Poltergeists: Psychic Force, Angry Spirits, or Something Else?

A chair slides across a room.

A picture falls from a wall.

Something knocks three times from inside a wooden bedhead.

A stone appears to change direction in mid-air.

A frightened family asks a question — and whatever is making the noise knocks back.

That last detail changes everything.

Because the word poltergeist is often used as though it describes one phenomenon. It may not.

For centuries, a poltergeist was exactly what the German word suggests: a noisy spirit. Something unseen was believed to be throwing objects, hammering on walls, disturbing beds and occasionally terrorizing the people living in a house.

During the twentieth century, parapsychology introduced a radically different idea.

Perhaps there was no ghost.

Perhaps the force came from a living human being.

The disturbances might represent an uncontrolled form of psychokinesis — PK — occurring repeatedly around a particular person without that person consciously causing it. William Roll and J. Gaither Pratt called this recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, or RSPK.

And there was a good reason for proposing it.

When Roll examined 116 historical poltergeist cases, a particular individual appeared to be associated with the disturbances in 92 of them — around 79%. A later German survey of 54 cases found a similar living-person association in 63%.

That is not a minor pattern.

But it leaves another problem.

What about the other cases?

What about poltergeists that communicate intelligently?

What about cases in which the phenomena appear to reveal information, develop personalities, answer questions, produce voices or apparitions, or continue when the supposed human agent is absent?

Even the Society for Psychical Research has warned against assuming that everything grouped under the word poltergeist must have the same underlying cause.

That may be the key.

Perhaps “poltergeist” describes what happens rather than what causes it.

And if so, there may be more than one kind.

What Is a Poltergeist?

The popular image of a poltergeist comes from horror movies: violent hauntings, possessed children and kitchen furniture flying through the air.

The actual case literature is stranger.

Alan Gauld and Tony Cornell examined 500 reported hauntings and poltergeist cases. Among the poltergeist-type phenomena they catalogued, small-object movements appeared in roughly 64% of cases, unexplained rappings in 48%, movements of larger objects such as chairs and tables in 36%, human-like apparitions in 29%, and voices or groaning sounds in 26%.

Most intriguingly, around 16% of the total cases contained some form of apparent communication through raps.

So the classic poltergeist is not merely a ghost that throws plates.

The phenomenon can include:

• knocks and bangs;
• footsteps;
• moving furniture;
• objects apparently thrown through the air;
• doors opening or closing;
• beds shaking;
• objects disappearing and reappearing;
• unexplained water;
• small fires;
• electrical disturbances;
• voices;
• writing;
• physical attacks;
• apparitions;
• and responsive communication.

That is an extraordinary range of behaviour.

And it immediately raises a question.

Are we certain all of these things belong to the same phenomenon?

Model One: The Human Mind Is Producing the Poltergeist

The RSPK model begins with one of the strongest recurring observations in poltergeist research.

Activity frequently clusters around a person.

Not necessarily around a house.

Not necessarily around a supposedly haunted room.

Around someone.

This person is sometimes called the focus, agent or poltergeist agent.

Often the individual is young.

Sometimes they are going through emotional stress, family conflict, puberty, anger or circumstances in which strong emotions cannot easily be expressed.

The proposed mechanism is extraordinary but conceptually simple:

emotion or psychological tension somehow produces unconscious physical effects outside the body.

In other words, psychokinesis without conscious intention.

Roll did not imagine the agent standing in a room thinking, I am going to throw that bottle.

The person may be as surprised as everyone else.

Under this model, the subconscious mind is doing something the conscious mind does not know how to do.

Miami: The Poltergeist Who Seemed to Need Julio

The Miami poltergeist of 1966–1967 is almost a textbook RSPK case.

The disturbances occurred inside Tropication Arts, a warehouse in Florida.

Objects fell.

Merchandise moved.

Items appeared to leave shelves unexpectedly.

Police officers, employees and investigators became involved.

William Roll and J. Gaither Pratt investigated.

And slowly, one person became difficult to ignore.

A young employee named Julio.

Activity seemed unusually concentrated around him.

Julio also made some remarkable statements.

During one quiet period he reportedly became nervous because nothing was happening.

After a burst of activity, he appeared cheerful.

At another point he said that the disturbances made him feel happy and that he missed them when they stopped.

