It would be pointless to waste time by trying to determine whether or not poltergeists exist because they have been encountered many times and investigated in great depth. They have also proven to be one of the easiest phenomenon to capture on film and they tend to show up quite regularly when the investigators are called in. It is also quite easy to show that genuine cases have no direct physical human cause and so hoaxes are easily eliminated from the equation. What we will determine to do is to find out what poltergeists are and just how the activity is caused.
The word “poltergeist” is German and translates as “noise ghost” or “noise spirit” and was defined by Dr. A. R. G. Owen in his book “Can We Explain The Poltergeist?” as one or both of the following which occur in a spontaneous way;
An earlier account of poltergeist activity dates from 355AD when a house was bombarded by stones while the walls emitted thumping sounds and it is interesting that western and the more civilised countries report more cases than others. Physical investigator Herward Carrington points out that if trickery were involved then we would expect this to be the reverse.
In the early cases the “victims” would look to a priest to come and banish the “evil spirits” rather than looking for a cause, but this would usually work, and it wasn't until much later that we began to look more deeply than witches and demons for the reason behind the phenomenon and it is now believed that the victim, or “catalyst,” is also the perpetrator as it has been noted many times that unlike hauntings the activity will centre around a person rather than a house or some other specific place or object.
The poltergeist activity will usually begin when a person is under some sort of stress, be it at work, at home or, more commonly, it is associated with the onset of puberty. One famous case involved a young girl named Shirley Hitchins who lived with her parents in Wycliffe Road, London. She had left secondary school early in order to go to work, as many of her friends had also done, and she had taken a job as a sales girl in a London department store and soon after her fifteenth birthday Shirley's troubles began.
She woke one morning to find a shiny new key lying on her bedspread, her parents had never seen the key before and it did not fit any lock in the house. The next few nights saw further disturbances for Shirley who had her bedclothes ripped off her while she was sleeping, and loud knocks rang out all around her bedroom walls. In the daytime these knocks in her bedroom would be accompanied by tappings and scratches all over the house, and heavy furniture would move around the house.
These disturbances continued for a few days until Shirley became haggard due to a lack of sleep and went to spend the night at a neighbour's house, that of Mrs. Lily Love, so that she may get a good nights sleep, but rather than remaining in her house, the activity followed her to her neighbour's house where she continued to be troubled by whatever it was that was harassing her. During her stay an alarm clock and china ornaments moved around on a shelf, a poker was thrown across the room and her watch was pulled off her arm and thrown to the floor. After these occurrences Shirley's father, a London Transport Motor man, decided that he would stay awake one night and watch what happened, and he managed to persuade his brother to sit with him. Shirley went to bed in her mother's room and even before she fell asleep her bed began to shake and emit a tapping noise while her hands were in view above the covers. Soon afterward she told her father and uncle that the covers were moving, and when they grabbed them they found that they were being pulled with considerable force toward the foot of the bed. They struggled against the invisible force and saw Shirley go rigid and were amazed to see her rise six inches off the bed without support. Her father and uncle lifted her clear of the bed and the disturbances now returned to the mundane rapping noises. Shirley later said that she had felt a great pressure in the small of her back lifting her up.
The rapping noises would follow her, not only to her neighbour's house, but even on the bus on her way to work, and her colleagues managed to persuade her to see the store doctor who was skeptical until the raps happened in his own office. He was still puzzled by it when all of a sudden after a month of mayhem the disturbances left Shirley for good.
This isn't the only incidence on record of a poltergeist having an apparent awareness for time periods, a much earlier case happened in Tedworth, Wiltshire in 1662 when the town Magistrate confiscated the drum of William Drury who was a magician and was forced to leave town. Soon afterward, the drum began to beat all by itself and fly around the Magistrate's home, and the spectacle was witnessed by several people. As well as the drumbeats were the classic raps of the poltergeist, and these would go on for two hours every night. After several sleepless nights he had the drum broken into pieces but still it continued to beat, and now shoes began to fly around the house and ash trays and chamber pots were emptied onto the beds. Children were levitated and a horse had its rear leg forced into its mouth. The Magistrate called in the Reverand Joseph Glanville, Chaplain to King Charles II, to investigate and he heard the noises and drum beats himself coming from around the children's beds. When he was ready to leave he went down to his horse and found it sweating profusely and the animal died soon afterwards.
The Reverand also spoke to those who had witnessed the other phenomenon but he could find no natural cause until, in 1663, William Drury was arrested in Gloucester for stealing a pig. A Wiltshire man visited him in jail and Drury asked him what had been happening in Wiltshire, to which the man replied nothing. Drury then asked him "What, haven't you heard about the drumming in the house at Tedworth?" and when the man said that he had, Drury told him that "I have plagued him, and he shall never be quiet until he has made me satisfaction for taking away my drum." Drury was deported for his crimes but somehow managed to escape back to England, at which point the temporarily silent Mompesson house was again disturbed by the noises. It is unclear what happened to the poltergeist next, there are stories that it continued to affect the house until it gradually faded away, and there are others that say it ceased suddenly, exactly one year after it had started.
Though not always so precise in time poltergeist activity will often stop by itself after an indeterminate period. One which remained for almost four years was known as “The Bell Witch” and it menaced the Bell family of Robertson County, Tennessee from 1817.
John Bell was a successful farmer who was both well known and well liked. He lived with his wife Luce and his nine children in their large farmhouse. One of his daughters, twelve year old Elizabeth "Betsy" was to be a key figure in the case which first began with knocks and scraping sounds that seemed to come from outside the walls and windows of the house. The sounds soon came inside the house and took the form of gnawing sounds on the bed posts, scratchings on the floor and flappings on the ceiling. They steadily grew in intensity until they seemed to shake the whole house. The “witch” soon became quite inventive with the various sounds it would make such as overturning chairs, throwing stones at the roof and dragging heavy chains along the floor. These occurrences, it seemed, would bother Betsy more than the rest of the family.
Soon it began to progress from just simply making sounds, and one night it woke Richard Bell by pulling his hair, immediately another one of the children, Joel, yelled in fright and Betsy began screaming, and after she retired to bed her hair would constantly be pulled. The family now decided to ask a friend and neighbour, James Johnson, for advice. He listened to the noises and formed the opinion that some form of intelligence lay behind them. He performed a simple exorcism, which seemed to help for a while, but when the activity returned it did so with a vengeance and turned its attention to Betsy to such an extent that her parents became greatly worried for her. It would pull her hair so hard that she screamed in agony and it would slap her so hard across the face that it left red marks on her cheeks.
Johnson now advised Bell to call in some more neighbours who then formed an investigating committee and they would ask the entity to perform certain tasks, which it duly did, and its repertoire was once again expanded. When the children were walking to school they would have sticks and stones thrown at them, and eventually they became accustomed to it and made a game out of it, so that when a stick was thrown at them they would mark it and throw it back, and the same stick would again be thrown at them. Though this game was relatively harmless the witch soon became more violent and would punch them in the face.
Betsy began to suffer from fits of shortness of breath and fainting which would last for thirty minutes, and during the fit there would be silence, but once Betsy had regained consciousness, the witch would again begin to whistle and talk.
As well as the repertoire of noises the Bell Witch's voice had also developed. What had started out as a faint and inarticulate voice was now a quiet but distinct whisper. It was suggested that as during Betsy's seizures there was no talking, it was possible that she was producing the voice herself by ventriloquism, but a doctor placed his hand over her mouth while the voice continued and they were satisfied that she was innocent of producing the voice.
The words uttered by the witch developed until it was able to say, word for word, the sermons that the two local parsons would give on a Sunday and it would also imitate their voices. Not content with this it began to utter obscenities which the community found most distressing and it also proclaimed a hatred for "Old Jack Bell" and said that it would torment him all his life. From that time on his health began to deteriorate and he said that he felt a stiffness in his jaw as if he had been punched on both sides of it, his tongue swelled so much that he was unable to eat or speak, and these bouts of stiffness and swelling would last for as long as fifteen hours. He developed a nervous tic in his cheek which seemed to spread all over his body until he could no longer get out of bed and would lie there twitching convulsively in a state of delirium.
The witch wasn't as unkind toward the rest of the Bell family, in fact Betsy's mother, whom the girl adored, was bestowed with many presents of fruit and nuts which would materialize from nowhere and, on one of Betsy' birthdays, it said that it had a surprise for her and materialized a large basket of fruit, including oranges and bananas. Of the children Joel, Richard and Drewry were often thrashed but were not too seriously hurt, and one winter when they were sitting on a sledge the voice told them to "Hold tight!" before it pulled them quickly around the house three times.
Betsy was now being tormented emotionally and she had become engaged to a neighbour named Joshua Gardner, but the witch would constantly try to break up the relationship whispering in her ear "Please, Betsy Bell, don't marry Joshua Gardner." It told her that if she did she would never have a moment's peace, and this persistent haranguing eventually succeeded in the break up of the relationship.
In the Autumn of 1820 John Bell had managed to get out of bed and go about his farm business which angered the witch, and one day his son Richard saw him fall as if he had been struck on the head. His face began "jerking with fearful contortions" and the boy replaced his father's shoes, but as soon as he did so they would fly off again. The two men were then surrounded by shrieking sounds and derisive songs which soon began to fade away, and as they did the contortions ceased and Richard saw that his father was crying.
John Bell accepted defeat and returned to bed where on December 19th he was found in a deep stupor from which nobody could rouse him. John junior went to the medicine cabinet where he found, not his father's prescribed medicine, but a "smoky looking vial, which was about one third full of dark coloured liquid."
When the doctor arrived the witch was heard to say " It's useless for you to try and relieve Old Jack - I have got him this time; he will never get up from that bed again." The next morning John Bell was dead. At his funeral as his coffin was lowered into the ground, the witch was heard to gloat by singing "Row me up some brandy,O."
