Poltergeists that Follow People
Poltergeist activity is a fairly common paranormal phenomenon experienced all over the world. While people define poltergeist in many different ways, most define poltergeist to be spirits or mental activities that makes themselves known by moving objects. The ghost, energy or phantom is usually invisible and tends to make a lot of noise.
Causes of Poltergeist Activity
Spirit-generated poltergeists are said to be created by the violent or angry death of a person who places a "mark" on the area where the death occurred. The energy created by the anger or violence supposedly replays through poltergeist activity over and over throughout time.
Many also believe that a poltergeist can be caused by a person's pent-up mental frustrations being released on objects. This psychokinetic activity, or "mind over matter," results in a release of psychic energy. Mental poltergeist activity can result in a shaking bed, moving objects and other frightening events.
Early Poltergeist Reports
One of the first known accounts of poltergeist activity happened in London in 1698. Mr. Ricard Chamberlain wrote about a poltergeist known to him years before in a pamphlet called Lithobolia. Lithobolia, which means "stone-throwing devil," is a typical account of a spirit poltergeist.
According to Chamberlain, an invisible witch or evil spirit of some type tortured a family by throwing stones, bricks and other large items for several months.
Poltergeists that Follow People
Poltergeists that follow people are also commonly reported. In these cases, it seems as if the poltergeist has chosen the specific person to follow from place to place. A classic example of a poltergeist following people is seen in the Rosenheim case of 1967. Annemarie Schneider was a 19 year old secretary in a law firm in Rosenheim, Germany when she supposedly began causing mental poltergeist activity.
While the poltergeist activity started in the law firm, it followed her as she changed jobs. This case, one of the first known poltergeists to be filmed, has not been disproven to this day. At the time, Dr. Friedbert Karger, a physicist from the Max Planck Institute, documented and investigated the events.
Getting Rid of a Poltergeist
According to paranormal experts, there is no known way to be rid of poltergeist activity once it starts. In the case of Annemarie Schneider, she was relieved of her traveling poltergeist when the phenomenon finally just ebbed away.
Mental poltergeist activity may be solved by simply avoiding the causes of stress or finding other ways of releasing stress. An investigation may be held to determine the root cause of mental poltergeist activity. This usually entails interviews with family and friends of the person experiencing the activity.
During a poltergeist investigation, experts take notes to find any patterns in the activity before, during and after the poltergeist event to see if the recurring instances of poltergeist activity have anything in common. A poltergeist investigation may be held by a psychic who tries to connect with any residual energy left from the occurrence.
Overall, the existence of poltergeist phenomena is open to debate. There is little documentation concerning poltergeist events, though many people over the years have claimed to have poltergeist experiences.
(from German poltern, meaning to rumble or make noise, and Geist, meaning "ghost", "spirit", or "embodiment") denotes a spirit or ghost that manifests itself by moving and influencing objects.
A pamphlet printed in London in 1698 by Mr. Ricard 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 province 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.
Poltergeist activity originates with agents
Poltergeist activity tends to occur around a single person called an agent or a focus Foci are often, but not limited to, pubescent children. Almost seventy years of research by the Rhine Research Center in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, has led to the hypothesis among parapsychologists that the "poltergeist effect" is a form of psychokinesis generated by a living human mind (that of the agent). According to researchers at the Rhine Center, the "poltergeist effect" is the outward manifestation of psychological trauma.[citation needed]
Separate existences
Poltergeists might simply exist, like the "elementals" described by occultists.
Another version posits that poltergeists originate after a person dies in a powerful rage at the time of death. According to yet another opinion, ghosts and poltergeists are "recordings." When there is a powerful emotion, sometimes at death and sometimes not, a recording is believed to be "embedded" in a place or, somehow, in the "fabric of time" itself. This recording will continue to play over and over again until the energy embedded disperses.
However some poltergeists have had the ability to articulate themselves and to have distinct personalities, which suggests some sort of self-awareness and intent. Practitioners of astral projection have reported the existence of unfriendly astral life forms, which Robert Bruce called "negs" (whom we might also identify with elementals). If they exist, these may well have the ability to affect the physical world.[citation needed]
Caused by physical forces
Poltergeists are ghosts that make noises or move objects through the air. While ghost hunters are ghost hunting it is sometimes dangerous if there is a poltergeist around. Some scientists and skeptics propose that all poltergeist activity that they can't trace 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, though criminologist Herbert Schäfer quotes an unnamed detective watching the agent pushing a lamp when she thought nobody was looking. However, 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. Poltergeists are dangerous, they may kill people.
