Poltergeist

A stone skitters across the flagstones with no hand behind it and fetches up against the far wall. On the mantel a candlestick tips, hangs a moment in the cold air as if considering, and drops. From somewhere inside the plaster a knocking starts up, steady and unhurried, keeping time with nothing at all. No figure stands in the doorway, and no face waits at the window. That absence is the whole character of the thing. The poltergeist is the haunting nobody sees, only hears, and feels, and sweeps up afterward.

The name says plainly what the trouble is. It comes from the German poltern, to bang and rumble and make a racket, welded to Geist, a spirit. A noisy ghost. Where a conventional apparition drifts silently down a corridor and unsettles by being looked at, the poltergeist works the other way around. It stays invisible and lets the house do the screaming. Doors slam in empty rooms. Plates leave the shelf and burst against the opposite wall. Beds lurch and tilt with sleepers still in them. Bells ring, stones fall indoors out of nowhere, and now and then a small fire starts in a folded sheet.

Because nothing is ever seen, the record it leaves is a record of effects and their residue: the cold draught that arrives ahead of the noise, the crash from the next room, the smell of scorching where no candle burned, the welt rising on a child’s arm. People who lived through a case rarely described a shape, for the good reason that there was none to describe. They described a sound, and then the mess.

Where such a thing comes from has never had one answer, and the answers on offer flatly contradict each other. The oldest reading, the one that governs the early accounts, held it to be a spirit of the restless dead or an outright demon, sent or strayed, working malice through a family’s furniture. A quieter tradition treated it as a household spirit gone sour, a kin of the German kobold turned spiteful after some slight, and did not always draw a firm line between a helper who smashed crockery in a temper and a devil who did it out of hatred. Then, in the twentieth century, the explanation turned inward, toward the living.

In the 1930s the psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor argued that many cases had no ghost in them at all, and that the disturbances radiated from a living person, usually one carrying repressed rage or unbearable tension, who became the unwitting focus of the outbreak. The parapsychologist William Roll pressed the idea further and, in a 1958 paper written with J. G. Pratt on a house on Long Island where the trouble circled a twelve-year-old boy, gave it a clinical name: recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis. Roll went back through four centuries of reports and kept finding the same figure at the centre, an adolescent under strain, as if the poltergeist were less a visitor than a symptom.

The case that fixed the pattern in English minds unfolded in Wiltshire between 1662 and 1663. A magistrate named John Mompesson had confiscated the drum of a wandering musician, William Drury, whom he had prosecuted for begging under false colours. Soon after the drum came into his house, the drumming followed it home. It beat through the walls at night, first outside, then in the children’s room, running through military tattoos no living hand was playing. Objects flew, boards rose from the floor, a servant swore something heavy and invisible pressed him down in his bed. The vicar Joseph Glanvill came to see for himself, heard the scratching and the raps answer his questions, and wrote the affair up; it reached print in his Saducismus Triumphatus in 1681 and became the founding English poltergeist, the Drummer of Tedworth.

The shape recurs across cases that otherwise share nothing. At Epworth Rectory in 1716 the Wesley family named their groaning, knocking tenant Old Jeffrey and half-domesticated it. In Tennessee between 1817 and 1821 the Bell Witch worked the Bell farm with scratches, slaps, and a disembodied voice that argued scripture and named its hatreds. A law office in Rosenheim, in Germany, spent 1967 watching its light bulbs burst and its telephones ring with no one on the line, all of it clustering around a young clerk. And in a council house in Enfield, north London, from 1977 to 1979, investigators from the Society for Psychical Research recorded knocks, sliding furniture, and a guttural voice issuing from an eleven-year-old girl, in the most argued-over haunting of the modern age. The English even owe the word itself to a single book: Catherine Crowe carried poltergeist over from German in The Night Side of Nature in 1848, and it stuck.

What it can do is narrow but relentless. It moves and hurls objects, sometimes idly, sometimes hard enough to shatter them, and it does so from across a room with nothing touching them. It raps and drums until the frame of a house sounds like a drumhead. It can pinch, scratch, bite, and shove; it can start small fires and foul the air; on rare occasions it finds a voice. Almost always it narrows its attention onto one person and works on them hardest.

Its limits are as consistent as its habits. A poltergeist is a creature of weeks and months, not years. The noise builds, peaks, and burns itself out, and the household that endures it usually outlasts it. Move the focus person elsewhere and the trouble often goes with them or dies away entirely, which is exactly what you would expect if the disturbance were tied to a person rather than a place. For all the terror it manufactures, it seldom does lasting harm. It breaks the crockery, not the family. Whatever it is, it cannot seem to keep going once whatever fed it has cooled.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a poltergeist?

A poltergeist is a type of haunting defined by noise and physical disturbance rather than by a visible ghost. The word is German for “noisy ghost,” and cases typically involve rapping sounds, thrown or moved objects, and occasional fires or physical attacks, all with no apparent cause.

What does the word poltergeist mean?

The word comes from the German poltern, meaning to make a racket or knock, and Geist, meaning spirit, so it literally means “noisy ghost.” The term entered English in 1848, when Catherine Crowe used it in her book The Night Side of Nature.

What causes a poltergeist?

Explanations have changed over the centuries. Older accounts blamed a spirit of the dead, a demon, or a soured household spirit, while twentieth-century researchers such as Nandor Fodor and William Roll argued the disturbances come from a living person under stress, a theory Roll named recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK).

What is the most famous poltergeist case?

The Drummer of Tedworth, which afflicted the Mompesson household in Wiltshire from 1662 to 1663 and was documented by Joseph Glanvill, is the founding English case. Other well-known cases include the Bell Witch in Tennessee, the Rosenheim disturbances in Germany, and the Enfield poltergeist in London.

How do you get rid of a poltergeist?

Poltergeist activity usually stops on its own, since most cases last only weeks or months before fading. Because the disturbances often centre on one person, especially an adolescent under stress, the activity frequently ceases or follows that person when they leave the affected home.

Related Entries

Kobold, Doppelgänger, Ghost, Dybbuk, Onryō, Gjenganger, Revenant, Wraith, Zashiki-warashi, Duende, Brownie