Talk:Poltergeist/Archive 1

Focus

I don't like this sentence: "Poltergeist activity tends to occur around a single person called an agent or a focus (typically a prepubescent female)," particularly the part about prepubescent females. Is there any source for this, or is this just based on legends seeming to involve girls? I think it ought to be removed or have some caveat included. 66.194.52.249 01:23, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

The idea of poltergeist agents being young girls is cited in all of Lloyd Auerbach's work on the subject, as well as in Troy Taylor's book, "The Ghost Hunter's Guidebook."

One sentence

My problem with this page is exemplified by, but not limited to, this sentence: 'Almost seventy years of research by the Rhine Research Center (Raleigh-Durham, NC USA) has led to the hypothesis that the "poltergeist effect", while certainly a manifestation of psychokinesis, is generated by a living human mind (typically a prepubescent female).'

I think it's fine for the authors, who appear to be pro-parapsychology, to include any information they deem relevant, but there should be certain caveats, such as: 1) Poltergeists are not universally (or, I'd hazard a guess, generally) accepted as real phenomena. The article does not mention this. 2) J.B. Rhine's work is not well-regarded in the scientific community at large, mostly because he selectively omitted data that did not agree with his hypotheses. The article doesn't mention this either. 3) The phrase "certainly a manifestation of psychokinesis" implies that the "poltergeist effect" is not only a well-established and accepted phenomenon, but that the effect is accepted to be explicable in terms of psychokinesis, which is also implied to be an uncontroversial fact.

I think that Wikipedia's house rules include Neutral Point of View, a criterion that is not met by this article.

6/1/04 - response to above

Your points are well taken. However, all discussion of poltergeist phemonena is discussed from a parapsychological perspective. The theory of psychokinesis is central to parapsychology, just as the theory of relativity is central to physics. (Would you similarly attack the wikipedia entry for relativity for being biased?) Thus the entry is valid, as long as evidence is discussed WITHIN a parapsychological context.

As to the validity of parapsychology as a legitimate science, I would agree with your points above. I will add to the entry that parapsychology is not accepted by the mainstream scientific community.

--Jaxon

Hi chaps, nice article (though the pubescent female bit is misleading according to the literature). I wrote a definition for a website a few years back which I offer in case you can pillage anything of use from it...

"The term was first introduced in to the English language in the middle of the 19th century, probably by Catherine Crowe in her book 'The Nightside of Nature'. Previously terms such as 'hobgoblin' were applied to this phenomena. It was popularised by Podmore in the SPR, and later Harry Price. It derives from geist, breath or spirit, and 'polter' a medieval North German term meaning 'to make a noise', but which was part of the English county of Suffolk's dialect in the 19th century.

A poltergeist is really an interactive "ghost", though modern researchers do not agree on whether the phenomena is in anyway related to dead people.

Symptoms; scratching, rapping, thrown objects, voices, floods, fires, showers of pebbles, sounds of crashing but objects scarcely moving, peculiar gravitic anomalies - heavy objects fall soft, etc, etc. Display intelligence and react to investigators.

While space will not allow a detailed explanation of poltergeist theory, suffice to say that it is considered by contemporary parapsychology to be distinct from hauntings. A haunt may continue for years - poltergeists are often short lived, usually burning out in a period of days or at most a few months, though some longer cases can be found in the literature.

Parapsychologists generally associate poltergeist activity with a living agent; that is a human being is unintentionally the source of the outbreak. Personality factors may be involved, as may extreme stress, boredom, etc etc. Almost every possible type of personality has been offered as conducive to poltergeist materialisation, yet the evidence is contradictory and inconclusive.

Despite the popular association of poltergeists in the public mind with adolescent females, in fact that is as tenous a connection as are the others. Even the human agent theory remains open to debate, and there was a long running disagreement between parapsychologists Ian Stephenson and D.Scott -Rogo over this in the 1970's and early 1980's. British author Colin Wilson has gone on record to assert that he believes poltergeists are a form of ghost who use the livings energy to create manifestations - the battery theory... Whether poltergists are the actions of living agents (the mainstream parapsychological consensus) dead people (several distiguished authorities in parapsychology) or just the result of fraud, as has been proven in several cases, remains open to question.

Perhaps the greatest breakthrough in the field of poltergeists was the work of William Rolls the pioneering parapsychologists whose careful analysis of the trajectory and mass of poltergeist thrown objects demonstrated a number of curious effects. Once again space does not allow for a full discussion here, and perhaps it is best if the hallmarks of a 'genuine' poltergeist are not readily available to the public, simply as that makes them easier to fake!