John Hutchinson has claimed that he has created poltergeist effects in his laboratory. Also worth noting is that scientist David Turner proposes that poltergeists and ball lightning may be linked phenomena. [2] Some scientists go as far as calling them pseudo-psychic phenomena and claim that under some circumstances they are caused by obscure physical effects.[3] 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, [4] this is outlined in the above article and in Roll's book Unleashed and mention is made of it 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 Science by Marie D. Jones.[5]
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.
See also:
* Hutchinson effect
Self-delusion and hoaxes
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.[citation needed]
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 when you do not catch them, the phenomenon is genuine. 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.[citation needed]
The current most agreed upon hypothesis among most scientists is a mixture of the self-delusion and hoax hypothesis and a bit of the caused by scientifically explained forces hypothesis [tremors, abnormal air currents etc ]
Famous poltergeist infestations
Although poltergeist stories date back to the first century, most evidence to support 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; however there are a few that do not, for example, the Miami poltergeist has event records signed by all witnesses as to the way things happened. These witnesses include police officers, a skeptical magician, and workers at the warehouse. The Rosenheim case is another, with multiple witnesses and unexplained electric and telephonic phenomena.
* An "evil spirit" threw stones and made the walls shake in a small farmhouse. This was the first recorded poltergeist case. (858)
* Drummer of Tedworth (1661).
* 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.
* Hopfgarten near Weimar (1921).
* Eleonore Zugun - The Romanian 'Poltergeist Girl' (1926).
* The Borley Rectory phenomena (1929).
* The Rosenheim Poltergeist (1967). (German and most extensive).
* The Black Monk of Pontefract
* The Enfield Poltergeist (1977).
* The Miami Poltergeist, a poltergeist witnessed by police and a skeptical magician who did not believe it was a ghost, but admitted he witnessed phenomena he could not explain. Many others witnessed phenomena including reporters, parapsychologists, and workers at the warehouse.
* 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.
* In Denver, Colorado there have been several reports of unknown forces positioning toys, furniture, and objects in patterns and strange positions.
* The Thornton Road poltergeist of Birmingham (1981).
* Easington Council in County Durham, UK paid a medium to exorcise a poltergeist from public housing in Peterlee as it was deemed more cost effective than relocation of the tenant (2008).
Although some parapsychologists suggest that poltergeists could be a form of recurrent PK, there is very little evidence for PK recorded on film or witnessed by objective parties. There are famous poltergeist cases where the activity was seen by objective parties and even skeptics
Poltergeist activity is a fairly common paranormal phenomenon experienced all over the world. While people define poltergeist in many different ways, most define poltergeist to be spirits or mental activities that makes themselves known by moving objects. The ghost, energy or phantom is usually invisible and tends to make a lot of noise.
Causes of Poltergeist Activity
Spirit-generated poltergeists are said to be created by the violent or angry death of a person who places a "mark" on the area where the death occurred. The energy created by the anger or violence supposedly replays through poltergeist activity over and over throughout time.
Many also believe that a poltergeist can be caused by a person's pent-up mental frustrations being released on objects. This psychokinetic activity, or "mind over matter," results in a release of psychic energy. Mental poltergeist activity can result in a shaking bed, moving objects and other frightening events.
Early Poltergeist Reports
One of the first known accounts of poltergeist activity happened in London in 1698. Mr. Ricard Chamberlain wrote about a poltergeist known to him years before in a pamphlet called Lithobolia. Lithobolia, which means "stone-throwing devil," is a typical account of a spirit poltergeist.
According to Chamberlain, an invisible witch or evil spirit of some type tortured a family by throwing stones, bricks and other large items for several months.
Poltergeists that Follow People
Poltergeists that follow people are also commonly reported. In these cases, it seems as if the poltergeist has chosen the specific person to follow from place to place. A classic example of a poltergeist following people is seen in the Rosenheim case of 1967. Annemarie Schneider was a 19 year old secretary in a law firm in Rosenheim, Germany when she supposedly began causing mental poltergeist activity.
While the poltergeist activity started in the law firm, it followed her as she changed jobs. This case, one of the first known poltergeists to be filmed, has not been disproven to this day. At the time, Dr. Friedbert Karger, a physicist from the Max Planck Institute, documented and investigated the events.
Getting Rid of a Poltergeist
According to paranormal experts, there is no known way to be rid of poltergeist activity once it starts. In the case of Annemarie Schneider, she was relieved of her traveling poltergeist when the phenomenon finally just ebbed away.
Mental poltergeist activity may be solved by simply avoiding the causes of stress or finding other ways of releasing stress. An investigation may be held to determine the root cause of mental poltergeist activity. This usually entails interviews with family and friends of the person experiencing the activity.
