Poltergeists - What are they?

Occurrences often associated with reports of poltergeists are:

Objects are moved or thrown around, sometimes at the victim
Objects appearing in random places
Raspy or vague voices are heard (sometimes are only heard from an EVP)
noises are heard (such as tapping, dragging, thumping or footsteps)
being pushed, tugged, or knocked down by an unknown force
Ghostly figures or shadows being seen (sometimes are only seen on a thermal imager or camcorder)
Haunting or activity starts after something bad happening (such as a death)
Forcing things on the victim (such as poison)
Rapping noises ( e.g.: one means no, two mean yes)
Electronics malfunctioning (during the presence of the poltergeist)
Victim may have strange feelings or sensations during the presence of a poltergeist (such as nausea or EMF sickness)
High EMF ratings from an unknown source
Cackling is heard upon presence of a poltergeist (usually only heard from an EVP)
Cold spots are often felt usually in dark areas
Blood appearing on floors, walls, ceilings, shiny and grimy surfaces
Inappropriate drawing of faces or contents usually on foggy mirrors
Unexplainable fear within the home or depression
Sensation of poltergeist activity becomes stronger and more prominent

Although poltergeist stories date back to the first century, the evidence supporting the existence of poltergeists is anecdotal, which is hardly surprising as the nature of the phenomenon is unpredictable and sporadic. Indeed, many of the stories below have several versions and/or inconsistencies.

A pamphlet, printed in London in 1698 by Mr. Richard Chamberlain, provides an account of a poltergeist-type haunting that had occurred some years before. Two copies of the pamphlet exist in the British Museum called: "Lithobolia, or stone throwing Devil. Being an Exact and True account (by way of Journal) of the various actions of infernal Spirits or (Devils Incarnate) Witches or both: and the great Disturbance and Amazement they gave to George Walton's family at a place called Great Island in the county of New Hampshire in New England, chiefly in throwing about (by an Invisible hand) Stones, Bricks, and Brick-Bats of all sizes, with several other things, as Hammers, Mauls, Iron-Crows, Spits, and other Utensils, as came into their Hellish minds, and this for space of a quarter of a year....", some cases, these types of spirits share aspects with elves and goblins.

The "Wizard", Livingston, West Virginia (1797).
The Bell Witch (1817).
The Haunting of The Fox sisters (1848) - arguably one of the most famous, because it started the Spiritualism movement.
The Great Amherst Mystery, 1878-79.
Hopfgarten near Weimar (1921).
Eleonore Zugun - The Romanian 'Poltergeist Girl' (1926).
The Epworth Rectory
The Wayne, NJ (1931)

William Roll, Hans Bender, and Harry Price are perhaps three of the most famous poltergeist investigators in the annals of parapsychology. Harry Price investigated Borley Rectory which is often called "the most haunted house in England."

Dr. Friedbert Karger was one of two physicists from the Max Planck Institute who helped to investigate perhaps the most validated poltergeist case in recorded history. Annemarie Schneider, a 19-year-old secretary in a law firm in Rosenheim (a town in southern Germany) was seemingly the unwitting cause of much chaos in the firm, including disruption of electricity and telephone lines, the rotation of a picture, swinging lamps which were captured on video (which was one of the first times any poltergeist activity has been captured on film), and strange sounds that sounded electrical in origin were recorded. Fraud was not proven despite intensive investigation by the physicists, journalists, and the police. The effects moved with the young woman when she changed jobs until they finally faded out, disappeared, never happened again, and never were spoken about again.
In the Rosenheim case of 1967, The Rosenheim Poltergeist (1967), Friedbert Karger's whole perspective on physics changed after investigating the events. "These experiments were really a challenge to physics," Karger says today. "What we saw in the Rosenheim case could be 100 per cent shown not to be explainable by known physics." The phenomena were witnessed by Hans Bender, the police force, the CID, reporters, and the physicists. Documented by the BBC in a TV series, "Leap in the Dark," the first series, transmitted in 1973, consisted solely of documentaries. From the second series onwards, the episodes were a combination of documentary and drama.