Psychological testing reportedly indicated anger, rebellion and feelings of social alienation. Psychologist Gertrude Schmeidler proposed that the disturbances might represent aggression directed unconsciously at Julio's employer and his possessions.

Think about what that hypothesis means.

Julio would not necessarily be pretending.

He might genuinely see an object move and have no idea that he was responsible.

The poltergeist would effectively be a physical expression of psychological conflict.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

Anger throws the bottle.

Except the angry person never touches it.

Sauchie: When the Phenomenon Followed the Girl to School

The 1960 Sauchie case in Scotland is particularly interesting because the disturbances did not remain conveniently trapped inside one supposedly haunted house.

They appeared around eleven-year-old Virginia Campbell.

At home, knocking sounds were reported.

Bedclothes appeared to ripple.

A pillow rotated.

A linen chest reportedly moved.

Then phenomena appeared at Virginia's school.

Her teacher Margaret Stewart described a pointer lying on a desk beginning to vibrate before falling to the floor. She placed her hand on the desk and felt vibration.

Then the desk itself moved.

Virginia was standing away from it with her hands behind her back.

Doctors also reported hearing knocks around the girl, and recording equipment captured some of the sounds.

That geographical movement is important.

If the house were the cause, moving Virginia should have stopped the phenomenon.

Instead, the disturbances apparently moved with Virginia.

That is exactly what the living-agent model predicts.

The person is the centre.

The building is scenery.

Rosenheim: When the Poltergeist Entered an Office

Rosenheim, Germany, in 1967 is even stranger because the reported effects occurred not in a frightened family's bedroom but inside a lawyer's office.

Telephones behaved abnormally.

Lights reportedly malfunctioned.

Electrical equipment showed disturbances.

Objects moved.

Technical personnel became involved.

Investigators eventually focused attention on a young employee, Annemarie Schneider.

The striking point is that the disturbances were reported to correlate with her presence.

When she eventually left the office, the phenomenon reportedly ended.

This is exactly the kind of pattern that encouraged researchers such as Hans Bender to interpret poltergeist activity as a human-centred phenomenon rather than a conventional haunting.

In cases like Rosenheim, the hypothesis of a deceased previous inhabitant seems almost unnecessary.

The strongest pattern is not place.

It is person.

Olive Hill: Objects Moving Under Observation

A Kentucky case investigated by Roll adds another element.

Roll later wrote that he personally observed a table jump and a bottle move through the air.

More importantly, he reported ten incidents in which either he or investigator John Stump could see both the young person associated with the case and the moving object without observing physical contact.

That is precisely the observational condition poltergeist investigators want.

Not:

We heard a crash and found something on the floor.

But:

There is the person.

There is the object.

We can see both.

And the object moves.

The family eventually stopped the investigation because of their religious interpretation of what was happening.

For the RSPK hypothesis, cases like Olive Hill are important because they suggest that some apparent poltergeist movements might resemble spontaneous macro-PK.

Eleonore Zugun: The Girl Who Blamed the Devil

One of the most extraordinary historical focus-person cases involved a Romanian girl named Eleonore Zugun.

Around her were reported:

• rappings;
• displaced objects;
• objects apparently appearing unexpectedly;
• scratches and bite-like marks on her body;
• and automatic writing.

Eleonore herself believed she was being attacked by something evil.

She referred to it as the Dracu — the Devil.

Researchers, however, increasingly considered the possibility that Eleonore herself was unconsciously connected to the manifestations.

And here we reach one of the strangest problems in poltergeist research.

From the inside, RSPK could feel exactly like an attack by an external being.

Imagine producing effects unconsciously.

You hear the knock too.

You see the object move too.

You feel the scratches.

You do not consciously know how any of it is happening.

From your perspective, something else is doing it.

The distinction between possessed and psychokinetic becomes far less obvious than it sounds.

But RSPK Has a Serious Problem

The human-agent theory handles chaotic physical activity surprisingly well.

Flying objects.

Raps.

Broken items.

Electrical disturbances.

Activity that follows an individual.

Emotional correlations.

Even apparently playful behaviour could theoretically originate in subconscious processes.

But then some poltergeists begin to behave as though there is somebody on the other side.

And this is where the subject becomes much more difficult.