During a poltergeist investigation, experts take notes to find any patterns in the activity before, during and after the poltergeist event to see if the recurring instances of poltergeist activity have anything in common. A poltergeist investigation may be held by a psychic who tries to connect with any residual energy left from the occurrence.
Overall, the existence of poltergeist phenomena is open to debate. There is little documentation concerning poltergeist events, though many people over the years have claimed to have poltergeist experiences.
(from German poltern, meaning to rumble or make noise, and Geist, meaning "ghost", "spirit", or "embodiment") denotes a spirit or ghost that manifests itself by moving and influencing objects.
A pamphlet printed in London in 1698 by Mr. Ricard 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 province 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.
Poltergeist activity originates with agents
Poltergeist activity tends to occur around a single person called an agent or a focus Foci are often, but not limited to, pubescent children. Almost seventy years of research by the Rhine Research Center in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, has led to the hypothesis among parapsychologists that the "poltergeist effect" is a form of psychokinesis generated by a living human mind (that of the agent). According to researchers at the Rhine Center, the "poltergeist effect" is the outward manifestation of psychological trauma.[citation needed]
Separate existences
Poltergeists might simply exist, like the "elementals" described by occultists.
Another version posits that poltergeists originate after a person dies in a powerful rage at the time of death. According to yet another opinion, ghosts and poltergeists are "recordings." When there is a powerful emotion, sometimes at death and sometimes not, a recording is believed to be "embedded" in a place or, somehow, in the "fabric of time" itself. This recording will continue to play over and over again until the energy embedded disperses.
However some poltergeists have had the ability to articulate themselves and to have distinct personalities, which suggests some sort of self-awareness and intent. Practitioners of astral projection have reported the existence of unfriendly astral life forms, which Robert Bruce called "negs" (whom we might also identify with elementals). If they exist, these may well have the ability to affect the physical world.[citation needed]
Caused by physical forces
Poltergeists are ghosts that make noises or move objects through the air. While ghost hunters are ghost hunting it is sometimes dangerous if there is a poltergeist around. Some scientists and skeptics propose that all poltergeist activity that they can't trace 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, though criminologist Herbert Schäfer quotes an unnamed detective watching the agent pushing a lamp when she thought nobody was looking. However, 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. Poltergeists are dangerous, they may kill people.
John Hutchinson has claimed that he has created poltergeist effects in his laboratory. Also worth noting is that scientist David Turner proposes that poltergeists and ball lightning may be linked phenomena. [2] Some scientists go as far as calling them pseudo-psychic phenomena and claim that under some circumstances they are caused by obscure physical effects.[3] 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, [4] this is outlined in the above article and in Roll's book Unleashed and mention is made of it 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 Science by Marie D. Jones.[5]
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.
See also:
* Hutchinson effect
Self-delusion and hoaxes
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.[citation needed]
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 when you do not catch them, the phenomenon is genuine. 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.[citation needed]
The current most agreed upon hypothesis among most scientists is a mixture of the self-delusion and hoax hypothesis and a bit of the caused by scientifically explained forces hypothesis [tremors, abnormal air currents etc ]
Famous poltergeist infestations
Although poltergeist stories date back to the first century, most evidence to support 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; however there are a few that do not, for example, the Miami poltergeist has event records signed by all witnesses as to the way things happened. These witnesses include police officers, a skeptical magician, and workers at the warehouse. The Rosenheim case is another, with multiple witnesses and unexplained electric and telephonic phenomena.
* An "evil spirit" threw stones and made the walls shake in a small farmhouse. This was the first recorded poltergeist case. (858)
* Drummer of Tedworth (1661).
* 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.
* Hopfgarten near Weimar (1921).
* Eleonore Zugun - The Romanian 'Poltergeist Girl' (1926).
* The Borley Rectory phenomena (1929).
* The Rosenheim Poltergeist (1967). (German and most extensive).
* The Black Monk of Pontefract
* The Enfield Poltergeist (1977).
* The Miami Poltergeist, a poltergeist witnessed by police and a skeptical magician who did not believe it was a ghost, but admitted he witnessed phenomena he could not explain. Many others witnessed phenomena including reporters, parapsychologists, and workers at the warehouse.
* 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.
* In Denver, Colorado there have been several reports of unknown forces positioning toys, furniture, and objects in patterns and strange positions.
* The Thornton Road poltergeist of Birmingham (1981).
* Easington Council in County Durham, UK paid a medium to exorcise a poltergeist from public housing in Peterlee as it was deemed more cost effective than relocation of the tenant (2008).
Although some parapsychologists suggest that poltergeists could be a form of recurrent PK, there is very little evidence for PK recorded on film or witnessed by objective parties. There are famous poltergeist cases where the activity was seen by objective parties and even skeptics
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