Things that go Bump in the Night

Poltergiest : A Kind of Haunting

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT - POLTERGIEST

(And Throw Your Crockery at the Walls)

A Rational Mystic's Guide to the Poltergeist Phenomenon

Somewhere in Germany, in the year 1599, a farmer sat down to breakfast. Before he could reach his porridge, the bowl levitated off the table, sailed gracefully through the air, and deposited itself, with some force, on the back of his head.

The farmer was not amused. Historians, however, very much are!

Welcome, dear reader, to one of the most raucous, baffling, occasionally terrifying, and frankly deeply inconvenient phenomena in all of paranormal research: the poltergeist. From the German Poltergeist — meaning, rather magnificently, "noisy ghost" — this is not your average, well-mannered spectre drifting mournfully through walls in a Victorian bedsheet.

No, no. The poltergeist is the chaos agent of the supernatural world. It moves furniture. It throws stones. It sets fires. It pulls hair. It leaves fish on kitchen floors. And, as we shall see, it has kept parapsychologists, sceptics, journalists, and very confused families thoroughly occupied for the best part of five centuries.

So brew a strong cup of something, secure your breakables, and let us take a thoroughly rational, and only occasionally baffled, look at what on earth is going on.

What Exactly IS a Poltergeist? (Defining the Undefinable)

Before we can argue about whether poltergeists exist, we ought to agree on what they are. This, unfortunately, is already an argument.

In the broadest sense, poltergeist phenomena refers to a cluster of reported paranormal disturbances that typically include: unexplained noises (banging, rapping, crashing: the full percussion section), the spontaneous movement of objects, the disappearance and reappearance of items (often in preposterous locations), interference with electrical equipment, and occasionally physical attacks on persons present. Pinching, scratching, hair-pulling and, in the more enthusiastic cases, full-on shoves down the stairs.

What distinguishes the poltergeist from your common-or-garden ghost is its kinetic quality. Ghosts, at least in the popular imagination, are passive affairs. A pale lady drifting through a corridor, a sad Victorian gentleman staring from a portrait. The poltergeist, by contrast, is busy. It has an agenda. It wants you to know it's there. It is, in short, the supernatural equivalent of a toddler in the grip of a magnificent tantrum.

"The poltergeist is not content to haunt. It wants to redecorate."

Cases tend to follow a recognisable pattern, helpfully documented by researchers Alan Gauld and A.D. Cornell in their landmark 1979 survey of over 500 poltergeist cases spanning four centuries.

They found that the most commonly reported phenomena were, in descending order:

• movement of small objects,

• rapping sounds,

• movement of large objects,

• opening and closing of doors and windows,

• and — somewhat alarmingly — apparitions.

Less common but rather more attention-grabbing were:

• biting,

• pools of water appearing on floors,

• and the inexplicable materialisation of stones that fall into rooms.

Stone-throwing, it should be noted, has been reported in poltergeist cases across cultures and centuries with a consistency that even the most rigorous sceptic must find slightly irritating. The stones are typically warm. Nobody sees them thrown. They somehow navigate around corners. This is not, one feels, orthodox physics.

A Brief and Chaotic History of Things Being Thrown at People

The Tedworth Drummer (1661) — England's Most Famous Rattling

Our history begins properly with one of the most celebrated cases in the English-speaking world: the Drummer of Tedworth, documented by the splendidly named Joseph Glanvill in his 1681 work Saducismus Triumphatus — a title that suggests either a learned philosophical treatise or a failed Roman general.

The story: Magistrate John Mompesson of Tedworth, Wiltshire, confiscated the drum of a travelling vagrant named William Drury, who was arrested for fraud. Shortly afterwards, the Mompesson household was visited by extraordinary disturbances. Prolonged drumming sounds, objects being flung about, children lifted in their beds, the smell of sulphur, and a variety of other inconveniences made domestic life rather trying. Glanvill himself visited and witnessed the phenomena. King Charles II, never a man to miss an interesting spectacle, sent investigators.