Because noise is one thing.

Conversation is another.

Model Two: An Independent Intelligence

Suppose something knocks against a wall.

That tells us almost nothing.

Now suppose you say:

“Knock twice.”

And it knocks twice.

Still possible coincidence.

So you change the test.

“Knock five times.”

Five knocks.

“Knock behind me.”

The sound changes position.

“What number am I thinking of?”

Correct number.

“Spell your name.”

The knocks begin responding to an alphabet.

At some point the question changes.

You are no longer asking:

What force is making the sound?

You are asking:

Who is answering?

Andover: The Poltergeist That Played Along

The 1974 Andover case is especially important here.

Investigator Barrie Colvin visited the family repeatedly.

The main phenomenon consisted of rappings apparently centred around a young girl named Theresa.

The knocks were reported from a wooden bedhead and elsewhere around the house.

But this was not merely random percussion.

Questions were asked.

The knocks responded.

A code developed.

The source was asked to move.

It apparently changed location.

Questions could reportedly be whispered.

Responses still followed.

At times Colvin reported that the phenomenon could correctly respond to numbers he was mentally concentrating on.

The communicating personality identified itself as Eric Waters.

Andover therefore looks, at first glance, exactly like the old-fashioned definition of a poltergeist.

A noisy spirit.

There is only one problem.

Colvin searched local records.

He could not establish that Eric Waters had actually been a dead person connected to the location.

Eventually even Colvin leaned toward RSPK.

His hypothesis was remarkable.

Theresa's subconscious might have been producing the knocks and the personality communicating through them.

That raises a fascinating possibility.

A living mind might not merely move objects unconsciously.

It might create an apparently independent character.

Which means intelligence alone does not automatically separate PK from spirits.

The subconscious is intelligent too.

Cideville: Something That Could Play Music

Now consider Cideville, France, in 1850–1851.

The disturbances became entangled in an actual court case, giving the episode an unusually detailed historical record.

The most interesting element was again responsiveness.

Witnesses described knocks answering questions.

Numbers could reportedly be requested.

The source could respond.

Then investigators asked for something considerably more complicated.

Musical rhythms.

According to the historical account, the knocking reproduced requested patterns, including part of Rossini's Stabat Mater.

That is no longer random physical discharge.

Whatever the mechanism, the phenomenon behaved as though information was being processed.

Something heard the request.

Something understood it.

Something converted that request into physical responses.

Whether that “something” existed inside a living brain or outside it is the real question.

Enfield: When the Poltergeist Acquired a Voice

The Enfield case began in north London in 1977.

It contained almost everything associated with classic poltergeist activity:

furniture movement;

rappings;

objects thrown;

doors opening;

equipment malfunctioning;

apparent levitations;

small fires;

strange appearances of water;

physical disturbances;

and apparitions.

Many people reportedly witnessed at least parts of the outbreak, including neighbours, reporters, police officers, technicians and investigators.

Then the phenomenon changed.

It started talking.

A deep, coarse male voice began speaking through eleven-year-old Janet Hodgson.

The voice eventually identified itself with a previous occupant of the house, usually referred to as Bill Wilkins.

It claimed to have died downstairs in the house.

That transformed Enfield from a violent RSPK-type outbreak into something resembling mediumship.

And it produces three possibilities.

Possibility One: Janet Created the Voice Normally

This explains the voice without explaining every other reported phenomenon.

Possibility Two: Janet's Subconscious Created the Personality

This is effectively the Andover model.

The same unconscious mind hypothesized to produce psychokinetic effects could also construct the personality communicating through them.

Possibility Three: Something Used Janet

In this model, Janet is not the source.

She is the interface.

The distinction is enormous.

And it may explain why some historical “possessions,” mediumistic episodes and poltergeist cases resemble each other so closely.

Maybe occasionally they are the same phenomenon viewed from different directions.

Battersea: Donald Arrives

The Battersea poltergeist that began in London in 1956 produced another apparent personality.

The activity centred largely around Shirley Hitchings.

Raps developed into communication.

The supposed intelligence identified itself as Donald, claiming to be a dead boy Shirley had once known.

Then written messages appeared.

The behaviour eventually became darker.

Threats were made.

A burning match was reportedly seen flying through the air.

Bedclothes caught fire.

