The Jason Andrews Birthday

It was Jason Andrews' fourth birthday, in July 1987, at the family's home near Slade Green in Kent. According to the account the archive holds, heavy banging came from the door with no one there, followed by a bright bolt of lightning. Jason began reciting numbers as though he were a computer, in a trance, and tried to leave the house saying that they were waiting for him, while the banging surrounded the building. The account records that the house afterwards had poltergeist and electrical activity.

What is on the record

Three claimants are resolved: Anne Andrews, Paul Andrews and Jason himself. They are one family, and everything the public knows about this case comes from them. The account was made public in the mid-1990s and set down at length in a book by Jason's mother, and every retelling since draws on that book. The archive's grade counts three people describing one event; it cannot count independence that is not there, and a reader should weigh the file as a family's testimony rather than as corroborated by anyone outside it.

That is not a reason to dismiss it, and the archive keeps such records deliberately. It is a reason to be precise about what kind of record it is. A parent's account of a small child is doubly filtered: through the child's capacity to describe, and through the parent's memory of what was described. Nothing physical was recorded. There is no photograph, no measurement of the reported electrical activity, and no third party present that night.

The case is the opening episode of a longer family history of reported experiences that the archive does not hold here.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3 on the archive's count of claimants. One household, no outside witness and no document is the ceiling. What happened in that house on the boy's birthday is not resolved here.