Drury was later arrested in Gloucester and, under questioning, apparently boasted that he had "plagued" the magistrate. He was subsequently transported to the colonies. The phenomena, reportedly, ceased. Whether this represents justice, coincidence, or a spectacularly self-incriminating confession remains, four centuries later, an open question.

The Epworth Poltergeist (1716) — When the Devil Visits a Vicar

One rather enjoys the irony that the father of John Wesley, founder of Methodism and a man professionally committed to the supernatural, had his own rectory in Epworth, Lincolnshire, visited by what his family cheerfully referred to as "Old Jeffrey."

Over several months, the Wesley household was subjected to knocking, groaning, rattling of latches, the sound of breaking bottles, footsteps on the stairs, and the curious phenomenon of a bed being lifted with an occupant still in it. Samuel Wesley senior, in a fine example of clerical pluck, attempted to confront the entity directly. Old Jeffrey responded by knocking even more loudly. The reverend noted this in his diary with what one senses is barely suppressed exasperation.

John Wesley later collected the family accounts and published them as evidence of the supernatural. His sister Emily, rather more pragmatically, simply called it "the thing." The Methodists have been citing it ever since.

The Bell Witch (1817–1821) — Tennessee's Most Troublesome Resident

Crossing briefly to the Americas, because the poltergeist is an equal-opportunity phenomenon with no respect for geography, we arrive at the Bell family of Adams, Tennessee, and their extraordinary uninvited guest.

The Bell Witch. Though the entity apparently objected to the name, which suggests either supernatural dignity or unusual self-awareness, it began by knocking, dragging chains, throwing stones, and yanking the bedcovers off sleeping family members. It escalated, rather spectacularly, to slapping, hair-pulling, and a particular fixation on the patriarch, John Bell, whom it apparently despised and made its mission to torment until his death in 1820.

Conversely, the entity seemed rather fond of John's wife, Lucy, bringing her nuts and fruit as gifts, which is either touching or deeply sinister, depending on your philosophical outlook. Dozens of witnesses, including General Andrew Jackson (later President of the United States, which gives this story a rather distinguished cast), reported experiencing phenomena firsthand.

Jackson allegedly fled the Bell farm in the night, declaring he would rather face the British at New Orleans than spend another evening there. High praise indeed.

The Borley Rectory (1929–1944) — "The Most Haunted House in England"

No discussion of famous poltergeist cases would be complete without Borley Rectory in Essex, labelled by the indefatigable ghost hunter Harry Price as "the most haunted house in England." This claim was made with considerable confidence and, as we shall see, considerable controversy.

The alleged phenomena at Borley were prodigious in both variety and absurdity: a phantom nun, a headless coachman, a phantom coach and horses, mysterious writing appearing on walls, bottles and stones flying through air, bells ringing, lights appearing in windows, doors locking themselves, and a spirit who communicated through planchette with the deeply unsatisfying name of "Marie Lairre."

Harry Price investigated at length, rented the house, invited observers, and wrote two bestselling books about it. Unfortunately, subsequent investigation, most notably by the Society for Psychical Research in 1956, found substantial evidence of fraud, exaggeration, and Harry Price's rather flexible relationship with the truth. The SPR report was diplomatically damning. Price himself had died in 1948 and was therefore unavailable to respond, which some felt was convenient timing.

The rectory burned down in 1939 under mysterious circumstances (or possibly just poor maintenance). Excavations in the cellar later found a woman's jawbone. Nobody was entirely sure whose. This is, admittedly, not a great sign.

The Twentieth Century: When Poltergeists Met Parapsychology

The Rosenheim Poltergeist (1967) — Germany's Most Expensive Haunting

In 1967, a solicitor's office in Rosenheim, Bavaria, became the site of what may be the most technically investigated poltergeist case in history. Neon lights swung without cause and exploded. Fuses blew. Telephone calls were recorded to the speaking clock at rates physically impossible by conventional means, up to forty calls per minute, before the receiver was lifted. Electrical measuring equipment was installed and recorded anomalous fluctuations. The Post Office investigated. The electricity board investigated. Physicists from the Max Planck Institute investigated.