Physical attacks were reported.

A journalist who slept beside Shirley described witnessing the girl being clawed and dragged from the bed.

This is much closer to what people mean when they describe a hostile spirit.

Not merely unexplained energy.

Not random flying objects.

Something that apparently behaves aggressively toward specific people.

Yet the same conceptual problem remains.

A violent subconscious personality could theoretically imitate a violent external personality remarkably well.

The two hypotheses begin to overlap.

What Would an Actual Hostile Spirit Look Like?

This question can be approached more carefully than horror movies usually do.

If a poltergeist were generated by unconscious PK, several patterns should make sense:

It should follow a living person.

Activity should weaken or stop when that person leaves.

Emotional conditions might influence it.

Stress, anger, conflict and emotional release could correlate with outbreaks.

Physical effects should dominate.

Objects moving, breaking, falling or disappearing would fit naturally.

Communication might be psychologically connected to the agent.

Names, personalities and themes might draw from information available consciously or unconsciously to the focus person.

Now reverse that.

If an autonomous entity were involved, we might expect different signs.

Activity could persist without one particular living agent.

The location or people targeted might change.

The personality should show continuity.

Not simply isolated answers but characteristic language, preferences, memories and behaviour.

It might possess information unavailable to the apparent agent.

This is crucial.

If a communicating poltergeist gives accurate information that nobody present could reasonably know, the subconscious-personality explanation becomes harder to maintain.

Communication should be interactive.

Not merely a knock after someone asks a question, but extended responsiveness to unpredictable requests.

Different channels might converge.

Raps, voices, writing, apparitions and physical effects could all express the same apparent personality.

Behaviour might be goal-directed.

Helping.

Threatening.

Hiding objects.

Responding to insults.

Protecting someone.

Targeting someone.

Trying to communicate a particular message.

That begins to look less like an explosion of psychological energy and more like an actor.

The Importance of Personality

This may ultimately be more important than raw physical force.

Moving a chair is impressive.

But physics alone does not tell us whether a mind moved it.

Intelligent behaviour potentially does.

Imagine three events.

Event A

A cup falls from a shelf.

Almost no information.

Event B

A cup flies from a shelf immediately after someone angrily mentions the poltergeist.

More interesting.

Event C

An investigator says:

“If you understand me, move the red cup but leave the blue one where it is.”

The red cup moves.

Now the information content of the event has dramatically increased.

The energy required might be identical.

But Event C contains selection.

Something distinguished red from blue.

Something understood a sentence.

Something acted according to it.

That is why responsive poltergeist cases deserve a category of their own.

The central mystery is no longer force.

It is cognition.

The Hybrid Model

There is another possibility that rarely receives enough attention.

What if both major interpretations are sometimes correct?

A living person's PK ability and an external intelligence need not be mutually exclusive.

Suppose some people unconsciously produce physical psi.

They could function like amplifiers.

Most of the time emotional pressure produces chaotic RSPK.

But under particular circumstances, an independent consciousness might interact with the same mechanism.

In that model the human focus is not necessarily the poltergeist.

The person provides the energy or channel.

The intelligence provides the direction.

That would explain a peculiar pattern found in some cases:

the disturbances strongly depend on one living individual, yet the behaviour simultaneously appears autonomous.

Janet Hodgson would then be neither simply perpetrator nor victim.

She would be the component through which the phenomenon becomes physically expressive.

This hybrid possibility also resembles older ideas about physical mediumship, in which unusual phenomena allegedly occurred around particular individuals even though the intelligence producing them claimed to be deceased.

The difference between a physical medium and a poltergeist focus might therefore be smaller than the terminology suggests.

Why Some Poltergeists Look Angry

Another recurring feature is aggression.

Poltergeists throw things.

Break possessions.

Pull bedding.

Scratch people.

Produce threatening messages.

Start fires.

Sometimes they appear almost obsessively mischievous.

Two interpretations again emerge.

Under RSPK, aggression may reflect the emotional condition of the focus person.

The anger belongs to the living.

It simply appears outside the body.

Under an entity model, the hostility belongs to whatever intelligence is manifesting.

The anger belongs to the dead — or at least to something presenting itself as such.

And these possibilities make different predictions.

If emotional treatment of the living focus reduces the activity, RSPK becomes attractive.