The potion in the vial was tested on a cat which immediately went into convulsions and died, but instead of analysing the liquid it was thrown away and no satisfactory medical explanation has ever been given for John Bell's death, after which the activity faded until one evening it was as though a kind of smoke bomb went off and the witch said that it was going but it would return in seven years time.
Seven years later, as promised, the witch did indeed return but the activity now only consisted of scuffling sounds and the twitching of bedclothes. By this time though only Mrs. Bell, Joel and Richard lived in the house and the witch soon grew bored and vanished again but this time forever, failing to fulfil a further promise to return in 1935 by which time a relative of the late John Bell owned the house. The case is still considered today worthy of study, and under investigation by parapsychologists the relationship between Betsy and her father was looked at closely. Dr. Fodor concluded that it was possible that as a child Betsy had been abused by her father, a practise surely not uncommon in such circumstances, and the arrival of the activity coincided with Betsy's puberty. Dr. Fodor considered Betsy to be quite sexually mature and forward.
If Betsy had in fact been abused by John Bell then the reason for him to be victimised by the witch is clear and the attacks on Betsy could be due to the guilt that she felt for hurting her father. Even if she had no knowledge of it at the time, she would have had such feelings when the abuse was taking place, possibly years earlier, and her own victimisation could have either been through guilt at having such awful feelings for her father, or it could have been that she felt guilty about the abuse, as many victims do blame themselves for their ordeal to some degree rather than blaming their abuser, or it may simply have been due to anger at the break up of her engagement.
Dr. Fodor cites an incident where he says that John Bell demonstrates a deep rooted guilt. One evening he went to dine with friends named Dearden yet he said nothing all evening and seemed depressed and confused. The next day he rode over to apologise to the Deardens, saying that his tongue had been affected as if his mouth had been filled with fungus. This, says Fodor, is representative of "self aggression."
What is interesting is that the occurrences don't coincide with the alleged abuse itself but lay dormant until Betsy's puberty when she underwent, as all teenagers do, great physical, psychological and hormonal change, and possibly began to understand the error of her father's ways. It seems the only conclusion, whether there was a history of abuse or not, is that Betsy herself was responsible for the poltergeist and it was noted by Dr. Fodor that the fainting and dizzy spells Betsy suffered followed by the voice are "very similar" to a medium entering into a trance.
There is another possible explanation for the persecution of John Bell rather than the abuse of Betsy that he was posthumously accused of. One day while outside he saw a strange dog-like creature sitting between two rows of corn and he took a shot at it. The witch had said that it was able to assume the shape of an animal, so had John Bell actually tried to shoot it? Poltergeists are known to dislike aggression towards them, so had he managed to anger it in this way? Was it perhaps not Betsy at all but a spirit of some kind?
There is another case of a poltergeist centring around a young girl and resulting in death, but this time it was her own death. The girl was eleven year old Maria Jose Ferreira from Jabuticabal, Brazil, and the entity emerged in December 1965 and was friendly at first, bestowing her with gifts of flowers or sweets whenever she asked for them dropping them at her feet, but soon it turned quite nasty and would throw eggs and stones around the house and smash crockery. It began to vent it's anger on Maria and would slap her, bite her and throw furniture at her. One time she was nearly suffocated when she lay in bed and had objects placed over her nose and mouth, she had fifty five needles rammed into her heel at the same time and her clothing set on fire.
Her family called in a catholic priest to carry out an exorcism but this only made matters worse and objects began to fly around with an increased vigour and regularity. Like Shirley Hitchins she went to stay with a neighbour and was pursued there by the activity, and she had stones thrown at her wherever she went, and witnesses to the stone throwing remarked that the stones appeared to have a magnetic effect on one another.
Maria was taken to a spiritualist who contacted the poltergeist and it said that Maria had been a witch in a previous existence and she had caused much suffering so now it was her turn to suffer. It said "She was a witch. A lot of people suffered, and I died because of her. Now we are making her suffer too."
Again a form of exorcism was tried and an appeal was made to the entity but again it was unsuccessful and the disturbances continued for over a year until finally Maria was found dead after drinking ant killer mixed with a soft drink. She was Thirteen years old.
We can see how Betsy Bell could feel anger or guilt with herself but how could Maria Jose Ferreira generate such hatred for herself at such a young age? The entity was concentrated on her and nobody else who may have angered her in some way, so she must have had a deep self loathing, so much so that she drove herself to her own suicide. Had she really had a past life as a witch or did she take some terrible secret to the grave with her? Again though, like Betsy Bell, could it have been a spirit of some kind?
Allen Kardec wrote in his “spirit's book” that people who die suddenly or those that are not prepared for death by reason of wasted lives are often unaware that they are dead at all and they continue to wander the earth. These people are then able to influence like-minded people, and Kardec goes on to say that some "low spirits" are activated by malice and others are either mischievous or may cause physical disturbances by drawing energy from people - These are known as poltergeists.
Kardec clearly didn't go in for the human cause and he claimed that he was told by a spirit that they are unable to “take over” another person's body as it belongs to its owner, but they are able to actually "assimilate" themselves to a person who possesses similar qualities to them, and what's more, he was also told that spirits may dominate such a person.
Kardec went along with this and gives the example of a person indulging in sexual fantasy, he says that they may unwittingly provide a kind of pornographic film show for some homeless spirit which will then try to influence the person into providing further glimpses by putting sexual thoughts into their head.
The author Colin Wilson also supports the spirit theory and he suggests, as has been suggested before, that the person may be the source of the phenomena, but maybe not the whole “cause.” He uses the example of Maria Jose Ferreira to say that if her own subconscious aggressions drove her to suicide, such depths of despair would have reached the rebellious part of her mind and caused it to stop, rather than pushing her to the point of suicide so therefore, he argues, there must be another entity behind it, a spirit. He adds "You can use a knife to cut bread or to cut a man's throat, and so it is with the hidden powers of man. They can be turned to good or bad ends, though they remain the same powers. To produce a successful poltergeist, all you need is a group of bad spirits prepared to do your work for you, for a suitable reward, and a susceptible victim who is insufficiently developed spiritually to be able to resist."
Another very interesting case is that of seventeen year old Esther Cox in 1878 in Amherst, Nova Scotia who suffered a traumatic ordeal when she was led at gunpoint by her then boyfriend Bob Macneal into the woods where he tried to rape her, but when they were disturbed he was forced to flee.
Sometime afterward rustling noises were heard in the Cox's house, furniture was moved, small fires would break out inexplicably and Esther's bedclothes would float around the room, all common traits of the poltergeist, but more unusual events were to unfold which would affect Esther much more directly. Her body became bloated and only returned to normal after a loud bang like a thunder clap was heard. She also received messages which were written on the wall, some of which read things like "Esther, you are mine to kill." The end to the activity came when Esther was imprisoned for arson after a barn fire.
Typically rape or attempted rape share characteristics with abuse in the respect that the victim often feels as though they share some portion of the blame so, could Esther Cox have tried to make herself feel and look unattractive to try and dissuade any further male attention, not being possessed by a spirit at all, but driven purely by herself somehow?
Not all poltergeist cases though are exactly what they seem, for example in 1906 a probate judge in Windsor, Nova Scotia experienced many strange occurrences in his town. He saw the headless "spirit" of a man, heard voices and often saw a barrel rolling around the town. Coins would drop in front of him as he walked into shops, objects were thrown about in the restaurant where he ate and lamps would throw out their bulbs in the barber's shop. A researcher named Hereward Carrington was sent to investigate but he didn't need very long to solve the mysterious happenings. Factory workers had rigged a chair to rock, speaking tubes were erected and the townsfolk had practised and mastered the art of throwing objects without moving their arms, one eight year old had even made a machine that caused objects to fly unaided, and so the whole town were behind a plot to play a trick on the judge.
Though not down to such trickery, a case in Wisbech, England in January 1979 was quickly explained in natural terms. The activity centred around a housing estate known as the Mount Pleasant Estate, and the residents there were beginning to fear the vibrations and rumbling noises that would shake their homes. Sometimes it would be so bad that ornaments would fly off shelves, and one thing they found puzzling was the regularity with which the bouts would strike, and usually during the evening they would be at their worst. The cause was found to be the local sewer system because the air relief valve had failed, and when it approached overload it would rumble and shake. This would be especially bad in the evenings when a commercial break was on the television and there would be a rush of people using the toilet in the houses on the estate.
There have been many cases of such natural causes being responsible for all kinds of strange activity, but not all cases can be explained as easily, and many possible causes for poltergeists have been put forward and disproved, such as the geophysical theory put forward by psychical researcher G. W. Lambert in 1955. Lambert said that the activity attributed to a poltergeist was caused by the movement of water in subterranean streams under the buildings concerned which caused vibrations in the building itself. However Lambert's theory received a crushing blow in 1961 when Alan Gauld and A. D. Cornell “borrowed” a terraced house in Cambridge that was due to be demolished, and they placed objects, some hanging on the walls and others on shelves around the rooms of the house. They then attached a machine to a wall of the house which generated vibrations and also a sixty pound demolition hammer for extra vibrations was used. The house was then shaken and banged so much by the vibrating machine that cracks began to appear in the walls, but only a couple of the objects fell from where they had been placed, and no other poltergeist effects had been produced.
One example of poltergeist activity that I myself witnessed occurred in 1977 whilst staying with family friends in Manchester. It happened one afternoon when the son of the family told me about a record that had been bought for him by his late brother. The record itself was harmless enough, being ken Dodd and the Diddy Men, but every time he played it, the ornaments in the room would begin to move so I asked him to put it on, which he was reluctant to do at first, but when the music started the ornaments did indeed begin moving unaided.