Nonetheless there is a theory here which can be tested, and evidence collected on a poltergeist investigation should be subjected to rigorous analysis using Roll's ideas. The other major contribution to the debate was Gauld & Cornell's Poltergeists (1978) which demonstrated by statistical analysis of several hundred cases that their appear to be distinct groupings of 'haunts' and 'poltergeist' symptoms. There is however a third group of polterghosts, smaller but statistically meaningful, which suggests that people may in a haunted house 'add' to the haunting by their own psychic ability, something this author has long suspected... Gauld and Cornells work was probably the greatest achievement in the 20th century in the field of spontaneous case investigation (parapsychology 'in the field' so to speak, as distinct from experimental work in the lab.)

Parapsychologists often refer to the poltergeist as Recurrent Spontaneous Pschokineses, or RSPK. This value laden term obviously presupposes that psycho-kinesis (mind-movement)is the root of the poltergeist phenomena. In many ways the older term telekinesis for the apparent movement of objects is preferable, as not advocating any particular theory.

Mainstream science does not recognise the reality of the poltergeist phenomena, which remains an area of study."

cj

Bias

This article seems biassed to me, shouldn't there be a section on the criticism on Parapsychologists? and the phenomenom of "poltergeists"? Instead the author seems to asume that Poltergeists are a proven and generally accepted fact, wich of course they are not.

Children Being the Reason for Poltergeists

Perhaps children are the "agent" because their pineal gland, "third eye" is proportionately biggest in the person before it hits puberty. The pineal gland is associated in many religions, is thought to be the medium for astral projection, and also is responsible for consciousness. Perhaps, a poltergeist is a projected conscious or subconscious personality of a child or person with a keen spirituality.Jebus96ae 09:41, 14 February 2006 (UTC)Jebus96ae

Perhaps children are the agent because they are small and weak and don't have many options for influencing adults. So they think up tricks to fool them. --Hob Gadling 14:16, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps in Flatland it's the big and strong that have many options for influencing adults, but everywhere else it's precisely the children.--Tufelix 18:26, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

My friend's house is haunted it has a poltergiest! It happened just yesturday (March 2nd), it was terrifying. Me and 2 of my friends were at one of their houses, and we aren't allowed to go up to the 2nd floor cause the floor isn't that strong up there but I had never been up there and so 2 of us went up. We just went up there for about 2 minutes or less then when we came back down we closed the door. Then we were all sitting in the living room (which is right next to the stairwell) talking about our favorite movies when all of a sudden the door at the top of the stairwell makes a huge boom as it opens and slams against something. We all froze and then ran to look at the door and then screamed like little kids and ran as fast as we could to the oppisite end of the house. We sat there for 5 minutes terrified, we told my friend's grandma that she lives with, but she didn't believe us even though I was almost crying I was so scared andwe still had to go get our shoes out of the living room. So then we finally got enough courage to go back to get our shoes. So we slowly and cautiously walked back to get them we felt terrified but safe until we were about 2 feet from the room we started to feel a littlewierd like right where your heart is but we kept going cause we were curios then we all screamed and ran again cause this heavy chair near the stairwell had moved. It had started out against the wall and now it was 2 feet away from the wall and we hadn't pushed it when we were running away from the stairwell. Then we asked my friend's grandma to come with us to get our shoes. When shecame nothing happened. We are in puberty right now I might add, and we could sensethe ghost. Also later after we calmed down a bit we came back (we had run out of the house)to see if anything would happen if we just stood next to the front porch which is right in front of the stairs to the 2nd floor. So we didn't feel anything, so then we sat down on one of the steps to see how close we could get cause we were really curious we have always believed in ghosts. We felt fine then we sat on the top step and we felt fine. So we were begining to feel at home there and we started talking. Then all of a sudden we all screamed at the same timeand ran. We had felt a really strong "presence" I guess you would say. It's really hard to describe but we felt it right in the same spot as before and it was so strong. My thereoy on this ghost is that it was really mad at us for going up to the 2nd floor and "disturbing" it's home. So it tried to scare us off so we would never go up there again, thats why it started to scare us off again when we started to feel more confident that time that we were sitting on the steps of the front porch. We are never ever going up there again, although I am still curious as to why we could feel it and if you can only feel it during puberty or what.

