Matilda stages a haunting with a parrot as a calculated response to Mr. Wormwood’s destruction of a library book: by hiding Fred’s talking bird in the chimney, she makes her family mistake an ordinary voice for a supernatural presence. The incident turns an act of adult cruelty into a carefully prepared domestic deception, with Matilda controlling what her family hears while keeping the source out of sight.

Causes and Preparation

The prank follows Mr. Wormwood’s attack on Matilda’s reading. He dismisses her book as worthless because it was written by an American, refuses to hear what it is about, and tells her to do something useful instead. Then he tears out handfuls of pages and throws them into the wastebasket. Matilda explains that the volume belongs to the library and must be returned to Mrs. Phelps, but her father continues until only the empty cover remains. He tells her to save her pocket money for a replacement and leaves the television blaring as he walks out.

Matilda does not answer this injury by crying. Pale and silent, she sits thinking about a fitting punishment for her false father. Her plan depends on whether the parrot her friend Fred has been boasting about can really speak. Fred is six, lives around the corner, and has had the bird from his father for several days. The sequence links Matilda’s retaliation directly to the book’s destruction: once her father attacks the pleasure she finds in reading, she turns her quick, resourceful mind toward a trick that will make the household believe something is wrong with its own home.

The next day, after Mrs. Wormwood has left by car for her bingo club, Matilda goes to Fred’s house to inspect the bird. Fred shows her a striking blue-and-yellow parrot in a tall cage and identifies it as Hakker. Matilda asks to borrow it for one night. Fred initially refuses, but agrees when she offers him all her pocket money for the following week, on the condition that she return the bird the next day. The exchange gives the prank a definite timetable and shows the price Matilda is willing to pay to carry it out.

The Hidden Voice

Matilda carries the cage back to her empty house in both hands and takes it to the dining room, where a large open fireplace provides the hiding place. Pushing the cage up into the chimney is difficult, but she eventually gets it out of sight. The parrot calls down from above; Matilda tells it to be quiet and washes the soot from her hands. The physical arrangement is essential to the deception: the family will hear a voice coming from the dining room without being able to see the bird that produces it.

That evening, Matilda, her mother, her father, and her brother are eating in the sitting room in front of the television when the parrot calls from the other side of the hall. Mrs. Wormwood turns pale and tells Mr. Wormwood that someone is in the house; Matilda’s brother confirms that he has heard a voice too. The ordinary family routine is interrupted by a sound that seems to come from an empty room. Matilda has prepared the setting, but the others do not know that the voice belongs to a bird concealed in their own chimney.

The Apparent Haunting

The parrot speaks again, this time softly and spookily, lamenting its bones. Everyone is startled, including Matilda, who is acting as though she too has been caught off guard. They look around the room but can see nobody. Matilda reinforces their uncertainty by insisting that the sound is a ghost and claiming that she has heard it in that room before. She then joins the search behind the sofa and the curtains, helping to perform the discovery of an intruder while making the unseen voice seem more mysterious.

Mrs. Wormwood cries for help and nearly chokes her husband as she clings to him. Mr. Wormwood, described as greyer than ever, says he is leaving. The whole family runs out and slams the door behind them. Their flight is the prank’s immediate consequence: Matilda’s concealed bird has turned a familiar domestic space into a source of fear, and the adults who dismissed her concerns about the destroyed book are now responding to a crisis she has invented for them.

Retrieval and Significance

The following morning, Matilda gets the rather sooty and grumpy parrot out of the chimney and out of the house without anyone seeing her. She carries it through the back door and runs all the way to Fred’s house. When Fred asks whether the bird behaved, Matilda tells him that they had great fun with it and that her parents could not get enough of it. Her answer playfully reverses the family’s panic: the adults have been made to react to the parrot, while Matilda can present the night as an entertaining success.

The episode’s resolution confirms the natural explanation for the supposed haunting. The unexplained voice comes from Hakker, not a ghost, and the next-morning retrieval closes the practical risk of keeping the bird hidden. As a small revenge, the plan is precise rather than forceful: Matilda borrows the necessary instrument, conceals it in a familiar part of the house, supplies her family with a ghostly interpretation, and returns the bird once the deception has worked. The episode also contrasts Mr. Wormwood’s destruction of a book with Matilda’s inventiveness. He leaves the television blaring after silencing the book; she uses a voice from the chimney to unsettle the very household in which he expects her simply to obey.