Straw dolls on the shelves were turning through 360 degress, a shield held on the wall by a nail was spinning very slowly around on the nail, castanets hung on the wall began clicking and other ornaments around the room were moving around as though they had a mind of their own. All of this happened before even one song had finished, and as soon as he turned the music off, the activity ceased and we had to go around the room and replace the ornaments before his mother found out as she did not like him playing the record.
None of them were rigged in any way, though he did say that the castanets would sometimes click lightly if the window was open or the nearby fire was on, but no other explanation offered itself for the other ornaments. It is interesting that the activity only manifested itself when the record was played and at no other time. Just as a footnote to this story, I also experienced automatic writing in the same room of the house.
So once again we come to the adolescent mind being the cause for poltergeist activity and an interesting case when considering this theory is that known as the Black Monk of Pontefract.
In September 1966 in Pontefract, Yorkshire fifteen year old Philip Pritchard and his grandmother were at home at 30 East Drive while the rest of the family were on holiday. It began when a film of white dust descended and covered everything, then mysterious pools of water would appear and a wardrobe moved out of the corner of the room, but when the rest of the family returned home everything was back to normal and remained that way for two years until all hell broke lose. Footprints appeared inside the house, keys flew down the chimney, jam appeared on the walls and doors and crosses were drawn on the walls. Ornaments, pans and bedding would fly around, furniture moved, a carpet sweeper began dancing and a roll of wallpaper reared up like a snake. The taps, instead of issuing water, began oozing green foam and the house began to shake and made loud crashes and a grandfather clock was thrown down the stairs.
The family called in a priest to perform an exorcism and he saw a candle stick float right in front of him. He was unable to do anything and told the family that there was something evil in the house and that they should move. When they tried to record the noises the plug was taken from the tape recorder. When an Aunt Maude came to visit she had a jug of milk poured over her head and she thought that it was the children playing a trick on her so the spirit levitated a pair of gloves in front of her. When she told them to go away one glove made a fist and shook itself at her and when she started singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” the gloves started mocking her by pretending to conduct her. Most of the goings on seemed to centre around Diane Pritchard and she was thrown out of bed numerous times, and when furniture moved it seemed to attack her. One time a crucifix flew off the wall and hit her leaving a red mark, but this was nothing compared to the time she was physically grabbed and dragged upstairs screaming, this time she was left with red finger marks round her neck.
Unusually with a poltergeist an apparition was seen, that of a black monk, he was thought to be a monk who was hung for rape in Tudor times and he appeared shortly after Aunt Maude's visit. He was described as a tall man in a long, black robe and on one occasion it was seen to disappear through the floor. It was concluded that the black monk was a spirit who had been waiting, lying dormant, for the energy it needed to manifest itself in the house and it seemed to take this energy from Philip. It is thought that the monk was possibly hung on the spot where the house now stood, and it is interesting that the activity began when Philip was at puberty and again two years later when Diane Pritchard reached that same age and the activity stopped altogether in 1969. The activity and the house became so notorious in the area that local bus drivers would stop their bus outside the house and point it out to their passengers. It is possible of course that the sighting of the monk and the poltergeist were not connected but totally independent of one another, but Colin Wilson thinks otherwise, and it was this case which somehow convinced him that poltergeists were caused by spirits.
So far we've seen fairly standard behaviour from poltergeists but the repertoire goes far beyond this, there is even a case of a poltergeist saving the lives of those it was haunting. Derek Newman and his family lived in a flat in Sheffield, Yorkshire and they had been troubled for over a year by poltergeist activity until one night in January 1982 when the family were sleeping and were woken by a commotion coming from downstairs which sounded "like someone running round the lounge with a hammer." Annoyed at being woken Derek decided to answer the poltergeist and picked up a hammer, but when he opened the bedroom door he was confronted by thick smoke and dialed 999. The firemen rescued the family from the balcony as the flat was consumed in flames. Derek realises that he owes his life, and that of his family, to the poltergeist, but there are several questions to answer here. What started the blaze? Was it the poltergeist which then raised the alarm to save itself? Did the fire itself wake the poltergeist or was the poltergeist completely unaware of the danger and after starting the fire, continued with other activity oblivious and woken the family quite by accident? But the most important question would seem to be what was Derek Newman doing with a hammer in his bedroom?
An interesting case of a fire-raising poltergeist occurred in 1948 in Macomb, Illinois on the Willey family farm where brown spots would appear on the wallpaper. The temperature needed to cause the spots was estimated to be 450 degrees Fahrenheit and the spots would then burst into flames. The problem became so bad that their friends and neighbours stood all over the house with buckets of water in order to put out the flames as they broke out, and the spots progressed from the wallpaper to the porch, the curtains and then to anything that would burn. The local fire chief said of the fires that: "The whole thing is so screwy and fantastic that I'm almost ashamed to talk about it" and representatives from the air force said that they thought either high frequency radio waves or bizarre radioactivity were causing the fires, but another expert said that if this were the case then the surrounding farms would also have been affected which they weren't. Arson investigators came up against the same argument when they gave their theory that combustible gases were accumulating in the walls of the house, but they overcame this problem by forcing a confession out of the Willey's niece Wanet. This confession was greatly criticised and it was said of Wanet that she must have had "incredible persistence, an unlimited supply of matches, and was blessed with exceptionally near sighted relatives and neighbours."
The opposite effect of fire is also produced by poltergeists but much less frequently, and that is the materialization of water, one such case took place in 1903 in the home of a public prosecutor in Ancona, Italy, M Marrauno. Both he and his two sons were hit by jets of water which came from the walls and ceilings, hats in the house were filled, beds were flooded and various liquids such as milk, wine and coffee were spilled on the floor.
Another case sixty years later followed Francis Martin and his family from house to house. It began in their television room when a wet spot appeared on the wall and began to spray water after a loud popping noise, and when they went to a relative's house it happened again. By the time the fire chief had arrived, five rooms in the house had been completely soaked.
When they returned to their own home the problem continued, and now the humidity in the house began to fluctuate even if the water supply to the house was switched off. The jets would last for about twenty seconds and would be roughly fifteen minutes apart: "There's a little tremor and then a ‘whoosh’ and then the water." Again, they left their own home to stay with a relative and again the water spouts followed them. The disturbances gradually faded away and the cause for them was never found.
Whereas a “fire-raiser” would seem to drive people from their home, and “water senders” are generally harmless and seem to be more of a nuisance than anything else, there is a type of poltergeist which apparently has every intention of harming it's host, and that is the biting poltergeist which, like the water sender, is quite rare. There was one particular case which occurred in 1962 in Indianapolis in the home of Mrs. Renata Beck, her mother Mrs. Lina Gemmecke, an immigrant, and her thirteen year old daughter Linda. The first visit from the poltergeist came on March 10th, the birth date of Mrs. Beck's father from whom she had not heard in twenty years. The activity began, as most do, with small objects flying around the house and smashing. Very quickly after this, Mrs. Beck got puncture marks on her arms and cried out in pain, almost straight away Mrs. Gemmecke also cried out and found that she had similar marks on her arms. Over the duration of the activity Mrs. Gemmecke received bites on fourteen separate occasions, the number of bites on each occasion varying.
Mrs. Gemmecke believed that the bites were caused by insects or spiders but the investigator W. G. Roll once saw her holding a crucifix against them. The only person not bitten by the poltergeist was thirteen year old Linda, but the women would often be bitten when Linda wasn't even there, and although both women were bitten it was Mrs. Gemmecke who was the main target, but suddenly on March 18th the biting attacks ceased. Unfortunately, however, they were replaced by raps which sounded all over the house.
This aspect of the case is not uncommon as often the poltergeist will change its tactics as though trying some other means by which to achieve its ends, which would seem to suggest that there is some sort of intelligence behind it.
Do poltergeists really have an ulterior motive? Do they make themselves known to achieve some aim on behalf of the person around which they centre, such as Betsy Bell punishing her father or Esther Cox punishing herself, or are they in fact created by something else, something far more supernatural? Harry Price famously distinguished between a haunting and a poltergeist in 1945 when he said that "The poltergeist is mischievous, destructive, noisy, cruel, erratic, thievish, demonstrative, purposeless, cunning, unhelpful, malicious, audacious, teasing, ill disposed, spiteful, ruthless, resourceful and vampiric. A ghost haunts; a poltergeist infests."
Further research was done in the 1970s by two the parapsychologists who had performed the experiment on the house in Cambridge, Alan Gauld and A. D. Cornell, and this time they analysed five hundred cases dating back to 1800 to find and classify poltergeist characteristics. During their research they found that of all the cases;
The most likely answer is thought to be psychokinesis or P.K., (to move objects using the power of the mind alone) the power of the mind over matter, and one of the greatest exponents of P.K. in the world is undoubtedly Uri Geller but there have been many others.
Mostly they did their work at the extremely popular seances of the early 20th Century when Spiritualism was born, but many frauds were exposed and so they became fewer in number, but still there were many who could not be shown to be frauds and were later tested under laboratory conditions. Some of them put their abilities down to the help of the spirit world whilst others, such as Daniel Dunglas Home said they had no idea how they did what they did.
One example was a middle aged Russian housewife named Nina Kulagina who has been studied many times by scientists since her abilities were discovered in the 1960s by a Russian parapsychologist, L. L. Vasiliev, who was studying E. S. P. (Extra Sensory Perception) as part of his work as head of the Institute for Brain Research based in Leningrad, Russia.