Aaga

Aaga aka Saurabh Sunil is farce. It's a delibrate attempt either by the person himself or his friends to get publicity. Torturing since 1984 means, he was born in 1984. A blog by a person of same name is present called "Oxymoronic.." at blogger.com. Please look into this matter and make the correction asap.

Why remove those poltergeist cases that turned out to be fraud? They are an important part of the phenomenon (in my opinion, they are 100% of the phenomenon). --Hob Gadling 13:28, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Rosenheim

Just added information on the rosenheim poltergeist, from William Rolls "the poltergeist" Arthur c clarkes " World of mysterious powers" this site http://www.trivia-library.com/b/biography-of-electric-psychokinetic-anne-marie-sch-part-1.htm three pages long, and this page http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:WwAh2UK3gnIJ:www.eece.ksu.edu/~gjohnson/nechap9.pdf+poltergeists+static-magnetic+fields&hl=en&gl=uk&ct=clnk&cd=6 The report (Bender, 1969; Karger and Zicha, 1968) A background check on Zicha and Karger places them as normal physicists with serious backgrounds in physics studies such as this one for Zicha http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0741-3335/28/1A/020. The physicists published there reports in Karger, F., & Zicha, G. (1968). Physical investigation of psychokinetic phenomena in Rosenheim, Germany, 1967. Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association, 5, 33-35. Robin 20:47 march 19th 2006

I removed the "information":

Some scientists propose that all poltergeist activity that cannot be traced to fraud has an explained physical explanation such as static magnetic/electric fields, ultra and infra sound, static electric charging and ionised air, even though in some cases such as the rosenheim poltergeist case, the physicist Dr F Karger from the Max-planck institut fur plasmaphysik and Dr G Zicha from the technical university of munich found none of these effects present, and no-evidence of fraud was ever found, even after a sustained investigation from the police force and CID. But according to the two physicists this did not rule out what they called "short duration forces" or the case that the effects that they were looking for were not constant, but only happening at the time of the phenomena, which was witnessed by Hans Bender the famous parapsychologist, the police force, the CID, skeptical reporters and the physicists present and the phenomena such as the rotation of a picture and swinging lamps were captured on video [which was one of the first times and poltergeist activity has been captured on film] and strange sounds that sounded electrical in origin were recorded. The findings were aired in a documentary in 1975 in a series called leap in the dark. And while this case came far from proving that poltergeists are paranormal in origin, it did provide solid evidence that not all poltergeist phenomena are due to fraud and mistaken interpretations of events and speculation.

The reason is that it is not true that fraud could not be found. A policeman hid himself in a closet and could clearly see the girl who was the focus of the poltergeist activity casually hitting the lamps in the corridor while passing them when nobody else was looking, making them swing. This observation was ignored by Bender, who was not interested in finding natural explanations, but the criminologist Herbert Schäfer published the unconvenient fact in his parapsychology-critical book "Poltergeister und Professoren. Über den Zustand der Parapsychologie". --Hob Gadling 16:39, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

This was later unsubstanciated if you read it through properly, it was a comment by an employee that did not want the attention of the press and government that the case brought. see "best evidence" by michael schmicker. all one needs to do is review the evidence to see that swinging lamps were recorded when she walked past but they were too high to touch.[i have seen the footage myself] here is a link that shows a pic of the lamps swinging http://www.forteantimes.com/gallery/tvghost.shtml look how close they are to the ceiling and also see that there is no one around to push them, these were hidden cameras by the police so noone would have known about them. and here is a pic of said girl near the lamps, look how high they are compared to her http://www.ufopsi.com/psidc/rosenheim_poltergeist.html .And all the CID and police reports i read were confirmations of unexplained phenomena. So am Reinserting information. please research further so you can see that this is the case "the criminal police began their own investigation, the outcome of which was that no hoax could be detected. It was noted, for example, that a picture hung on the wall had rotated 320 degree, and that this rotation seems to have been due to paranormal forces." this is a quote not from a paprapsycholgy text but from the "peoples almanac" in Germany. These were not the only phenomena that were witnessed by the physicists, police and skeptical reporters, but were also captured happening on film, thus making at least such conventional fraud as tapping the lamps impossible. plus in every report it states categorically that no fraud was ever detected, i can show you copys of the cid and police statements if you like. no fraud was detected, and if it had been the physicist and police would have reported it if not the parapsychologists,which would have been the thing to do for police and respected physicists. yet the physicists wrote the report of it being genuine. it is not a claim it was paranormal, but it was unexplained by fraud and misinterpretation. For more back ups of this claim see the long standing wickipedia listing for Hans bender. Further more did search for your book concerning rosenheim poltergeist and found nothing. Robin 21:47 March 22

I don't know what you mean by "This was later unsubstanciated if you read it through properly". What is "it"? What should I read?

