A poltergeist ("noisy ghost," from the German poltern, to make noise, and geist, spirit) is a type of reported haunting phenomenon centred on physical disturbance rather than a visible apparition — objects thrown or moved, furniture displaced, unexplained noises, and electrical disturbances, rather than a seen or felt presence.[1] Unlike most entries under Ghosts and Hauntings, poltergeist activity is not always attributed to a deceased spirit at all; a major strand of research instead attributes it to a living person within the household — see Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis for the full account of this hypothesis and the research behind it.
History
Early cases
The Drummer of Tedworth (1662) is generally regarded as the first well-documented poltergeist case in English history.[2] After magistrate John Mompesson won a lawsuit against a vagrant drummer, William Drury, and confiscated his drum, Mompesson's house in Tedworth (now Tidworth), Wiltshire, was reportedly plagued by loud phantom drumming and other disturbances, even after the drum itself had been destroyed.[2] The case was recorded and promoted by clergyman Joseph Glanvill in his 1681 book Saducismus Triumphatus, becoming one of the most famous episodes in the history of English witchcraft literature, though later scholarship has highlighted conflicting contemporary accounts and early scepticism about the case even at the time.[3]
The Epworth Rectory disturbances of 1716 affected the Lincolnshire home of the Reverend Samuel Wesley, father of Methodism founder John Wesley. The family reported loud knocking, groaning, clinking metal, and the sound of a phantom horn, with eldest daughter Hetty nicknaming the presumed spirit "Old Jeffrey."[4] Later analysis has speculated the disturbances may have reflected family or marital stress within the household, an explanation that would later become central to the RSPK framework developed some two centuries afterward.[4]
Other well-known 18th and 19th-century cases include the Bell Witch of Tennessee (1817–1821), the Great Amherst Mystery centred on Esther Cox in Nova Scotia (1878–1879), and numerous other disturbances recorded across Europe and North America throughout the period.[5]
Systematic modern investigation
Poltergeist research shifted from anecdotal case collection toward systematic pattern analysis from the mid-20th century onward, driven substantially by parapsychologists Joseph Gaither Pratt and William G. Roll, whose investigation of the 1958 Seaford, New York case led them to coin the term "recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis" (RSPK) — see Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis for a full account of this hypothesis, its supporting case pattern, and its reception.
Notable cases
The Enfield Poltergeist
The best-documented poltergeist case in British history — see Enfield Poltergeist for the full account.
The Rosenheim Poltergeist
A 1967 case in the office of a Bavarian law firm in Rosenheim, Germany, notable for occurring in a workplace rather than a private home. Reported phenomena included exploding light bulbs, telephone malfunctions, and other electrical disturbances documented by physicists from the Max Planck Institute, with activity linked to the presence of a 19-year-old employee, Annemarie Schneider, reportedly under significant personal stress at the time.[6]
Scientific and sceptical perspective
Sceptics attribute poltergeist cases to a combination of deliberate fraud — often by the "agent" seeking attention — unconscious or conscious trickery, misperception of ordinary events, and investigator bias, and note that in several high-profile cases the agent was directly caught producing phenomena by normal means. As with other subjects gathered under Parapsychology, RSPK remains a fringe hypothesis rather than an accepted explanation, even among researchers who take poltergeist reports seriously as a subject worth investigating.
A distinct, environmentally-focused sceptical thread has developed around the work of British engineer Vic Tandy, who in 1998 proposed that low-frequency sound below the range of human hearing — infrasound — could account for some reported haunting and poltergeist experiences. Tandy traced an apparent "haunting" he personally experienced at a medical equipment laboratory to a standing wave of infrasound around 19Hz generated by a newly installed extractor fan; this frequency is close to the resonant frequency of the human eyeball, which Tandy proposed could cause peripheral visual distortion, feelings of unease, and other effects consistent with reported paranormal experiences.[7] He published his findings in the peer-reviewed Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, and later investigated similar infrasound signatures at other reportedly haunted sites, including a 14th-century cellar in Coventry and Warwick Castle, and later reported measuring infrasound at levels roughly 200 times higher in "haunted" areas of Edinburgh's Mary King's Close than in unhaunted control areas.[8] Subsequent attempts to replicate Tandy's specific findings under controlled conditions, including a large-scale "GhostFest" experiment exposing hundreds of participants to ambient versus deliberately introduced infrasound, found no significant difference in reported paranormal experiences between the two conditions, and infrasound is not thought to affect all individuals equally.[9] Infrasound therefore remains, at most, a partial and contested explanation for some reported cases rather than a general solution to poltergeist phenomena as a whole.
See also
- Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis
- Enfield Poltergeist
- William G. Roll
- Vic Tandy
- Ghosts and Hauntings
- Society for Psychical Research
- Parapsychology
References
- ↑ "Poltergeist."Encyclopedia.com.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Drummer of Tedworth."Wikipedia.
- ↑ "New light on the 'Drummer of Tedworth': conflicting narratives of witchcraft in Restoration England."Historical Research (Wiley).
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Notable Historic Poltergeist Cases."PsychicScience.org.
- ↑ "Poltergeist."Sloppy Intelligence.
- ↑ "The Rosenheim Poltergeist."Ghostwatch.
- ↑ "Vic Tandy."Wikipedia.
- ↑ "The Haunted Frequency."Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics.
- ↑ ""Has the Boom Been Busted? Should Paranormal Research Be Interested in Infrasound?"."Academia.edu.