Kulagina's talents had first come to light during a stay in hospital while she recovered from a nervous breakdown, when doctors had seen her reaching into a sewing box and picking out the coloured thread she wanted without looking. Out of curiosity they did a few tests on her and found that she could indeed see colours by touching them with her fingertips. They also found that she had healing abilities and that she could make wounds heal very quickly simply by holding her hands over them. Coincidentally, Vasiliev was trying to train people to sense colours just by touching them when he found that Kulagina was very adept at it, and he felt that with proper training she could become even greater. It was during her training that Vasiliev noticed when she moved her hand over an object it would move slightly. He tested these new found abilities and subsequently found that she could move a compass needle merely by moving her hand over it, she could move small objects around on a table and she was able to move a single match out of a pile of matches and move it away from the others. She was also able to move objects even if they were placed beneath plastic or glass covers and she said that when she was doing these things she got a sharp pain in her spine, her eyesight blurred and her blood pressure rose.
Vasiliev died in 1966 and Nina began to work with other “experts” some of whom were from the west and had been intrigued after watching a film of her at work which had been smuggled out of Russia.
Two of those who saw the film were the American parapsychologists J. G. Pratt and Dr. Montague Ullman, the latter of which presented film of Nina's performances to staff at Maimonides Medical Centre's Division of Parapsychology (one of America's best). Ullman merely intended for the screening to demonstrate P.K. on video, one of science's rarest forms of psychic ability, but sitting in the audience was a young hematologist named Felicia Parise who worked at the hospital and was also one of their best E. S. P. subjects.
Felicia was impressed with the films and felt that with practise she also would be able to perform similar tasks, so she went away to practise and found that with concentration she could move objects even when they were placed underneath a glass bell jar. Further experiments were done with Felicia and she found that not only could she move a compass needle, but if the compass was moved away from the spot where she had affected it and then later moved back again the needle would again be affected and this effect would last for up to thirty minutes.
Felicia found that her P.K. abilities would also manifest themselves spontaneously and, eventually she felt that it was too much of a strain for her. She compared her talent to a musical gift that must be worked at and practised but she was loth to show such dedication though she continued to sometimes affect objects unwittingly.
An experiment conducted on a group of children in the 1980s by Professor John Hasted of the University of London showed that many could demonstrate such powers, and in 1982 schoolboy Mark Briscoe was working with the “memory metal” Nitinol which will permanently hold it's shape, and if bent will revert back to it's former shape. One way to reshape it is to heat it to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, but Mark Briscoe altered it's form by simply stroking it. Another school child working with a bunch of paper clips sealed inside a glass sphere was able to tangle them into a huge knot without even touching the sphere, and it is these psychokinetic powers that are widely believed to be responsible for poltergeist activity.
Realistically speaking there are only two serious alternative explanations for poltergeists outside of P.K. but, by its very nature, it is an extremely difficult power to investigate with any great depth. So what else could there be behind the poltergeist phenomenon? Is it trickery or could it be some kind of intelligent force outside of our own understanding? Trickery cannot be ruled out in all cases, but clearly can be ruled out of others, and it is those with which we are concerned, but could it be, as was thought in the early days, some form of demonic possession. a person having their body possessed by “evil spirits?”
In one of the most influential books on the subject, “Possession, Demoniacal and Other”, published in 1921, T.K. Oesterreich dismisses the spirit theory totally. He says that it is always a case of hysteria or mental illness. However, he doesn't even accept the possibility of a multiple personality because he doesn't think that the human personality can split.
It is interesting in poltergeist cases that the “haunting” will follow a person rather than stay resident in one place, and that the person is usually undergoing some sort of stress, a problem at home, a problem at school, stress at work, a tainted past for which they are feeling guilty or, more often than not, puberty. It is true to say that at this time the body is undergoing the change from childhood to adulthood, and the changes taking place within the body are physical, mental, emotional, and hormonal and this process is perhaps second only to the female menopause. The majority of people are able to cope with all of these changes well and suffer no adverse effects, but others can not and do not, perhaps they need a release valve through which to take out their frustrations.
It is true that poltergeists are quite rare and that makes them so much more difficult to document and research, but there are many examples of cases that have been researched, but we are not much closer to understanding them than we were years ago. We understand the possible causes of the poltergeist but do not know how the forces of the mind can influence solid objects and why some people create poltergeists without realising it, and somebody else with obvious problems may not.
I believe that it is the individual that is the cause of the activity and that they use P.K. to do so, in cases like the Bell Witch in order to create serenity in their mind by punishing those who have wronged them and bringing their own form of justice. Where there isn't a problem as serious as this, or the attempted rape of Esther Cox, then the onset of puberty alone may be all the trigger that is required to spark off the poltergeist within. So, does P.K. exist as a tangible force which is detectable, and can it be shown to be such a force?
We have seen several examples of people with the gift of P.K., but as I said earlier perhaps the greatest exponent of P.K. is the Israeli psychic Uri Geller. Geller is one of those people who is either loved or hated and, whether or not you believe him to be a fraud, he is still an enigmatic figure with an uncanny gift, whether that gift is the art of conjury or the harnessing of powers hidden deep within the mind, he has a gift.
Psychic researcher Dr. Anrija Puharich, described as "one of the most brilliant minds on parapsychology" heard many stories about Geller, and at their first meeting Geller got a woman to hold a ring in her hand and he then held his own hand over hers for thirty seconds. When she opened her hand the ring was broken into two pieces. Geller then wrote three numbers on a piece of paper and turned it over, he then asked Puharich to write three numbers as well, he wrote 4, 3 and 2. Geller turned over his piece of paper and on it were the same three numbers, he told Puharich that he had not predicted what he would write but transmitted his thoughts to him and told him what to write. He went on to change the time on Puharich's watch while it was in Puharich's hand, and he raised the temperature on a thermometer without even touching it.
On Geller's first visit to America he again broke a ring but this time more impressively. He was dining with astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell who had carried out some E.S.P. experiments on his Apollo 14 flight which launched on January 31st, 1971 and lasted for nine day. Ironically these experiments were carried out with Dr. Puharich among others. Mitchell's secretary was wearing a gold ring and Geller asked her to take it off and hold it in her closed hand. He then waved his own hands over hers without even touching her, and when she opened her hand the ring had a crack in it. Over the next few hours the crack grew and grew until the ring eventually bent itself into an “S” shape.
The author Colin Wilson who now believes the Demon Theory has ironically seen P.K. at work when he met Geller in 1974 with a view to filming his life story and, along with a secretary, sat at a restaurant table. Uri gave him one of the restaurant cards and told him to draw something on it and he drew a picture of an imaginary animal he had invented for his children. As he was doing so he looked up and saw that Uri was looking the other way. When he had finished he covered it with one hand and Geller took another one of the restaurant cards and told Wilson to try and transmit the thought to him,. After a minute or so he said "It seems very complicated; is it a kind of amoeba?" and he began to draw it, starting at the same point as Wilson had, the right ear. He next performed the “trick” that he was to become most famous for, spoon bending. Geller would cause a spoon to bend and eventually break by simply stroking it, and he says that he derives power from metal and he was also able to wind the hands of a watch back by two hours and the date forward by two days.
Wilson had been warned beforehand to watch out for trickery as Geller had once been a conjurer and the author freely admits that he may have been able to bend the spoon and alter the watch by trickery but not reproduce the drawing. Geller would also appear on television and perform these same feats in full view of the cameras. On one occasion he took a gold spoon from the priceless collection belonging to the Marquess of Bath and, with no visible effort, broke it in two. He could affect Geiger counters, mend watches or break them and he also passed countless E.S.P. tests.
His first noted television appearance was on November 23rd, 1973 on “The David Dimbleby Talk-In” when he rubbed two broken watches and mended them, then bent the hands of one of them upwards inside the glass. While Dimbleby held a spoon Geller stroked it and bent it but this was nothing compared to the fork on the table in between them which bent of its own accord, and even more amazing was an announcement by the producer of the show that they had received dozens of telephone calls from viewers who said that cutlery in their homes had bent while the programme was airing.
Some of Geller's more ambitious feats were the stopping of the Hochfelln cable car in mid air at the fifth attempt after he had taken up a challenge to do so. It was later found that the main power switch in the control centre had flipped off, but the “trick” had been done at such short notice that a conspiracy was ruled out. Another occasion when outside help was ruled out was on a trip from Spain to Italy on the liner “Renaissance” when the ship's musicians challenged Geller to stop the vessel. He immediately began to concentrate and before long the ship began to lose power and the engines died. The ship's engineers found a damaged fuel line but again Geller had performed the feat upon request and could not have caused the damage by any physical means.
Geller was also approached in London, where he was then residing, by an American games company who asked him to stop the most famous clock in the world, Big Ben, on New Year's Eve. Geller has documented proof of the request, and on the very next day, December 17th, around midday he went to Westminster to “experiment” and at 12-35 pm Big Ben stopped dead. Geller could not have got inside the tight security at Westminster and the clock is renowned for its accuracy and is also meticulously maintained, so again, he had no physical control over the clock.
The effects of P.K. on metal have been described as changing the structure of the metal itself, "as though the bent part of the spoon was a soft as chewing gum."
Two French investigators funded by a metals company used hallmarked metal objects and tested their “microhardness” before and after their experiments and analysed the metals' chemical composition. They found "local hardening" in the metals, and similar experiments performed found hardening as though "a strip had been exposed to crushing by a weight of five tons." but more interestingly they found that rather than external forces being responsible, the hardening was caused by "internal metal stress."
So if these powers exist where do they come from? It is believed that everybody possesses some level of P.K. ability but most never use it, some use it unwittingly in poltergeist cases and others are able to use it at will.
We know that the mind has a control over the physical body by using tiny electrical impulses but how could it have the same effect on household objects, cable cars and the most renowned clock in the world? It would seem that the human mind holds many secrets that we cannot yet explain, and it would seem that P.K. is just another one of them, and in the case of poltergeists it is not merely moving small objects after a period of controlled concentration, but it is an involuntary action which takes many and varied forms.