Please look at the picture with the girl and the lamp again. Remember that humans have upper extremities (called "arms"). Imagine the girl stretching an arm upwards and making a small jump, and she can easily touch the lamp.

Also, I think that a criminologist who researched the case is a more reliable source than some website called "ufopsi.com". Physicists are not taught how to detect fraud, and Bender is regarded as gullible even by his own disciples. Schäfer's book describes several of Bender's blunders. --Hob Gadling 13:15, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Please actually read this one. the police are able to detect fraud and the Cid are trained for it and found none. while she could have jumped to tap the lamps, the photo of the swinging lamp and the video it was taken from prove that this was not the case, actual first hand evidence, not an anecdotal example. and you did not explain the lamps swinging without being touched on camera, even if one person faked one incident [which was never proved] there was still loads of evidence of real phenomena. Shafers book was a peice of anti-psi propaganga and the story about the man in the closet is anectodtal evidence at best, and a lie or misquote at worst [ probably siteing the instance when anne-marie walked donw the halls and the lamps swung above her though she didnt touch them. The incident that first prompted bender to think it was poltergeist phenomena.] while Karger and Zicha measured scientificly, actual phenemena. see the other links and articles and reports i sited, plus read any report on the rosenheim case to see that no fraud was detected. Once again reinserting This time do not delete without a good reason. schafer may have studied what he thought was the "case" but all who were actaully there including police, CID, physicists and all the employees and the company owner, confirm that this was not the case.

Robin march 28th 23:29

• I don't know what the Cid (El Cid?) has to do with it.
• Does the video show first a still lamp and empty corridor, then suddenly, the lamp starts swinging? Or what? And where does the video come from?
• "Shafers book was a peice of anti-psi propaganga" - did you read it?
• "anectodtal evidence" - I don't think you understand what the term means. It denotes that in order to tell random events from non-random ones, you have to do statistics and taking every data point into account. Picking only the parts with the result you like is "anecdotal evidence". But when ten people try to detect fraud, and nine of them are too stupid while one is not, citing that one case is hardly anecdotal.
• "a lie or misquote" - do you have evidence for that? Or do you just close your eyes when you hear things you don't like?
• "measured scientificly" - whoa, that does it. You must be right. (Only joking. Your text is such a sorry excuse for an argument...)
• "to see that no fraud was detected" - or rather, to see that those people were unable to detect fraud. One instance of fraud detected is enough to show that all the others were fooled. Of course not to people like you, who don't accept the possibility that parapsychologists may have been fooled. But Wikipedia should have higher standards. If there are doubts of the veracity, Wikipedia cannot write there aren't. --Hob Gadling 09:25, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Note: I wrote in my last revert: "third revert. If you try to put it in a fourth time despite not achieving consensus, you violate the rules".

I retract that, and I'm sorry. I misunderstood the 3 revert rule. You can legally continue the edit war.

But you shouldn't. Your new paragraph is POV (especially the "no-evidence of fraud was ever found" part is nothing but your personal opinion because you personally choose to ignore the evidence in question) and therefore does not belong here. Also, as far as I know there is no organization called "CID" in Germany. And quoting physicists as if they were automatically competent for detecting hoaxes because of being physicists is fallacious. --Hob Gadling 09:53, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Read the sources. the cameras were set up by the police at first to catch fraudulent acts, and they recorded pictures rotating on the walls to 90 degrees. Later they recorded a swing lamp, that would swing of its own accord, noone in the halls whatsoever and checks were regularly made for wires and earth tremors were not reported. but these phenomena only happened when anne marie was in the building. also bender observed they would sometimes swing when she walked down the halls.

The way i understand it anectodal evidence is evidence that has only one persons word to back it up, such as a claim of seeing a ghost or someone seeing someone commiting fraud. i am talking about it as the opposite to scientific testing in set condititions, which was done. i choose to discout schafers book on the grounds that firstly he wsas not present at the incident. secondly the police force claimed no fraud so this officer that hid in the closent never existed and thirdly i would rather trust a police officer with no psi bias than a person that has written an anti-psi book or Even hans bender.