Everyone agreed something very odd was happening. Nobody agreed on what.

German parapsychologist Hans Bender was called in. He observed that the phenomena seemed to centre on a nineteen-year-old secretary named Annemarie Schneider. When she was absent, nothing happened. When she walked down the corridor, the lamps would swing. When she left her employment, the phenomena ceased entirely.

Annemarie went on to live an entirely unremarkable life, which is perhaps the most unsettling detail of all.

The Enfield Poltergeist (1977–1978) — Britain's Most Celebrated Chaos

If poltergeist cases had a Premier League, Enfield would be sitting comfortably at the top of the table with a gold star and a documentary deal. Which, fittingly, it has eventually acquired.

In August 1977, Peggy Hodgson, a single mother in a council house in Green Street, Enfield, North London, reported that furniture was moving by itself and knocking sounds were occurring. She called the police. A female officer witnessed a chair move across the floor with no apparent cause and signed a statement to that effect, which is the sort of thing that requires a certain amount of professional courage.

The Society for Psychical Research dispatched investigators Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair, who between them spent eleven months documenting what they described as an extraordinary catalogue of phenomena: furniture levitating, toys flying across rooms, marbles appearing from nowhere, and, most sensationally, eleven-year-old Janet Hodgson apparently speaking in a deep, gruff voice claiming to be the ghost of a former occupant named "Bill."

Playfair documented the case in his book This House Is Haunted (1980). Grosse, who had lost his own daughter in a motorcycle accident shortly before the case began and brought to it a personal intensity that colours the entire investigation, remained convinced of the genuine nature of the phenomena until his death.

Janet was subsequently photographed, apparently levitating above her bed. Sceptics noted that the photographs look remarkably like a child jumping. Janet herself, in later life, admitted that she and her sister had "done some things" — specifically, the bending of spoons and some of the more obviously theatrical incidents — but maintained that the majority of phenomena were genuine. This is, as any investigator will tell you, about as satisfying as it gets.

"The Enfield case has everything: witnesses, recordings, photographs, a confessed child fraudster, and absolutely no consensus whatsoever. Perfect."

The Miami Poltergeist (1967) — When Paperwork Goes Paranormal

Not all poltergeist cases involve the dramatic theatrics of Enfield or Rosenheim. The outbreak at Tropication Arts, a novelty wholesale warehouse in Miami, has a certain surreal charm in its domestic ordinariness.

In January 1967, items in the warehouse began falling off shelves spontaneously. Beer mugs, back-scratchers, novelty ashtrays, and other products of questionable necessity launched themselves from their shelves and smashed on the floor. The frequency was remarkable — up to twenty-two incidents per hour at peak. The owners, understandably, thought they were being robbed.

Parapsychologist William Roll investigated and identified a nineteen-year-old shipping clerk, Julio Vasquez, as the apparent focus. Roll, who had a particular interest in what he termed "recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis" (RSPK — parapsychology has a gift for acronyms), noted that incidents clustered around Julio and diminished with distance from him. Roll suggested that unconscious psychokinetic energy, generated by a psychologically troubled individual, might be responsible. Julio was subsequently arrested for theft unrelated to the poltergeist activity, which rather complicated the narrative.

The Theories: A Bewildering Buffet of Explanations

Given the evidence (or rather, given the reported evidence, which is a distinction that will keep appearing like an unwanted relative), what do researchers actually think is happening? The answer is: quite a lot of things, and none of them entirely satisfactorily.

Theory 1: It's Actually Ghosts (The Traditional Approach)

The oldest explanation is, of course, that poltergeists are exactly what they appear to be: the energetic manifestations of the disembodied dead. This view, held by the folklore of virtually every culture on the planet and enthusiastically promoted by investigators from Glanvill to Price, has the considerable advantage of explaining everything and the considerable disadvantage of explaining nothing.

