Poltergeists: The Famous Cases and What Investigators Found

The word poltergeist is German, from poltern, to make a racket, and Geist, spirit: a noisy ghost. It entered English in the nineteenth century, but the kind of case it names is much older. Where a classic haunting is tied to a place, and often to a figure seen or sensed, a poltergeist is a pattern of disturbances: knocks and raps, objects thrown or moved, bedclothes pulled off, stones falling on roofs, and occasionally voices. The activity usually starts suddenly, lasts weeks or months, and stops just as suddenly.

The most consistent feature, noticed by believers and skeptics alike, is that the disturbances tend to cluster around one person in a household, very often a child or teenager, and to happen when that person is present. Investigators have read that pattern in opposite ways. A few psychical researchers have proposed that the person is an unwitting source of some unknown force; most skeptics conclude that the person is, deliberately or not, producing the effects. The famous cases below show both readings at work.

One of the best-documented early cases took place over the winter of 1716 and 1717 at the rectory in Epworth, Lincolnshire, home of the Reverend Samuel Wesley and his large family. For weeks the household heard knocks, groans and footsteps, and the children nicknamed the presence Old Jeffrey. Letters the family wrote about it survive, and Samuel's son John Wesley, later the founder of Methodism, published an account in 1784. No cause was ever settled on; later commentators have suggested a prank by someone in the household.

The Bell Witch of Tennessee is America's most famous poltergeist story. The Bell family farmed near what is now Adams, in Robertson County, and the haunting is said to have run from about 1817 to 1821: knocking and scratching, then a voice that spoke, quoted Scripture and tormented the youngest daughter, Betsy. The legend says the entity, which came to be called Kate, poisoned John Bell, who died in December 1820. The problem is the source. The first full account is a book published in 1894 by a newspaper editor, Martin Van Buren Ingram, built around a family diary that no one has ever produced. Historians and skeptics treat it as a folk legend written up long after everyone with firsthand memory had died.

Borley Rectory, a brick house built in the early 1860s in a village on the Essex and Suffolk border, gathered stories early on, including a phantom nun that some of the rector's daughters said they saw in 1900. Its fame began in 1929, when the Daily Mirror reported strange events there and Harry Price, the best-known ghost hunter of the day, came to investigate. While the Reverend Lionel Foyster and his wife Marianne lived there, from 1930 to 1935, the reports grew into a full poltergeist case: bells ringing, objects thrown, and penciled messages on the walls, some apparently addressed to Marianne. Price rented the empty house in 1937 and 1938, recruited dozens of volunteer observers, and in 1940 published The Most Haunted House in England. The rectory was gutted by fire in February 1939, when its owner said an oil lamp had been knocked over, and it was demolished in 1944.

After Price died in 1948, three members of the Society for Psychical Research, Eric Dingwall, Kathleen Goldney and Trevor Hall, re-examined the case, comparing Price's published accounts with the original witness statements. Their report, The Haunting of Borley Rectory, published in 1956, concluded that Price had embellished the evidence and had probably produced some of the phenomena himself, and that the case for a haunting faded away under scrutiny. Price's defenders have disputed parts of the report ever since, but most psychical researchers now regard Borley as unreliable evidence for anything paranormal.

The best-known modern case began in August 1977 in a rented house in Enfield, north London, home to a single mother and her four children. The family reported furniture sliding, knocking in the walls and objects thrown, and police officers called to the house in the early days of the case included a policewoman who later signed a statement saying she had seen a chair slide across the floor. Activity centered on two sisters, aged 11 and 13. Before long the younger girl was speaking in a gruff voice that sounded like an old man's.

Two members of the Society for Psychical Research, Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair, spent many months on the case, recorded hours of tape and became convinced that much of what happened was genuine; Playfair's book, This House Is Haunted, appeared in 1980. They also accepted that the girls sometimes played tricks. Other investigators were far less impressed. Anita Gregory and John Beloff of the same society concluded that the girls were faking incidents, and a video camera in a neighboring room reportedly caught the younger girl bending spoons and trying to bend an iron bar. The magician Milbourne Christopher saw nothing paranormal, and the ventriloquist Ray Alan judged the voice a vocal trick. Press photographs that seem to show the younger girl flying across her bedroom look to skeptics like a child jumping off a bed. One of the sisters later said that a small part of the activity had been faked, while insisting that most of it was real. The case has inspired dramas and films, but its own record is a dispute that was never resolved.

Systematic study of poltergeists began with the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882. In 1896 one of its leading members, Frank Podmore, reviewed eleven cases and concluded that trickery, often by a child at the center of the disturbances, was probably a sufficient explanation for each; in several, fraud had been detected or confessed. That conclusion, sometimes called the naughty-little-girl theory, remains the mainstream skeptical view: a young person, often under stress, discovers that a knock or a thrown object gets attention, and the adults around them begin to see every unexplained event through the story.

A minority of parapsychologists took the opposite line. After investigating a case in Seaford, on Long Island, in 1958, J. Gaither Pratt and William Roll coined the term recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, proposing that the young person at the center was producing the effects unconsciously, with the mind rather than the hands. The idea has never been accepted by mainstream science, and the skeptic Joe Nickell, re-examining the Seaford case, concluded the 12-year-old boy involved was most likely playing tricks.

Not every report is a hoax. Settling timber, plumbing, drafts and misplaced objects all feed a frightened household's sense that something is happening, and memory tends to tidy events into a pattern afterward. What the famous cases have in common is that the strongest effects tend to happen when no one is watching closely.