What is a Poltergeist?: Understanding Poltergeist Activity

INTRODUCTION

A poltergeist, being mute and unable to deliver a clear message, is the most disturbing and irritating of spectres. Its apparition will annoy, terrify, and even kill the person who experiences it; its narrative occurrence will trigger all the casuistry at hand in order to explain its existence.

Wolfgang Neuber, ‘Poltergeist the Prequel’, 2008

Imagine you are at a garden party for Paranormal Phenomena. The first to arrive is Telepathy, with his tightly buttoned shirt and intense stare. Then comes Mediumship, a blowsy woman quaffing sherry and wondering whether to pocket the silverware. Clairvoyance’s deep mascara and Gothic clothes contrast with the faded military fatigues sported by her companion Remote Viewing, one of the newest members of the group. Around one table lounge the slightly vague figures of Precognitive Dreaming, Prophecy and Divination. Muttering to himself in one corner is Glossolalia, while Reincarnation is tucking into the buffet with all the relish of a pudgy eight-year-old. The twins, Out-of-Body-Experience and Near-Death-Experience, float on by, and Metal Bending and Psychic Surgery are throwing caution to the winds on the dance floor. Although some tensions are evident, by and large everyone manages to tolerate everyone else, and some guests are even cordial to each other, while in the shrubbery, Dowsing and Psychometry are snogging like nobody’s business.

Then Poltergeist appears. Fast and bulbous, naked, warty and sporting a multi-hued Mohican, he kicks over the flower arrangements, belches into the MC’s microphone, throws crudités at the waiters and vomits over the patisseries. Ear-splitting feedback howls out of the PA system, foul stenches pervade the summerhouse, and blood and maggots bubble out of the punchbowl. Having slapped, bitten or insulted every guest and shredded or sliced every party dress or suit, Poltergeist tops his visit by urinating copiously into the fountain.

In short, while most aspects of psychical research have varying degrees of respectability, the poltergeist is the unwelcome guest at the party, the neighbour from hell, the irredeemable agent of dark and dangerous chaos. For those who suffer them, poltergeist infestations can be as frightening as experiencing a major crime. Property damage, assault and financial loss are all typical elements of a poltergeist attack, sometimes leaving a psychological and emotional legacy that can be compared to post-traumatic stress. ‘Polts’ are also the most perplexing and vexing of phenomena, where the scale of violence is only matched by the degree of pointlessness. From one point of view, a poltergeist outbreak is an absurdist spectacle; from another, it’s theatrical terrorism.

The poltergeist is a citizen of all countries and eras, as a small sampling shows:

Mâcon, France, 1612. An invisible ‘demon’ throws heavy items about, pours water over a maid and incessantly calls out offensive gossip for two months. When a stone is thrown at one witness, the man marks the stone and chucks it into an empty yard. Within moments the same stone, distinguished by its mark, is returned, so hot that the witness fears it has been heated ‘in the fires of hell’.

Dortmund, Germany, 1713. Over 20 days, 760 stones are thrown, breaking 147 windowpanes. A bacon rind is attached to a boy’s back, pinecones are knotted round a door handle, a heavy table is upended to bar a door, and an inkbottle is dismantled in plain sight. The phenomena escalate, with faeces being used for wallpaper, and on the final day a voice is heard shouting ‘Bad end! Very bad end! Stinky end!’

Stratford, Connecticut, 1850. Virtually every item in the household of a Presbyterian clergyman becomes airborne, from keys and tools to umbrellas and heavy furniture. A potato appears in mid-air, scurrilous letters are scribbled in seconds, and over a dozen anthropomorphic figures are constructed out of random clothing and sheets to resemble people at prayer, or corpses laid out for burial.

Clarendon, Canada, 1889. Windows are smashed, stones are thrown (but do not hurt people even when moving at great speed) and up to eight fires break out a day. A little girl has her braid cut off and a boy’s hair is hacked about. A voice makes inconsistent accusations but, when upbraided for obscenity, becomes contrite and sings a hymn.

Sumatra, Indonesia, 1903. Hundreds of stones are thrown about in a closed bedroom with no chimney. When a witness tries to catch them, the stones change direction in mid-flight.

Tomika-cho, Japan, 2000. Household items turn themselves on spontaneously, even when not connected to the power supply. Kitchen items move, televisions switch channels, flowers die within minutes and machines go haywire. Among the phenomena reported by dozens of witnesses are loud footsteps and what sounds like a submarine’s sonar signal.

Rio Tercero, Argentina, 2004. Hundreds of stones weighing up to 1.3kg (almost 3lbs) rain down on a house and car. Sixteen policemen surround the dwelling, only to report stones travelling along ‘impossible trajectories.’ One stone, travelling at great speed, comes to a dead stop – an instantaneous loss of momentum that is physically impossible.

South Shields, England, 2006. A family suffers extremely violent bodily assaults from something which speaks through toy figures and sends threatening text messages from disconnected phone numbers. In direct contravention of the laws of physics and common sense, objects pass through walls.