If poltergeists are ghosts, why do they move physical objects? How do spirits — which, presumably, lack physical form generate sufficient kinetic energy to throw a wardrobe down the stairs? Why do they cluster around particular living persons? Why do the phenomena cease when those persons leave? Why, above all, do they seem so peculiarly teenage in their emotional register? These questions remain, shall we say, under-addressed.

Theory 2: Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (The Parapsychological Approach)

By the mid-twentieth century, parapsychological researchers, most notably William Roll, had begun to develop a rather different hypothesis. Rather than attributing phenomena to an external entity, they proposed that the focus person (the individual around whom activity seems to cluster) was somehow generating the phenomena themselves, through unconscious psychokinesis.

The pattern is striking: in the majority of documented cases, there is a focus person, typically an adolescent, typically experiencing significant psychological stress — family breakdown, emotional difficulties, the generalised existential misery of being a teenager in a difficult household. Roll proposed that unconscious, uncontrolled psychokinetic energy RSPK), was being discharged by the focus person as a kind of dramatic, kinetic acting-out.

This is, it must be said, an elegantly constructed theory. It explains the clustering around individuals, the cessation when they leave, the emotional charge of the phenomenon, and even its unconscious nature. The focus persons rarely feel responsible and are often frightened themselves. It does not, of course, explain how minds move matter without a physical mechanism, which is where physics would like a quiet word.

Theory 3: It's Fraud (The Sceptical Approach)

James Randi, the indefatigable professional sceptic, would like it noted that in every single case he investigated personally, fraud was either demonstrated or strongly suspected. Randi is not alone in this view. The sceptical literature on poltergeists is substantial and frequently compelling.

The fraud hypothesis has real explanatory power. Adolescents are capable of remarkable feats of deception when motivated. The incentives are not negligible: attention, disruption of household routine, escape from unwanted circumstances. Investigators who arrive convinced of the phenomenon's reality may miss what stage conjurers call "the move" , the moment of misdirection during which the actual physical action occurs.

Janet Hodgson's partial admissions in the Enfield case are instructive. In multiple cases, focus persons have been caught in the act of producing phenomena. And yet — and here is the perennial irritation for the committed sceptic — witnesses who catch the focus person in one act of fraud then find themselves unable to explain other phenomena that occurred under controlled conditions. Fraud explains some. It does not tidily explain all.

Theory 4: Infrasound, Electromagnetism and the Physics of Strangeness

A rather more materialistically respectable set of explanations involves the physical environment itself. Researcher Vic Tandy famously demonstrated in the 1990s that standing waves of infrasound at 18-19 Hz can produce feelings of unease, disorientation, peripheral visual disturbances, and general feelings that something is wrong. All without any ghostly assistance. Geophysicist John Hutchinson claims to have produced object-levitation effects through electromagnetic fields (the Hutchinson Effect), though reproducibility has been elusive.

Electromagnetic anomalies have been proposed as explanations for hallucinatory experiences. Michael Persinger's "God helmet" research, subsequently controversial due to its poor replication, suggested that temporal lobe stimulation via magnetic fields could produce experiences of presence and apparition. Geomagnetic fluctuations correlate with reports of haunting in some studies.

These are intriguing avenues. They suggest that the human nervous system, under certain environmental conditions, may generate experiences interpreted as paranormal. Whether this explains projectile crockery remains unclear.

Theory 5: Quantum Weirdness (Please, No)

Every discussion of paranormal phenomena eventually arrives, with the inevitability of bad weather, at quantum physics. The poltergeist is no exception. Various enthusiasts have proposed that quantum nonlocality, the observer effect, or wave-function collapse somehow enables minds to affect matter at a distance.

As a Rational Mystic, I feel obliged to note: this is not how quantum physics works. Quantum effects operate at subatomic scales and do not, under current understanding, scale up to the level of airborne furniture. Using quantum mechanics to explain poltergeists is rather like explaining why your car won't start by pointing to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Technically, it's all physics. Practically, it's unhelpful.