The word “poltergeist” is German and translates as “noise ghost” or “noise spirit” and was defined by Dr. A. R. G. Owen in his book “Can We Explain The Poltergeist?” as one or both of the following which occur in a spontaneous way;
- The production of noises.
- The moving of objects by no known physical means.
An earlier account of poltergeist activity dates from 355AD when a house was bombarded by stones while the walls emitted thumping sounds and it is interesting that western and the more civilised countries report more cases than others. Physical investigator Herward Carrington points out that if trickery were involved then we would expect this to be the reverse.
In the early cases the “victims” would look to a priest to come and banish the “evil spirits” rather than looking for a cause, but this would usually work, and it wasn't until much later that we began to look more deeply than witches and demons for the reason behind the phenomenon and it is now believed that the victim, or “catalyst,” is also the perpetrator as it has been noted many times that unlike hauntings the activity will centre around a person rather than a house or some other specific place or object.
The poltergeist activity will usually begin when a person is under some sort of stress, be it at work, at home or, more commonly, it is associated with the onset of puberty. One famous case involved a young girl named Shirley Hitchins who lived with her parents in Wycliffe Road, London. She had left secondary school early in order to go to work, as many of her friends had also done, and she had taken a job as a sales girl in a London department store and soon after her fifteenth birthday Shirley's troubles began.
She woke one morning to find a shiny new key lying on her bedspread, her parents had never seen the key before and it did not fit any lock in the house. The next few nights saw further disturbances for Shirley who had her bedclothes ripped off her while she was sleeping, and loud knocks rang out all around her bedroom walls. In the daytime these knocks in her bedroom would be accompanied by tappings and scratches all over the house, and heavy furniture would move around the house.
These disturbances continued for a few days until Shirley became haggard due to a lack of sleep and went to spend the night at a neighbour's house, that of Mrs. Lily Love, so that she may get a good nights sleep, but rather than remaining in her house, the activity followed her to her neighbour's house where she continued to be troubled by whatever it was that was harassing her. During her stay an alarm clock and china ornaments moved around on a shelf, a poker was thrown across the room and her watch was pulled off her arm and thrown to the floor. After these occurrences Shirley's father, a London Transport Motor man, decided that he would stay awake one night and watch what happened, and he managed to persuade his brother to sit with him. Shirley went to bed in her mother's room and even before she fell asleep her bed began to shake and emit a tapping noise while her hands were in view above the covers. Soon afterward she told her father and uncle that the covers were moving, and when they grabbed them they found that they were being pulled with considerable force toward the foot of the bed. They struggled against the invisible force and saw Shirley go rigid and were amazed to see her rise six inches off the bed without support. Her father and uncle lifted her clear of the bed and the disturbances now returned to the mundane rapping noises. Shirley later said that she had felt a great pressure in the small of her back lifting her up.
The rapping noises would follow her, not only to her neighbour's house, but even on the bus on her way to work, and her colleagues managed to persuade her to see the store doctor who was skeptical until the raps happened in his own office. He was still puzzled by it when all of a sudden after a month of mayhem the disturbances left Shirley for good.
This isn't the only incidence on record of a poltergeist having an apparent awareness for time periods, a much earlier case happened in Tedworth, Wiltshire in 1662 when the town Magistrate confiscated the drum of William Drury who was a magician and was forced to leave town. Soon afterward, the drum began to beat all by itself and fly around the Magistrate's home, and the spectacle was witnessed by several people. As well as the drumbeats were the classic raps of the poltergeist, and these would go on for two hours every night. After several sleepless nights he had the drum broken into pieces but still it continued to beat, and now shoes began to fly around the house and ash trays and chamber pots were emptied onto the beds. Children were levitated and a horse had its rear leg forced into its mouth. The Magistrate called in the Reverand Joseph Glanville, Chaplain to King Charles II, to investigate and he heard the noises and drum beats himself coming from around the children's beds. When he was ready to leave he went down to his horse and found it sweating profusely and the animal died soon afterwards.
The Reverand also spoke to those who had witnessed the other phenomenon but he could find no natural cause until, in 1663, William Drury was arrested in Gloucester for stealing a pig. A Wiltshire man visited him in jail and Drury asked him what had been happening in Wiltshire, to which the man replied nothing. Drury then asked him "What, haven't you heard about the drumming in the house at Tedworth?" and when the man said that he had, Drury told him that "I have plagued him, and he shall never be quiet until he has made me satisfaction for taking away my drum." Drury was deported for his crimes but somehow managed to escape back to England, at which point the temporarily silent Mompesson house was again disturbed by the noises. It is unclear what happened to the poltergeist next, there are stories that it continued to affect the house until it gradually faded away, and there are others that say it ceased suddenly, exactly one year after it had started.
Though not always so precise in time poltergeist activity will often stop by itself after an indeterminate period. One which remained for almost four years was known as “The Bell Witch” and it menaced the Bell family of Robertson County, Tennessee from 1817.
John Bell was a successful farmer who was both well known and well liked. He lived with his wife Luce and his nine children in their large farmhouse. One of his daughters, twelve year old Elizabeth "Betsy" was to be a key figure in the case which first began with knocks and scraping sounds that seemed to come from outside the walls and windows of the house. The sounds soon came inside the house and took the form of gnawing sounds on the bed posts, scratchings on the floor and flappings on the ceiling. They steadily grew in intensity until they seemed to shake the whole house. The “witch” soon became quite inventive with the various sounds it would make such as overturning chairs, throwing stones at the roof and dragging heavy chains along the floor. These occurrences, it seemed, would bother Betsy more than the rest of the family.
Soon it began to progress from just simply making sounds, and one night it woke Richard Bell by pulling his hair, immediately another one of the children, Joel, yelled in fright and Betsy began screaming, and after she retired to bed her hair would constantly be pulled. The family now decided to ask a friend and neighbour, James Johnson, for advice. He listened to the noises and formed the opinion that some form of intelligence lay behind them. He performed a simple exorcism, which seemed to help for a while, but when the activity returned it did so with a vengeance and turned its attention to Betsy to such an extent that her parents became greatly worried for her. It would pull her hair so hard that she screamed in agony and it would slap her so hard across the face that it left red marks on her cheeks.
Johnson now advised Bell to call in some more neighbours who then formed an investigating committee and they would ask the entity to perform certain tasks, which it duly did, and its repertoire was once again expanded. When the children were walking to school they would have sticks and stones thrown at them, and eventually they became accustomed to it and made a game out of it, so that when a stick was thrown at them they would mark it and throw it back, and the same stick would again be thrown at them. Though this game was relatively harmless the witch soon became more violent and would punch them in the face.
Betsy began to suffer from fits of shortness of breath and fainting which would last for thirty minutes, and during the fit there would be silence, but once Betsy had regained consciousness, the witch would again begin to whistle and talk.
As well as the repertoire of noises the Bell Witch's voice had also developed. What had started out as a faint and inarticulate voice was now a quiet but distinct whisper. It was suggested that as during Betsy's seizures there was no talking, it was possible that she was producing the voice herself by ventriloquism, but a doctor placed his hand over her mouth while the voice continued and they were satisfied that she was innocent of producing the voice.
The words uttered by the witch developed until it was able to say, word for word, the sermons that the two local parsons would give on a Sunday and it would also imitate their voices. Not content with this it began to utter obscenities which the community found most distressing and it also proclaimed a hatred for "Old Jack Bell" and said that it would torment him all his life. From that time on his health began to deteriorate and he said that he felt a stiffness in his jaw as if he had been punched on both sides of it, his tongue swelled so much that he was unable to eat or speak, and these bouts of stiffness and swelling would last for as long as fifteen hours. He developed a nervous tic in his cheek which seemed to spread all over his body until he could no longer get out of bed and would lie there twitching convulsively in a state of delirium.
The witch wasn't as unkind toward the rest of the Bell family, in fact Betsy's mother, whom the girl adored, was bestowed with many presents of fruit and nuts which would materialize from nowhere and, on one of Betsy' birthdays, it said that it had a surprise for her and materialized a large basket of fruit, including oranges and bananas. Of the children Joel, Richard and Drewry were often thrashed but were not too seriously hurt, and one winter when they were sitting on a sledge the voice told them to "Hold tight!" before it pulled them quickly around the house three times.
Betsy was now being tormented emotionally and she had become engaged to a neighbour named Joshua Gardner, but the witch would constantly try to break up the relationship whispering in her ear "Please, Betsy Bell, don't marry Joshua Gardner." It told her that if she did she would never have a moment's peace, and this persistent haranguing eventually succeeded in the break up of the relationship.
In the Autumn of 1820 John Bell had managed to get out of bed and go about his farm business which angered the witch, and one day his son Richard saw him fall as if he had been struck on the head. His face began "jerking with fearful contortions" and the boy replaced his father's shoes, but as soon as he did so they would fly off again. The two men were then surrounded by shrieking sounds and derisive songs which soon began to fade away, and as they did the contortions ceased and Richard saw that his father was crying.
John Bell accepted defeat and returned to bed where on December 19th he was found in a deep stupor from which nobody could rouse him. John junior went to the medicine cabinet where he found, not his father's prescribed medicine, but a "smoky looking vial, which was about one third full of dark coloured liquid."
When the doctor arrived the witch was heard to say " It's useless for you to try and relieve Old Jack - I have got him this time; he will never get up from that bed again." The next morning John Bell was dead. At his funeral as his coffin was lowered into the ground, the witch was heard to gloat by singing "Row me up some brandy,O."
The potion in the vial was tested on a cat which immediately went into convulsions and died, but instead of analysing the liquid it was thrown away and no satisfactory medical explanation has ever been given for John Bell's death, after which the activity faded until one evening it was as though a kind of smoke bomb went off and the witch said that it was going but it would return in seven years time.