One of the most common of poltergeist elements is repetitive noises, from rappings to thunderous wall-shaking blows. In 2010 Dr Barrie Colvin performed an acoustic analysis of poltergeist sounds recorded in ten cases: in Brazil, Ipiranga (1971) and Santa Rosa (1988); in England, Andover (1974), Enfield (1977) and Euston Square (2000); in Scotland, Sauchie (1960); in Switzerland, Thun (1967); in Germany, Schleswig (1968) and Pursruck (1971); and in France, La Machine (1973). These poltergeist raps were compared to the acoustic signature of ordinary raps on different surfaces, and the results published in The Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. The waveform of the normal raps started with the maximum volume at the moment the knuckles or tools hit the surface, and then grew quieter as the sound decayed. But, without exception, all the poltergeist raps had a different signature, starting relatively quietly then a few milliseconds later escalating to the maximum volume. This meant that the poltergeist raps were not created by something striking the wall or wood surface from outside – but were generated from within the structure of the material. In other words, poltergeist raps behave differently to other sounds: they are generated by something we cannot yet understand.

With Colvin’s groundbreaking analysis topping a vast edifice of convincing witness material and recorded evidence, I take it as axiomatic that at least some – and probably most – poltergeist phenomena is absolutely genuine, some proven hoaxes notwithstanding. But just because it does happen, does not mean that we know how it happens. We have the phenomena, but we don’t have the mechanism for those phenomena.

Poltergeists have been recorded and investigated by a variety of careful observers, many of whom we will meet in this book. Nothing in the realm of human curiosity happens in a vacuum, however, so it’s perhaps worth taking a step back and putting some of these investigations into a historical and philosophical context. Poltergeists had been known about since the pre-Christian era, although the name itself did not enter the English language until 1848. After centuries of interpretation largely based on equal exhalations of religion and superstition, the topic entered the modern era with the founding of the first Society for Psychical Research (SPR), in London in 1882. Determined to bring a scientific spirit to the subject of spirits, the SPR acted as a springboard for further societies in other countries. These learned organisations put out well-regarded academic works such as The Journal of the Society for Psychical Research and The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, and it is to these still-thriving publications that we owe many of the insights garnered in this book. But the psychical research societies were themselves products of their time – specifically, they were founded when the key issue of the era was survival after death. Buoyed by the burgeoning success of Spiritualism (for more on which see Chapter 3), the early decades of the SPR and its American equivalent the ASPR were dominated by post-mortem survival research – the questions of death, ghosts and the afterlife – although the focus has broadened greatly since then. If the big-bearded founding fathers of psychical research had been more influenced by the other credos of the day – say, Theosophy, Mesmerism or Catholic mysticism – then the history of the subject may have focused more on, respectively, spiritual masters and superbeings, animal magnetism and universal fluids, or miraculous healing and Marian apparitions. As it was, the guiding ideology was directed along the lines of investigating ghosts (discarnate entities) and communication with the dead; and this had a major impact on thinking about poltergeists. Similarly, late-twentieth-century publications such as The Journal of Parapsychology and The European Journal of Parapsychology have tended to favour the currently orthodox academic world-view that poltergeists are linked to environmental factors (see Chapter 9), and/or are products of the human mind, the latter phenomena usually being labelled Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK – see Chapter 6). This is not in any way to diminish the excellent work found in these journals, simply to point out that all such publications tend to have a particular ideology, or favour a certain point of view. For example, you won’t find too many parapsychologists taking seriously the idea that poltergeists are demons (Chapter 1), witches (Chapter 2), ghosts (Chapter 3), fairies (Chapter 4) or vampires (Chapter 5). Nevertheless, all these notions used to make sense for a great many people, and the first three continue to do so. Even the term ‘parapsychology’ itself contains an ideological link to the human mind. There is no equivalent term based on the notion that discarnate entities might play a role, although look forward to changes in the intellectual climate that could see future poltergeist cases being investigated by PhD-bearing parademonologists or paraphantomologists. Despite the professed objectivity of science, all scientists have ideologies. I have them as well; perhaps you can spot my prejudices and shibboleths as you peruse the chapters.

In truth, despite the vast corpus of data, and numerous attempts at investigation, nobody yet knows exactly what poltergeists really are. I certainly don’t. What follows is a distillation of the ideas of people who think they know, or at least think they think they know. Tread carefully, for you tread on their dreams.

CHAPTER 1

POLTERGEISTS ARE… DEMONS

Living creatures of different types and varied intelligence may exist in the unseen as in the seen. Possibly these poltergeist phenomena may be due to some of these, perhaps mischievous or rudimentary, intelligences in the unseen: I do not know why we should imagine there are no fools or naughty children in the spiritual world; possibly they are as numerous there as here.

Sir William Barrett, ‘Poltergeists, Old And New’, 1911

In January 1949 something disrupted a house in Cottage City, Maryland, close to the state border with Washington, D.C. Scratching noises came from under the floorboards; there was a sound of dripping, but nothing to account for it; a picture of Jesus on the wall shook. Over the next few weeks more noises – scratchings, raps and squeaking – were heard. Objects were moved, beds shaken, bedclothes pulled off. It was the relatively mild start of what would become not only a whirlwind of violence, but also form the basis