We shall leave quantum mysticism in the corner where it belongs and move on.

What Does the Research Actually Say?

There has been genuine scientific investigation of poltergeist phenomena, and it is worth being honest about what it has and has not produced.

Gauld and Cornell's 1979 meta-analysis of 500+ cases remains the most comprehensive survey. They found remarkable cross-cultural consistency in the phenomena reported — the pattern of stone-throwing, knocking, object movement, and focus-person clustering appears across European, Asian, African and American cases with a consistency that is, at minimum, sociologically interesting.

The SPR (Society for Psychical Research) has investigated numerous cases since its founding in 1882. It has found cases it could not satisfactorily explain by fraud or conventional means, cases it could explain by fraud, and cases that remain stubbornly ambiguous. This is, honestly, not a particularly dramatic conclusion, but it is an honest one.

Roll's longitudinal work with focus persons identified psychological profiles — high levels of dissociation, repressed hostility, family stress — that appeared consistently. Whether this profile causes the phenomena through RSPK, or simply describes the kind of person likely to be at the centre of a household in sufficient chaos to generate paranormal reports, is precisely the question nobody has yet answered.

Laboratory attempts to reproduce poltergeist-type PK under controlled conditions have produced, at best, modest effects that rarely survive rigorous replication. The phenomena, inconveniently, do not seem to perform on demand. This is either because they are genuine and elusive or because they were never real to begin with. The epistemological problem is, frankly, maddening.

"Poltergeist phenomena have the annoying quality of being too consistent to dismiss and too elusive to prove. They are the academic version of a cat."

The Rational Mystic's Verdict

So where does that leave us? After five centuries of reports, eleven months in Enfield, Max Planck physicists in Rosenheim, and more flying crockery than any reasonable universe should contain, what do we actually know?

Here is my honest assessment, for what it is worth:

Something is clearly happening. The cross-cultural consistency, the volume of credible witnesses (police officers, scientists, clergy, investigators — people with professional reputations to lose), and the patterns in the data are too robust to be explained entirely by collective delusion or deliberate fraud. Something generates the reports.

Fraud is part of the picture. Focus persons — particularly adolescents — sometimes fake phenomena, sometimes elaborate genuine experiences, and sometimes live in households so chaotic and distressed that reliable observation becomes impossible. This does not explain everything. It does explain some things.

The RSPK hypothesis is the most intellectually interesting. The notion that human minds, under extreme psychological stress, might generate effects on the physical environment — not through spirits, not through quantum magic, but through some mechanism we do not yet understand — is genuinely fascinating. The mind-matter relationship is incompletely understood. That is not a licence to believe anything; it is an invitation to look more carefully.

Environmental factors deserve more serious investigation. Infrasound, electromagnetic anomalies, and geological factors may explain more than is currently appreciated. A haunted house may sometimes be a house with unusual acoustic properties, subsidence, geological quirks, or electromagnetic hot spots. This is less exciting than a ghost. It is also considerably more useful.

We should be comfortable with uncertainty.

The poltergeist phenomenon resists tidy resolution. It occupies an uncomfortable border territory between the psychological, the physical, the social, and the genuinely unexplained. The impulse to declare it either "all real" or "all fake" says more about our tolerance for ambiguity than it does about the phenomena themselves.

The universe is under no obligation to resolve its mysteries on our timetable. The poltergeist — if it exists — has been operating without our permission since at least 1599. It is not, evidently, in any particular hurry.

A Final Note

If you are currently experiencing unexplained knockings, flying crockery, spontaneous fires, or the inexplicable materialisation of warm stones in enclosed spaces, the Rational Mystic recommends: (1) Rule out structural problems with the house. (2) Rule out family members with a grievance and a strong throwing arm. (3) Contact the Society for Psychical Research, which takes these matters seriously and is significantly less expensive than an exorcist. (4) If all else fails, consider that you may simply be living through one of reality's stranger chapters — and that, in the long run, it makes a magnificent story. In all cases I'd like to

Alan /|\