Seven years later, as promised, the witch did indeed return but the activity now only consisted of scuffling sounds and the twitching of bedclothes. By this time though only Mrs. Bell, Joel and Richard lived in the house and the witch soon grew bored and vanished again but this time forever, failing to fulfil a further promise to return in 1935 by which time a relative of the late John Bell owned the house. The case is still considered today worthy of study, and under investigation by parapsychologists the relationship between Betsy and her father was looked at closely. Dr. Fodor concluded that it was possible that as a child Betsy had been abused by her father, a practise surely not uncommon in such circumstances, and the arrival of the activity coincided with Betsy's puberty. Dr. Fodor considered Betsy to be quite sexually mature and forward.
If Betsy had in fact been abused by John Bell then the reason for him to be victimised by the witch is clear and the attacks on Betsy could be due to the guilt that she felt for hurting her father. Even if she had no knowledge of it at the time, she would have had such feelings when the abuse was taking place, possibly years earlier, and her own victimisation could have either been through guilt at having such awful feelings for her father, or it could have been that she felt guilty about the abuse, as many victims do blame themselves for their ordeal to some degree rather than blaming their abuser, or it may simply have been due to anger at the break up of her engagement.
Dr. Fodor cites an incident where he says that John Bell demonstrates a deep rooted guilt. One evening he went to dine with friends named Dearden yet he said nothing all evening and seemed depressed and confused. The next day he rode over to apologise to the Deardens, saying that his tongue had been affected as if his mouth had been filled with fungus. This, says Fodor, is representative of "self aggression."
What is interesting is that the occurrences don't coincide with the alleged abuse itself but lay dormant until Betsy's puberty when she underwent, as all teenagers do, great physical, psychological and hormonal change, and possibly began to understand the error of her father's ways. It seems the only conclusion, whether there was a history of abuse or not, is that Betsy herself was responsible for the poltergeist and it was noted by Dr. Fodor that the fainting and dizzy spells Betsy suffered followed by the voice are "very similar" to a medium entering into a trance.
There is another possible explanation for the persecution of John Bell rather than the abuse of Betsy that he was posthumously accused of. One day while outside he saw a strange dog-like creature sitting between two rows of corn and he took a shot at it. The witch had said that it was able to assume the shape of an animal, so had John Bell actually tried to shoot it? Poltergeists are known to dislike aggression towards them, so had he managed to anger it in this way? Was it perhaps not Betsy at all but a spirit of some kind?
There is another case of a poltergeist centring around a young girl and resulting in death, but this time it was her own death. The girl was eleven year old Maria Jose Ferreira from Jabuticabal, Brazil, and the entity emerged in December 1965 and was friendly at first, bestowing her with gifts of flowers or sweets whenever she asked for them dropping them at her feet, but soon it turned quite nasty and would throw eggs and stones around the house and smash crockery. It began to vent it's anger on Maria and would slap her, bite her and throw furniture at her. One time she was nearly suffocated when she lay in bed and had objects placed over her nose and mouth, she had fifty five needles rammed into her heel at the same time and her clothing set on fire.
Her family called in a catholic priest to carry out an exorcism but this only made matters worse and objects began to fly around with an increased vigour and regularity. Like Shirley Hitchins she went to stay with a neighbour and was pursued there by the activity, and she had stones thrown at her wherever she went, and witnesses to the stone throwing remarked that the stones appeared to have a magnetic effect on one another.
Maria was taken to a spiritualist who contacted the poltergeist and it said that Maria had been a witch in a previous existence and she had caused much suffering so now it was her turn to suffer. It said "She was a witch. A lot of people suffered, and I died because of her. Now we are making her suffer too."
Again a form of exorcism was tried and an appeal was made to the entity but again it was unsuccessful and the disturbances continued for over a year until finally Maria was found dead after drinking ant killer mixed with a soft drink. She was Thirteen years old.
We can see how Betsy Bell could feel anger or guilt with herself but how could Maria Jose Ferreira generate such hatred for herself at such a young age? The entity was concentrated on her and nobody else who may have angered her in some way, so she must have had a deep self loathing, so much so that she drove herself to her own suicide. Had she really had a past life as a witch or did she take some terrible secret to the grave with her? Again though, like Betsy Bell, could it have been a spirit of some kind?
Allen Kardec wrote in his “spirit's book” that people who die suddenly or those that are not prepared for death by reason of wasted lives are often unaware that they are dead at all and they continue to wander the earth. These people are then able to influence like-minded people, and Kardec goes on to say that some "low spirits" are activated by malice and others are either mischievous or may cause physical disturbances by drawing energy from people - These are known as poltergeists.
Kardec clearly didn't go in for the human cause and he claimed that he was told by a spirit that they are unable to “take over” another person's body as it belongs to its owner, but they are able to actually "assimilate" themselves to a person who possesses similar qualities to them, and what's more, he was also told that spirits may dominate such a person.
Kardec went along with this and gives the example of a person indulging in sexual fantasy, he says that they may unwittingly provide a kind of pornographic film show for some homeless spirit which will then try to influence the person into providing further glimpses by putting sexual thoughts into their head.
The author Colin Wilson also supports the spirit theory and he suggests, as has been suggested before, that the person may be the source of the phenomena, but maybe not the whole “cause.” He uses the example of Maria Jose Ferreira to say that if her own subconscious aggressions drove her to suicide, such depths of despair would have reached the rebellious part of her mind and caused it to stop, rather than pushing her to the point of suicide so therefore, he argues, there must be another entity behind it, a spirit. He adds "You can use a knife to cut bread or to cut a man's throat, and so it is with the hidden powers of man. They can be turned to good or bad ends, though they remain the same powers. To produce a successful poltergeist, all you need is a group of bad spirits prepared to do your work for you, for a suitable reward, and a susceptible victim who is insufficiently developed spiritually to be able to resist."
Another very interesting case is that of seventeen year old Esther Cox in 1878 in Amherst, Nova Scotia who suffered a traumatic ordeal when she was led at gunpoint by her then boyfriend Bob Macneal into the woods where he tried to rape her, but when they were disturbed he was forced to flee.
Sometime afterward rustling noises were heard in the Cox's house, furniture was moved, small fires would break out inexplicably and Esther's bedclothes would float around the room, all common traits of the poltergeist, but more unusual events were to unfold which would affect Esther much more directly. Her body became bloated and only returned to normal after a loud bang like a thunder clap was heard. She also received messages which were written on the wall, some of which read things like "Esther, you are mine to kill." The end to the activity came when Esther was imprisoned for arson after a barn fire.
Typically rape or attempted rape share characteristics with abuse in the respect that the victim often feels as though they share some portion of the blame so, could Esther Cox have tried to make herself feel and look unattractive to try and dissuade any further male attention, not being possessed by a spirit at all, but driven purely by herself somehow?
Not all poltergeist cases though are exactly what they seem, for example in 1906 a probate judge in Windsor, Nova Scotia experienced many strange occurrences in his town. He saw the headless "spirit" of a man, heard voices and often saw a barrel rolling around the town. Coins would drop in front of him as he walked into shops, objects were thrown about in the restaurant where he ate and lamps would throw out their bulbs in the barber's shop. A researcher named Hereward Carrington was sent to investigate but he didn't need very long to solve the mysterious happenings. Factory workers had rigged a chair to rock, speaking tubes were erected and the townsfolk had practised and mastered the art of throwing objects without moving their arms, one eight year old had even made a machine that caused objects to fly unaided, and so the whole town were behind a plot to play a trick on the judge.
Though not down to such trickery, a case in Wisbech, England in January 1979 was quickly explained in natural terms. The activity centred around a housing estate known as the Mount Pleasant Estate, and the residents there were beginning to fear the vibrations and rumbling noises that would shake their homes. Sometimes it would be so bad that ornaments would fly off shelves, and one thing they found puzzling was the regularity with which the bouts would strike, and usually during the evening they would be at their worst. The cause was found to be the local sewer system because the air relief valve had failed, and when it approached overload it would rumble and shake. This would be especially bad in the evenings when a commercial break was on the television and there would be a rush of people using the toilet in the houses on the estate.
There have been many cases of such natural causes being responsible for all kinds of strange activity, but not all cases can be explained as easily, and many possible causes for poltergeists have been put forward and disproved, such as the geophysical theory put forward by psychical researcher G. W. Lambert in 1955. Lambert said that the activity attributed to a poltergeist was caused by the movement of water in subterranean streams under the buildings concerned which caused vibrations in the building itself. However Lambert's theory received a crushing blow in 1961 when Alan Gauld and A. D. Cornell “borrowed” a terraced house in Cambridge that was due to be demolished, and they placed objects, some hanging on the walls and others on shelves around the rooms of the house. They then attached a machine to a wall of the house which generated vibrations and also a sixty pound demolition hammer for extra vibrations was used. The house was then shaken and banged so much by the vibrating machine that cracks began to appear in the walls, but only a couple of the objects fell from where they had been placed, and no other poltergeist effects had been produced.
One example of poltergeist activity that I myself witnessed occurred in 1977 whilst staying with family friends in Manchester. It happened one afternoon when the son of the family told me about a record that had been bought for him by his late brother. The record itself was harmless enough, being ken Dodd and the Diddy Men, but every time he played it, the ornaments in the room would begin to move so I asked him to put it on, which he was reluctant to do at first, but when the music started the ornaments did indeed begin moving unaided.
Straw dolls on the shelves were turning through 360 degress, a shield held on the wall by a nail was spinning very slowly around on the nail, castanets hung on the wall began clicking and other ornaments around the room were moving around as though they had a mind of their own. All of this happened before even one song had finished, and as soon as he turned the music off, the activity ceased and we had to go around the room and replace the ornaments before his mother found out as she did not like him playing the record.
