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Welcome to unexplained extra with me Richard McLean Smith. For the weeks in between episodes we look at the stories that for one reason or other didn't make it into the show.

In last week's episode, Bangarang, we travelled to the town of Humpty-Dew in Australia's Northern Territory where in 1998 five of its residents were seemingly terrorised by what some have claimed to have been a poltergeist.

Many of the journalists and researchers who also witnessed the bizarre series of strange events came to the conclusion that they sent it on one person in particular.

Either as the perpetrator of a hoax or perhaps for reasons a little more fantastical.

In the world of parapsychology, it has long been supposed that a parent poltergeist activity, if it were to exist at all, is not the malevolent workings of the deceased, but rather the result of telekinesis, the potential ability of an individual to manipulate material things without physical contact.

I find this notion particularly alluring, not least because it has featured in many of my favourite films, such as Brian Deparmus 1978 Classic, The Fury, as well as David Kronerberg's equally intense take on a similar theme, Scanners, and also, in perhaps the most affecting and enigmatic of ways, in the 1979 masterpiece Stalker.

Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's short story, Roadside Picnic.

Often, those who believe in the potential for humans to wield such power have tended to link the phenomena to the hormonal rollercoaster of adolescence or the consequence of a profound trauma.

The suggestion being that something in the untethered emotions, particularly of teenagers, could be unwittingly unleashing some as yet unknown faculties of the mind.

The notion of influential forces, such as gravity or electromagnetism, essentially invisible to the human eye, is well accepted.

Yet despite years of scientific research, there remains no widely accepted evidence that we can manipulate them with our minds alone.

There is one individual, however, that some believe came closer than most to suggesting otherwise.

Her story begins almost a century ago, in the ruins of a city, where once majestic buildings have been reduced to stilted husks.

Their pretty facades, replaced by gaping holes, mangled iron and shattered concrete, emaciated faces peek out from behind the rubble.

On the streets, people drift like ghosts, neither men nor women, but mere skeletons, their chests sunken and stomachs perversely swollen from severe malnutrition.

Others, life frozen to death on the pavement, their bodies still wrapped in their thick clothes.

On one street corner, the remains of a frozen horse are gathered up by desperate, frost-bitten hands and piled onto a sled.

Elsewhere, from out of a dark alleyway, the smell of cooking flesh rises into the air. Only it is no horse meat that cooks here, but rather something a little closer to home.

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