POLTERGEISTS
Poltergeist or "noisy ghost" is one of the more exciting phenomenon claimed by the paranormalists and psychic researchers. Activities have been chronicled throughout history. However, unlike ghostly manifestations which are generally innocuous and limited to a location or a building, poltergeist have been reported as destructive and focused on specific individuals. If this focus or agent moves, the poltergeist typically follows them. Most cases deal young people beginning puberty and experiencing some kind of emotional or psychological stress. They are always intended to draw attention to the focus.
Gateway Ghost Hunters have categorized manifestations as follows:
1) Sense Attacks: The focus hears strange noises in the middle of the night or walk into a room and feel temperature changes.
2) Communications: The sense attacks become demonstative. Marks and symbols appear on the wall, objects and furniture mysteriously move, doors bang, dishes break, etc.
3) Control: The effects of hysteria began to become apparent. People around the focus become fearful.
4) Trickster Stage: The moving of objects becomes violent, fires can start at random. Mirrors shatter for no apparent reason. Language on the entity grows foul. Poltergeists have been reported to scream, sob, and moan.
5) Danger Level: Physical attack become apparent. Biting, scratching, punching, and sexual assaults may be reported.
Early psychic investigators, such as Sir William Barrett and Federic Mehers (1) and Nandor Fodor (2) proposed these manifestations were not caused by any spirit or demon, but by human agents suffering from repressed anger, hostility, and sexual tension. William Roll (3) explored psychological dysfunction and identified patterns he called recurrent spontaneous psychokenisis. He discovered the most common agent was a child or teenager whose unwitting psychokenisis was expressing hostility without the fear of punishment, frequently unaware they were causing the disturbance, but often pleased that they occurred. When studying the personality of agents, psychologists found anxiety reactions, conversion hysteria, phobias, mania, obsessions, dissociative reactions, and schizophrenia.
The problem with these theories are two-fold. First, they are put forth by investigators with specific agendas to advance the belief in the paranormal and, second psychokenisis has never been validated as factual. Their conjecture requires the energy involved in a poltergeist manifestation to vastly exceeds anything ever demonstrated for psychokenisis. What they haven't explained is why any entity that could marshal such power would waste it on such purposeless activities. So what is left - the most obvious: a combination of pyschotic behavior of the agent and fraud. Both are known verified facts.
Unless the child is caught in the deception, such as in 1984 with Tina Resch a fourteen-year old girl of Columbus, Ohio., most of these cases are always declared "true psychic phenomenon ungoverned by the laws of physics" by sloppy investigators who want to believe, such as researchers in parapsychology. Only recently has skeptics gotten involved with these cases, such as James Randi with Resch. Even in that case the going is tough. Skeptics are almost always excluded and refused access. I wonder why !
Footnotes:
1) Founder of Society for Psychological Reseach in England
2) Nandor Fodor and Hereward Carrington, Can We Explained Poltergeists? , 1930
3) Roll, WG. The Poltergeist. Published by Wyndham, 1972. Director of the Psychological Research Foundation in Durhan, NC. He studies 116 cases spanning four centuries in more than one hundred countries.
4) From James Randi (illusionist and Fellow of CSICOP) "Hot-Line" Wed, 26 Oct 1994 11:05:00 -0400
I was invited, by the local press and by her parents, to visit there and look into the phenomena. When I arrived I was
turned away at the door at the insistence of William Roll, a parapsychologist who specializes in "poltergeist" claims,
who had by then taken up residence at the Resch home and was having a grand time hyperbolizing the events for the
media.
My investigation thus turned to the photographic evidence, and I managed -- by scurrilous means -- to obtain copies of
ALL the photos in the 36-exposure frame taken by Fred Shannon, the photographer from the Columbus Dispatch. In the
other frames was the solution to the "mystery." The Dispatch had chosen to ignore the evidence that was right before
them, and were daily running highly positive accounts that supported Tina's wild supernatural claims. She was
discredited, though not to Roll, who continued to study her and to encourage the hoax she had perpetrated.