If the phenomenon behaves according to its own apparent motives independently of that person's psychological state, the entity interpretation becomes more interesting.

Some historical cases even report changes after religious rituals, prayers, exorcisms or confrontations with the supposed intelligence.

That alone does not tell us what the mechanism is.

But behavioural response is exactly the sort of thing worth documenting.

Because if something changes when spoken to, challenged or negotiated with, we are studying behaviour, not simply noise.

Bridgeport: When the Official Answer and Witnesses Diverged

The 1974 disturbances at Lindley Street in Bridgeport, Connecticut, became a media spectacle.

Police and other responders attended the Goodin home.

Eventually the case was officially labelled a hoax.

Yet later accounts from some people who had been present described incidents they believed were not adequately explained by that conclusion.

William J. Hall later reconstructed the case using recordings, incident sheets and interviews.

Bridgeport therefore presents another important problem.

Not every event in a poltergeist outbreak has to have the same cause.

Someone can fake one event inside a genuine anomaly.

Someone can exaggerate a real event.

A frightened witness can misinterpret one movement while accurately describing another.

A family can discover that attention follows strange activity and begin embellishing it after the original unexplained events have already occurred.

The presence of human manipulation does not automatically tell us what produced every incident.

Poltergeist cases may be messy because people are messy.

Druten: A Perfect Example of a Mixed Case

The 1995 disturbances in Druten in the Netherlands demonstrate this beautifully.

Police officers reported unusual incidents involving stones and sand.

Later researchers filmed the young boy associated with the case performing a trick.

Other ordinary throws were also observed.

So at least part of the case involved human deception.

But that leaves a more interesting question.

What about the incidents the trick does not reproduce?

If someone is caught throwing one stone, we know how that stone moved.

We do not automatically know how every earlier object moved.

This is why a poltergeist outbreak should be decomposed into individual events rather than labelled as either “real” or “fake.”

Reality does not owe us clean cases.

Fraud Can Grow Around a Genuine Phenomenon

This possibility deserves more attention.

Imagine genuinely strange activity begins in a house.

The family becomes terrified.

Then journalists arrive.

Investigators arrive.

Neighbours arrive.

Everyone waits.

Nothing happens.

A teenager who has been at the centre of weeks of chaos now feels enormous pressure.

So she throws something.

That proves she threw something.

It does not retroactively create every previous disturbance.

The famous Enfield case contains exactly this type of problem. Investigators acknowledged episodes of trickery while continuing to argue that those episodes did not explain everything they had witnessed.

The correct unit of analysis is therefore not:

Is Enfield fake?

It is:

What happened during event 347?

Then event 348.

Then event 349.

Poltergeists are collections of incidents.

Not single claims.

The Energy Problem

There is another aspect that deserves far more attention than it usually receives.

Some reported poltergeist effects imply substantial physical energy.

A knock loud enough to shake furniture requires energy.

A heavy table moving requires energy.

A solid object accelerating across a room requires energy.

A piece of furniture overturning requires considerably more.

In the RSPK model this creates an enormous biological mystery.

Where does the energy come from?

Roll spent decades exploring possible relationships between living organisms, environmental electromagnetic fields and physical effects, eventually proposing speculative electromagnetic models. One later paper by Roll and Michael Persinger compared patterns across historical RSPK collections and treated poltergeist events as observable displays of physical energy associated with particular individuals.

If PK exists at this scale, consciousness is capable of interacting with matter far beyond anything accepted neuroscience currently assigns to the brain.

That would be revolutionary even if there were no ghosts at all.

A genuine RSPK poltergeist would already rewrite part of our understanding of mind and matter.

The ghost is almost optional.

The Information Problem May Be Even Bigger

The entity hypothesis faces a different test.

Energy alone is not enough.

The strongest entity case would contain information.

Suppose a voice claiming to be a deceased person provides a name, private memory or historical fact that is subsequently verified and was not known to the focus person.

Now ordinary subconscious role-play becomes more difficult.

But even then another paranormal explanation remains possible.

ESP.

Perhaps the focus person obtained the information psychically from a living person, document or environment.

Parapsychology calls this problem super-psi.

It creates an almost absurd situation.

