Cambridgeshire, from as early as 1967, and when he returned to Oakham for the autumn term of 1970 similar phenomena reportedly followed him into the dormitory.
Other boys described his bed moving with no one touching it, small objects, screws, pebbles, cutlery, pieces of broken glass, being thrown around the room seemingly from nowhere, pools of water appearing on the floor, and sudden cold spots. One especially dramatic account describes a pile of dinner plates crashing down and shattering although nobody was near them. The school's first instinct was to have Manning removed as a boarder, but the parapsychologist George Owen, who had been investigating the case, persuaded the headmaster to let him stay. Manning was also taken to see a psychiatrist during this period, though nothing came of it. Whatever was behind the disturbances, they had died down by the spring of 1971, roughly when Manning's attention turned to automatic writing and drawing, producing scripts and sketches at home that he attributed to historical figures communicating through him.
That later phase of Manning's career has not worn well under scrutiny. The American investigator Joe Nickell made a detailed study of the automatic writing and found internal inconsistencies throughout, concluding that the purported signatures of historical figures were demonstrably inaccurate and that Manning showed traits consistent with a fantasy-prone personality rather than genuine mediumship. The Oakham School case itself was never independently verified in the way a controlled investigation would require, and rests almost entirely on the testimony of schoolboys and Manning's own later published account in his 1974 book The Link. It remains one of the better-known English poltergeist cases of the era precisely because it happened somewhere as institutional and ordinary as a Rutland boarding school, but it should be read as a contested case rather than a settled one.
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