IT started as one of those fait divers that populist newspapers, like France Soir thrive on.
In a small village in the Jura mountains in eastern France, a series of mysterious fires has afflicted one residential street in the last three months. Then it became more serious two people died in the latest fire and the nation's media has descended on Moirans en Montagne.
So far, over a dozen fires have broken out in houses on the Rue des Cares of this tiny village close to the Swiss border, whose only other claim to fame is that its neighbouring industrial estate makes it the toy manufacturing capital of France. A judicial inquiry is under way but the police do not suspect criminal causes.
Curiously, all but one have occurred at weekends, some times several times in the same day and in the same house, often when the residents were at home. They have all shown similar circumstances intense heat giving off strangely coloured flames which attacked some objects in a room but left others intact.
In the last, fatal outbreak on January 20th, three fires broke out that same day in Mr Jean Pierre Raffin's house on the Rue des Cares. The third time, Mr Raffin escaped, but his wife, Annie, did not. Both she and a fireman, Mr Gerard David, who was trying to rescue her, died in the intense heat.
The results of their autopsies are due today but not reported that they both suffered burns in the areas where their clothes would normally have protected them "as though they had been in a vast microwave", one source said.
Cartesian, technological France does not hold with mysteries of this kind, and an army of experts, scientists and engineers has descended on the village with its instruments to collect data so far, without any success or explanation.
The people of Moirans suspected electricity cables which had recently been buried in the street, but the state electricity company, EDF, has detected no abnormalities. The assistant manager of the company's Besancon office, Mr Roger Ecoiffier, was bemused. "I've worked for the EDF for 30 years and I've never seen such a thing. It's inexplicable," he said.
Radiation was suspected, "natural or otherwise. None has been detected, nor any gas leaks, nor the theory of ionised hydrogen coming out of the marshland on which Moirans was originally built. The EDF assurances were further checked by two independent electricity experts appointed by the investigating magistrate, Mr Jean Pierre Berthet. Still nothing.
In the absence of arationals' explanation, theories of paranormal activity are flourishing. A secondary army, self appointed this time, of mystics, psychics, mediums and other followers of the supernatural has also descended on Moirans. These people have offered their ideas of evil presences or souls in torment to any journalist willing to listen.
This avalanche of superstitious theories has reached such in level that the village mayor, Dr Jean Burdeyron, gave an exasperated press conference on Saturday. "If we believe in Father Christmas in Moirans, it's because we're the toys capital, not the capital of the super natural," he said.
Meanwhile, most residents of the Rue des Cares sleep at friends' houses at night, and every new phenomenon is scrutinised. An elderly woman was a woken last Friday night by a sharp cracking sound and found that a large section of her bathroom tiles had fallen off the wall. A farmer's barn was destroyed by fire for the fourth time.
Beneath the hard headed technological image of modern France, there lurk the ghosts of an older world. In rural France especially, superstition and belief in the supernatural remain strong. One of the most popular TV programmes on the privatised TFI station in recent times has been a weekly magazine devoted to the paranormal, Odyssey of the Strange.
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