The Black Monk of Pontefract
The Enfield Poltergeist (1977).
The Mackenzie Poltergeist (fairly recent) - Famed for haunting Greyfriars church yard, Edinburgh, UK.
The Canneto di Caronia fires poltergeist (fairly recent (2004-2005)) - Famed for defying all attempts at a scientific explanation, Sicily, Italy.
The Entity Case allegedly involved a single mother of three named Carla Moran who was being repeatedly raped by an invisible entity and its two helpers over the course of several years.
The case of Tina Resch, widely reported in the media in 1984.
A recent case in Barnsley near Sheffield in England, where poltergeist effects were witnessed by the police force.
The Thornton Road poltergeist of Birmingham (1981).
Easington Council in County Durham, UK paid half of a medium's fee so that she would exorcise a poltergeist from public housing in Peterlee as it was deemed more cost effective than relocation of the tenant (2008).

Historically, several different hypotheses have been put forward to explain the poltergeist phenomenon.

Some scientists and skeptics propose that all poltergeist activity untraceable to fraud has a physical explanation such as static electricity, electromagnetic fields, ultra-, and infrasound and/or ionized air. In some cases, such as the Rosenheim poltergeist case, the physicist F. Karger from the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik and G. Zicha from the Technical University of Munich found none of these effects present and psi proponents claim that no evidence of fraud was ever found, even after a sustained investigation from the police force and CID. Whether this is true or not, police officers did sign statements that they had witnessed the phenomena. Other aspects of the case were hard to explain: The time service was rung hundreds of times, with a frequency impossible with the mechanical dialing phones of 1967. The municipal authority disconnected the office from the mains supply and hooked it up to a dedicated generator hoping to stabilize the current. But surges in current and voltage still occurred with no detectable cause according to Zicha and Karger.

Others think poltergeist phenomena could be caused by more mundane phenomena, such as unusual air currents, air vibrations such as in acoustic levitation, or tremors caused by underground streams.

John Hutchinson has claimed that he has created poltergeist effects in his laboratory while scientist David Turner has suggested that ball lightning might cause the movement of objects blamed on poltergeists. Some scientists go as far as calling them pseudo-psychic phenomena and claim that under some circumstances they are caused by obscure physical effects. Parapsychologists William G. Roll and Dean Radin, physicist Hal Puthoff and head of electrical engineering at Duke University who specializes in electromagnetic field phenomena, claim that poltergeist phenomena [the movement of objects at least] could be caused by anomalies in the zero-point field,as outlined in the above article and in Roll's book Unleashed and mentioned in a chapter of Dean Radin's book Entangled Minds. The basic theory is that poltergeist movements are repulsive versions of the casimir effect that can put pressures on objects. Thus, anomalies in this field could conceivably move objects. This theory has also been mentioned in the current book on paranormal phenomena Psience by Marie D. Jones.

The theory is not complete, however, because it accounts for the movement of objects but not for the strange voices, seeming personality, and strange electrical effects displayed in some cases.

Some parapsychologists point out that poltergeist phenomena often occur in the vicinity of a focus person, generally a psychologically troubled adolescent. Thus, poltergeists may be instances of non-conscious psychokinesis caused by the focus person, rather than interventions of a ghost or spirit as traditionally believed.

Skeptics think that the phenomena are hoaxes perpetrated by the agent. Indeed, some poltergeist agents have been caught by investigators in the act of throwing objects. A few of them later confessed to faking

Skeptics maintain that parapsychologists are especially easy to fool when they think that many occurrences are real and discount the hoax hypothesis from the outset. Even after witnessing first hand an agent throwing objects, psi-believing parapsychologists rationalize the fact away by assuming that the agents are only cheating when caught cheating, and at no other time. One reason given is that the agents often fake phenomena when the investigation coincides with a period of time where there appears to be little or no 'genuine' phenomena occurring. Another stated reason is that some of the phenomena witnessed would be hard to fake, even for magicians when under the watch of many people, let alone untrained children and non-magicians.

The current consensus among most scientists is a mixture of the self-delusion and hoax hypotheses and a bit of the caused-by-scientifically-explained-forces hypothesis [tremors, abnormal air currents etc

Both the name and concept of the poltergeist became famous to modern audiences from 1982 in the Poltergeist movies and the subsequent TV series Poltergeist: The Legacy. The first Poltergeist movie gave an accurate depiction (during the first half of the film) of a "typical" report of poltergeist infestation, right down to the depiction of the focus as a prepubescent girl.
In the Harry Potter series, a poltergeist named Peeves lives at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.