None of them were rigged in any way, though he did say that the castanets would sometimes click lightly if the window was open or the nearby fire was on, but no other explanation offered itself for the other ornaments. It is interesting that the activity only manifested itself when the record was played and at no other time. Just as a footnote to this story, I also experienced automatic writing in the same room of the house.
So once again we come to the adolescent mind being the cause for poltergeist activity and an interesting case when considering this theory is that known as the Black Monk of Pontefract.
In September 1966 in Pontefract, Yorkshire fifteen year old Philip Pritchard and his grandmother were at home at 30 East Drive while the rest of the family were on holiday. It began when a film of white dust descended and covered everything, then mysterious pools of water would appear and a wardrobe moved out of the corner of the room, but when the rest of the family returned home everything was back to normal and remained that way for two years until all hell broke lose. Footprints appeared inside the house, keys flew down the chimney, jam appeared on the walls and doors and crosses were drawn on the walls. Ornaments, pans and bedding would fly around, furniture moved, a carpet sweeper began dancing and a roll of wallpaper reared up like a snake. The taps, instead of issuing water, began oozing green foam and the house began to shake and made loud crashes and a grandfather clock was thrown down the stairs.
The family called in a priest to perform an exorcism and he saw a candle stick float right in front of him. He was unable to do anything and told the family that there was something evil in the house and that they should move. When they tried to record the noises the plug was taken from the tape recorder. When an Aunt Maude came to visit she had a jug of milk poured over her head and she thought that it was the children playing a trick on her so the spirit levitated a pair of gloves in front of her. When she told them to go away one glove made a fist and shook itself at her and when she started singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” the gloves started mocking her by pretending to conduct her. Most of the goings on seemed to centre around Diane Pritchard and she was thrown out of bed numerous times, and when furniture moved it seemed to attack her. One time a crucifix flew off the wall and hit her leaving a red mark, but this was nothing compared to the time she was physically grabbed and dragged upstairs screaming, this time she was left with red finger marks round her neck.
Unusually with a poltergeist an apparition was seen, that of a black monk, he was thought to be a monk who was hung for rape in Tudor times and he appeared shortly after Aunt Maude's visit. He was described as a tall man in a long, black robe and on one occasion it was seen to disappear through the floor. It was concluded that the black monk was a spirit who had been waiting, lying dormant, for the energy it needed to manifest itself in the house and it seemed to take this energy from Philip. It is thought that the monk was possibly hung on the spot where the house now stood, and it is interesting that the activity began when Philip was at puberty and again two years later when Diane Pritchard reached that same age and the activity stopped altogether in 1969. The activity and the house became so notorious in the area that local bus drivers would stop their bus outside the house and point it out to their passengers. It is possible of course that the sighting of the monk and the poltergeist were not connected but totally independent of one another, but Colin Wilson thinks otherwise, and it was this case which somehow convinced him that poltergeists were caused by spirits.
So far we've seen fairly standard behaviour from poltergeists but the repertoire goes far beyond this, there is even a case of a poltergeist saving the lives of those it was haunting. Derek Newman and his family lived in a flat in Sheffield, Yorkshire and they had been troubled for over a year by poltergeist activity until one night in January 1982 when the family were sleeping and were woken by a commotion coming from downstairs which sounded "like someone running round the lounge with a hammer." Annoyed at being woken Derek decided to answer the poltergeist and picked up a hammer, but when he opened the bedroom door he was confronted by thick smoke and dialed 999. The firemen rescued the family from the balcony as the flat was consumed in flames. Derek realises that he owes his life, and that of his family, to the poltergeist, but there are several questions to answer here. What started the blaze? Was it the poltergeist which then raised the alarm to save itself? Did the fire itself wake the poltergeist or was the poltergeist completely unaware of the danger and after starting the fire, continued with other activity oblivious and woken the family quite by accident? But the most important question would seem to be what was Derek Newman doing with a hammer in his bedroom?
An interesting case of a fire-raising poltergeist occurred in 1948 in Macomb, Illinois on the Willey family farm where brown spots would appear on the wallpaper. The temperature needed to cause the spots was estimated to be 450 degrees Fahrenheit and the spots would then burst into flames. The problem became so bad that their friends and neighbours stood all over the house with buckets of water in order to put out the flames as they broke out, and the spots progressed from the wallpaper to the porch, the curtains and then to anything that would burn. The local fire chief said of the fires that: "The whole thing is so screwy and fantastic that I'm almost ashamed to talk about it" and representatives from the air force said that they thought either high frequency radio waves or bizarre radioactivity were causing the fires, but another expert said that if this were the case then the surrounding farms would also have been affected which they weren't. Arson investigators came up against the same argument when they gave their theory that combustible gases were accumulating in the walls of the house, but they overcame this problem by forcing a confession out of the Willey's niece Wanet. This confession was greatly criticised and it was said of Wanet that she must have had "incredible persistence, an unlimited supply of matches, and was blessed with exceptionally near sighted relatives and neighbours."
The opposite effect of fire is also produced by poltergeists but much less frequently, and that is the materialization of water, one such case took place in 1903 in the home of a public prosecutor in Ancona, Italy, M Marrauno. Both he and his two sons were hit by jets of water which came from the walls and ceilings, hats in the house were filled, beds were flooded and various liquids such as milk, wine and coffee were spilled on the floor.
Another case sixty years later followed Francis Martin and his family from house to house. It began in their television room when a wet spot appeared on the wall and began to spray water after a loud popping noise, and when they went to a relative's house it happened again. By the time the fire chief had arrived, five rooms in the house had been completely soaked.
When they returned to their own home the problem continued, and now the humidity in the house began to fluctuate even if the water supply to the house was switched off. The jets would last for about twenty seconds and would be roughly fifteen minutes apart: "There's a little tremor and then a ‘whoosh’ and then the water." Again, they left their own home to stay with a relative and again the water spouts followed them. The disturbances gradually faded away and the cause for them was never found.
Whereas a “fire-raiser” would seem to drive people from their home, and “water senders” are generally harmless and seem to be more of a nuisance than anything else, there is a type of poltergeist which apparently has every intention of harming it's host, and that is the biting poltergeist which, like the water sender, is quite rare. There was one particular case which occurred in 1962 in Indianapolis in the home of Mrs. Renata Beck, her mother Mrs. Lina Gemmecke, an immigrant, and her thirteen year old daughter Linda. The first visit from the poltergeist came on March 10th, the birth date of Mrs. Beck's father from whom she had not heard in twenty years. The activity began, as most do, with small objects flying around the house and smashing. Very quickly after this, Mrs. Beck got puncture marks on her arms and cried out in pain, almost straight away Mrs. Gemmecke also cried out and found that she had similar marks on her arms. Over the duration of the activity Mrs. Gemmecke received bites on fourteen separate occasions, the number of bites on each occasion varying.
Mrs. Gemmecke believed that the bites were caused by insects or spiders but the investigator W. G. Roll once saw her holding a crucifix against them. The only person not bitten by the poltergeist was thirteen year old Linda, but the women would often be bitten when Linda wasn't even there, and although both women were bitten it was Mrs. Gemmecke who was the main target, but suddenly on March 18th the biting attacks ceased. Unfortunately, however, they were replaced by raps which sounded all over the house.
This aspect of the case is not uncommon as often the poltergeist will change its tactics as though trying some other means by which to achieve its ends, which would seem to suggest that there is some sort of intelligence behind it.
Do poltergeists really have an ulterior motive? Do they make themselves known to achieve some aim on behalf of the person around which they centre, such as Betsy Bell punishing her father or Esther Cox punishing herself, or are they in fact created by something else, something far more supernatural? Harry Price famously distinguished between a haunting and a poltergeist in 1945 when he said that "The poltergeist is mischievous, destructive, noisy, cruel, erratic, thievish, demonstrative, purposeless, cunning, unhelpful, malicious, audacious, teasing, ill disposed, spiteful, ruthless, resourceful and vampiric. A ghost haunts; a poltergeist infests."
Further research was done in the 1970s by two the parapsychologists who had performed the experiment on the house in Cambridge, Alan Gauld and A. D. Cornell, and this time they analysed five hundred cases dating back to 1800 to find and classify poltergeist characteristics. During their research they found that of all the cases;
- 64% involve the movement of small objects.
- 58% are most active at night.
- 48% involve raps and knocks.
- 36% involve the movement of large objects.
- 24% last for more than one year.
- 16% involve communication with an “entity”.
- 12% involve the opening and shutting of doors and windows.
The most likely answer is thought to be psychokinesis or P.K., (to move objects using the power of the mind alone) the power of the mind over matter, and one of the greatest exponents of P.K. in the world is undoubtedly Uri Geller but there have been many others.
Mostly they did their work at the extremely popular seances of the early 20th Century when Spiritualism was born, but many frauds were exposed and so they became fewer in number, but still there were many who could not be shown to be frauds and were later tested under laboratory conditions. Some of them put their abilities down to the help of the spirit world whilst others, such as Daniel Dunglas Home said they had no idea how they did what they did.
One example was a middle aged Russian housewife named Nina Kulagina who has been studied many times by scientists since her abilities were discovered in the 1960s by a Russian parapsychologist, L. L. Vasiliev, who was studying E. S. P. (Extra Sensory Perception) as part of his work as head of the Institute for Brain Research based in Leningrad, Russia.