To distinguish a ghost from an extraordinarily psychic living mind, investigators might need to determine whether unconscious telepathy plus psychokinesis could reproduce the same result.

In other words:

even proving paranormality would not automatically prove ghosts.

But that is not a weakness of the subject.

It is where the subject becomes interesting.

The Cases May Form a Spectrum

Instead of forcing every report into two boxes, imagine a spectrum.

Type 1 — Chaotic RSPK

Objects move.

Things break.

There is little communication.

Activity tracks one person closely.

Miami fits reasonably well here.

Type 2 — Responsive RSPK

The activity follows a person but also responds intelligently.

The subconscious may be directing the PK.

Andover may belong here.

Type 3 — Personality-Producing RSPK

A seemingly independent character develops.

It speaks or communicates.

But everything it knows may originate in the living focus.

Type 4 — Hybrid Cases

A living person appears necessary for the physical manifestations, but the communicating intelligence behaves as though independent.

Enfield is one candidate.

Type 5 — Entity-Like Poltergeists

The activity shows sustained independent personality, meaningful communication or information difficult to connect to the living focus.

Historical responsive cases such as Cideville move closer to this territory.

Type 6 — Hostile Entity Cases

The activity appears intentional, aggressive and personally directed.

Threats, targeted physical attacks and behaviour resembling persecution dominate.

This is the territory traditionally described as an angry spirit — and in religious cultures, occasionally as demonic activity.

Whether all six categories represent genuinely different mechanisms is unknown.

But as a research framework it makes far more sense than pretending a thrown spoon, a communicating voice and an apparition must automatically have one explanation.

Perhaps “Poltergeist” Is a Symptom, Not a Species

Medicine offers an interesting analogy.

A fever is real.

But “fever” is not one disease.

Influenza can cause fever.

Bacterial infection can cause fever.

Autoimmune disease can cause fever.

Cancer can cause fever.

The outward symptom is similar.

The cause is different.

Perhaps poltergeist works the same way.

“Objects move without an obvious physical cause.”

That is the symptom.

RSPK could be one cause.

An external consciousness could be another.

Fraud could imitate either.

Ordinary environmental mechanisms could produce isolated events.

And multiple causes could exist simultaneously within one famous case.

That possibility would explain why more than a century of research has failed to produce one neat theory fitting everything.

There may not be one.

What Separates the Two Main Models?

The most valuable future poltergeist investigation would not simply try to prove that an object moved.

It would try to determine what the phenomenon behaves like.

Ask:

Does activity follow one person?

Does it continue when that person is absent?

Does intensity correlate with emotional events?

Can the phenomenon follow instructions?

Can it distinguish targets?

Can it answer unpredictable questions?

Can it provide information?

Does it maintain a stable personality?

Does that personality know things the focus person does not?

Does activity remain tied to a location after different occupants arrive?

Do several forms of manifestation — raps, writing, voices and apparitions — behave as though produced by the same intelligence?

Those questions could begin separating unconscious PK from autonomous agency.

Because both hypotheses predict movement.

Only one necessarily predicts an independent mind.

The Most Interesting Conclusion

The history of poltergeist research does not point neatly toward one explanation.

It points toward a division.

A large proportion of investigated outbreaks show an undeniable structural feature: the phenomena cluster around living people.

That is why RSPK became such an important theory.

Miami.

Sauchie.

Rosenheim.

Olive Hill.

Eleonore Zugun.

In cases like these, the living-agent model deserves serious attention.

But another group of cases contains something more.

Communication.

Responses.

Personalities.

Voices.

Apparitions.

Apparently intentional behaviour.

And sometimes hostility.

Andover.

Cideville.

Enfield.

Battersea.

Those cases force the question beyond simple psychokinesis.

The real mistake may have been asking for one explanation for every poltergeist.

Some may be extraordinary expressions of the living human mind.

Some may involve something that behaves like a mind independent of the living people present.

Some may involve both.

And some are undoubtedly mixtures of ordinary events, human tricks and genuinely puzzling incidents.

That is not a retreat from the mystery.

It makes the mystery much larger.

Because if RSPK exists, consciousness can somehow affect physical matter outside the body.

And if even a fraction of the apparently autonomous cases represent genuine independent personalities, then the question becomes more profound still.

We are no longer asking whether something moved the furniture.

We are asking who moved it.