Kulagina's talents had first come to light during a stay in hospital while she recovered from a nervous breakdown, when doctors had seen her reaching into a sewing box and picking out the coloured thread she wanted without looking. Out of curiosity they did a few tests on her and found that she could indeed see colours by touching them with her fingertips. They also found that she had healing abilities and that she could make wounds heal very quickly simply by holding her hands over them. Coincidentally, Vasiliev was trying to train people to sense colours just by touching them when he found that Kulagina was very adept at it, and he felt that with proper training she could become even greater. It was during her training that Vasiliev noticed when she moved her hand over an object it would move slightly. He tested these new found abilities and subsequently found that she could move a compass needle merely by moving her hand over it, she could move small objects around on a table and she was able to move a single match out of a pile of matches and move it away from the others. She was also able to move objects even if they were placed beneath plastic or glass covers and she said that when she was doing these things she got a sharp pain in her spine, her eyesight blurred and her blood pressure rose.
Vasiliev died in 1966 and Nina began to work with other “experts” some of whom were from the west and had been intrigued after watching a film of her at work which had been smuggled out of Russia.
Two of those who saw the film were the American parapsychologists J. G. Pratt and Dr. Montague Ullman, the latter of which presented film of Nina's performances to staff at Maimonides Medical Centre's Division of Parapsychology (one of America's best). Ullman merely intended for the screening to demonstrate P.K. on video, one of science's rarest forms of psychic ability, but sitting in the audience was a young hematologist named Felicia Parise who worked at the hospital and was also one of their best E. S. P. subjects.
Felicia was impressed with the films and felt that with practise she also would be able to perform similar tasks, so she went away to practise and found that with concentration she could move objects even when they were placed underneath a glass bell jar. Further experiments were done with Felicia and she found that not only could she move a compass needle, but if the compass was moved away from the spot where she had affected it and then later moved back again the needle would again be affected and this effect would last for up to thirty minutes.
Felicia found that her P.K. abilities would also manifest themselves spontaneously and, eventually she felt that it was too much of a strain for her. She compared her talent to a musical gift that must be worked at and practised but she was loth to show such dedication though she continued to sometimes affect objects unwittingly.
An experiment conducted on a group of children in the 1980s by Professor John Hasted of the University of London showed that many could demonstrate such powers, and in 1982 schoolboy Mark Briscoe was working with the “memory metal” Nitinol which will permanently hold it's shape, and if bent will revert back to it's former shape. One way to reshape it is to heat it to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, but Mark Briscoe altered it's form by simply stroking it. Another school child working with a bunch of paper clips sealed inside a glass sphere was able to tangle them into a huge knot without even touching the sphere, and it is these psychokinetic powers that are widely believed to be responsible for poltergeist activity.
Realistically speaking there are only two serious alternative explanations for poltergeists outside of P.K. but, by its very nature, it is an extremely difficult power to investigate with any great depth. So what else could there be behind the poltergeist phenomenon? Is it trickery or could it be some kind of intelligent force outside of our own understanding? Trickery cannot be ruled out in all cases, but clearly can be ruled out of others, and it is those with which we are concerned, but could it be, as was thought in the early days, some form of demonic possession. a person having their body possessed by “evil spirits?”
In one of the most influential books on the subject, “Possession, Demoniacal and Other”, published in 1921, T.K. Oesterreich dismisses the spirit theory totally. He says that it is always a case of hysteria or mental illness. However, he doesn't even accept the possibility of a multiple personality because he doesn't think that the human personality can split.
It is interesting in poltergeist cases that the “haunting” will follow a person rather than stay resident in one place, and that the person is usually undergoing some sort of stress, a problem at home, a problem at school, stress at work, a tainted past for which they are feeling guilty or, more often than not, puberty. It is true to say that at this time the body is undergoing the change from childhood to adulthood, and the changes taking place within the body are physical, mental, emotional, and hormonal and this process is perhaps second only to the female menopause. The majority of people are able to cope with all of these changes well and suffer no adverse effects, but others can not and do not, perhaps they need a release valve through which to take out their frustrations.
It is true that poltergeists are quite rare and that makes them so much more difficult to document and research, but there are many examples of cases that have been researched, but we are not much closer to understanding them than we were years ago. We understand the possible causes of the poltergeist but do not know how the forces of the mind can influence solid objects and why some people create poltergeists without realising it, and somebody else with obvious problems may not.
I believe that it is the individual that is the cause of the activity and that they use P.K. to do so, in cases like the Bell Witch in order to create serenity in their mind by punishing those who have wronged them and bringing their own form of justice. Where there isn't a problem as serious as this, or the attempted rape of Esther Cox, then the onset of puberty alone may be all the trigger that is required to spark off the poltergeist within. So, does P.K. exist as a tangible force which is detectable, and can it be shown to be such a force?
We have seen several examples of people with the gift of P.K., but as I said earlier perhaps the greatest exponent of P.K. is the Israeli psychic Uri Geller. Geller is one of those people who is either loved or hated and, whether or not you believe him to be a fraud, he is still an enigmatic figure with an uncanny gift, whether that gift is the art of conjury or the harnessing of powers hidden deep within the mind, he has a gift.
Psychic researcher Dr. Anrija Puharich, described as "one of the most brilliant minds on parapsychology" heard many stories about Geller, and at their first meeting Geller got a woman to hold a ring in her hand and he then held his own hand over hers for thirty seconds. When she opened her hand the ring was broken into two pieces. Geller then wrote three numbers on a piece of paper and turned it over, he then asked Puharich to write three numbers as well, he wrote 4, 3 and 2. Geller turned over his piece of paper and on it were the same three numbers, he told Puharich that he had not predicted what he would write but transmitted his thoughts to him and told him what to write. He went on to change the time on Puharich's watch while it was in Puharich's hand, and he raised the temperature on a thermometer without even touching it.
On Geller's first visit to America he again broke a ring but this time more impressively. He was dining with astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell who had carried out some E.S.P. experiments on his Apollo 14 flight which launched on January 31st, 1971 and lasted for nine day. Ironically these experiments were carried out with Dr. Puharich among others. Mitchell's secretary was wearing a gold ring and Geller asked her to take it off and hold it in her closed hand. He then waved his own hands over hers without even touching her, and when she opened her hand the ring had a crack in it. Over the next few hours the crack grew and grew until the ring eventually bent itself into an “S” shape.
The author Colin Wilson who now believes the Demon Theory has ironically seen P.K. at work when he met Geller in 1974 with a view to filming his life story and, along with a secretary, sat at a restaurant table. Uri gave him one of the restaurant cards and told him to draw something on it and he drew a picture of an imaginary animal he had invented for his children. As he was doing so he looked up and saw that Uri was looking the other way. When he had finished he covered it with one hand and Geller took another one of the restaurant cards and told Wilson to try and transmit the thought to him,. After a minute or so he said "It seems very complicated; is it a kind of amoeba?" and he began to draw it, starting at the same point as Wilson had, the right ear. He next performed the “trick” that he was to become most famous for, spoon bending. Geller would cause a spoon to bend and eventually break by simply stroking it, and he says that he derives power from metal and he was also able to wind the hands of a watch back by two hours and the date forward by two days.
Wilson had been warned beforehand to watch out for trickery as Geller had once been a conjurer and the author freely admits that he may have been able to bend the spoon and alter the watch by trickery but not reproduce the drawing. Geller would also appear on television and perform these same feats in full view of the cameras. On one occasion he took a gold spoon from the priceless collection belonging to the Marquess of Bath and, with no visible effort, broke it in two. He could affect Geiger counters, mend watches or break them and he also passed countless E.S.P. tests.
His first noted television appearance was on November 23rd, 1973 on “The David Dimbleby Talk-In” when he rubbed two broken watches and mended them, then bent the hands of one of them upwards inside the glass. While Dimbleby held a spoon Geller stroked it and bent it but this was nothing compared to the fork on the table in between them which bent of its own accord, and even more amazing was an announcement by the producer of the show that they had received dozens of telephone calls from viewers who said that cutlery in their homes had bent while the programme was airing.
Some of Geller's more ambitious feats were the stopping of the Hochfelln cable car in mid air at the fifth attempt after he had taken up a challenge to do so. It was later found that the main power switch in the control centre had flipped off, but the “trick” had been done at such short notice that a conspiracy was ruled out. Another occasion when outside help was ruled out was on a trip from Spain to Italy on the liner “Renaissance” when the ship's musicians challenged Geller to stop the vessel. He immediately began to concentrate and before long the ship began to lose power and the engines died. The ship's engineers found a damaged fuel line but again Geller had performed the feat upon request and could not have caused the damage by any physical means.
Geller was also approached in London, where he was then residing, by an American games company who asked him to stop the most famous clock in the world, Big Ben, on New Year's Eve. Geller has documented proof of the request, and on the very next day, December 17th, around midday he went to Westminster to “experiment” and at 12-35 pm Big Ben stopped dead. Geller could not have got inside the tight security at Westminster and the clock is renowned for its accuracy and is also meticulously maintained, so again, he had no physical control over the clock.
The effects of P.K. on metal have been described as changing the structure of the metal itself, "as though the bent part of the spoon was a soft as chewing gum."
Two French investigators funded by a metals company used hallmarked metal objects and tested their “microhardness” before and after their experiments and analysed the metals' chemical composition. They found "local hardening" in the metals, and similar experiments performed found hardening as though "a strip had been exposed to crushing by a weight of five tons." but more interestingly they found that rather than external forces being responsible, the hardening was caused by "internal metal stress."
So if these powers exist where do they come from? It is believed that everybody possesses some level of P.K. ability but most never use it, some use it unwittingly in poltergeist cases and others are able to use it at will.
We know that the mind has a control over the physical body by using tiny electrical impulses but how could it have the same effect on household objects, cable cars and the most renowned clock in the world? It would seem that the human mind holds many secrets that we cannot yet explain, and it would seem that P.K. is just another one of them, and in the case of poltergeists it is not merely moving small objects after a period of controlled concentration, but it is an involuntary action which takes many and varied forms.
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