The fact that no fraud was detected was not my opinion but the report filed by the rosenheim police. http://www.trivia-library.com/b/biography-of-electric-psychokinetic-anne-marie-sch-part-1.htm . The CID is a special branch of every police force. it deals with fraud, drug dealing etc. It is not an organisation.CID and police and skeptical reporters are trained to detect hoaxes, even if the physicists werent. and the offical police reports showed no cases of fraud and an abundance of evidence for unexplained phenomena. See the wikipedia reference for hans bender. Re inserting once again and will now continue to as long as you dont give me a good reason not to. Insulting my arguments just shows you are losing the argument man. Scientifically measuring was done on the voltage meters and and checks for infra/ultra sounds and anomolys were found but do not correspond to any known effects. if you want to insult people go to a forum not here. Do me a favour and if you have any questions ask them here before you delete my post this time ok?

Robin March 29th 12:22

You did not answer my questions. I'll just repeat them here. Did you read Schäfer's book? Does the video show first a still lamp and empty corridor, then suddenly, the lamp starts swinging? Do you have evidence for "lie or misquote"?

"The fact that no fraud was detected was not my opinion" - but you read it on some website which claims that it was "the report filed by the rosenheim police", right?

"skeptical reporters are trained to detect hoaxes" - oh yeah? and were there any skeptical reporters? I think not.

"Re inserting once again and will now continue to as long as you dont give me a good reason not to" - but you will never accept any reason. The proof is that you put the paragraph back again and again as it was before. You don't even try to understand what I am saying. You are not capable of constructive cooperation.

"Insulting my arguments just shows you are losing the argument man" - huh? Your arguments are bad, and I'm just pointing that out. What's wrong with that?

"voltage meters" - If, instead of playing with electric gimmicks, those scientists would have thought a little, they would have been more useful.

"Do me a favour and if you have any questions ask them here before you delete my post this time ok?" - No. Why should I do you a favor when you are obviously not even trying to be cooperative? See Wikipedia:Consensus: "Wikipedia's consensus practice does not justify stubborn insistence on an eccentric position combined with refusal to consider other viewpoints in good faith." I have no objections to a Rosenheim paragraph. I just won't allow it to sell POV as truth. --Hob Gadling 13:34, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

The change is acceptable as it shows that it contained genuinely unexplained phenomena, but if you read the sources i put forward it has a copy of the report filed by the rosenheim police department as "destruction due to x" because one cannot file damage against a spirit or poltergeist and no parties were found guilty of fraud. i just wanted to get across that there is substantional evidence for a rational scientific explanation to genuine poltergeist phenomena. All of the effects i mentioned are scientificly proven to cause poltergeist like effects [movement of objects by enseen means" and yes the video shows a lamp still for a long period then starting to swing, the same goes for the picture rotation. Sorry if i came across as arrogant and if i acted inapropratly, but i just want the psi-beleif side to have proper representation [ the parapsychology section is grossly bias but i have no time to sift through it] apologies again. am also changing rosenheim poltergeist link as the ufo-psi site is a bit spacey. Is that ok?

Robin March 29th 15:18

Still not NPOV

I take the point made above that this is a discussion within the context of parapsychology, but I still think that not enough provision is made in the article for the fact that none of the research cited here would be accepted by mainstream scientists. The only mention, really, is the parenthetical remark made about parapsychology. Items such as "seventy years of research have..." give a false impression of this research having been conducted along the lines of mainstream science, when in fact it was not, and the results would not be accepted by any peer-reviewed journal. Other articles on Wikipedia that deal with topics that are subject to competing scientific and non-scientific views seem to acknowledge that encyclopedia readers expect very clear distinctions between points of view that belong to mainstream scientists and those that do not.

--Boreas231 05:22, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Actually F.Karger and G.Zicha were members of the max plank institut fur plasmaphysic and the invetigations into the causes of the phenomena were using mainstream scientific methods. Also the incident was sighted in german scientific journals but under the title of unexplained electrical activity.

Robin 17:57 04 june

I have removed the phrase "Poltergeists are not able to go through locked doors" from the See Also section. Someone with knowledge on the subject is welcome to incorporate it in the body of the article, but it had no business floating around down there with the references. Also, there's another sentence that makes absolutely no sense, but I have not corrected it because I'm not sure what the author(s) are getting at (or it may be the result of an edit war etc). It is: "However, parapsychologists investigating poltergeists think that most occurrences are real, and the agents cheat only when they are subsequently caught cheating." Huh?

That's the way those people think. If they catch a kid throwing things, they say the kid cheated just now, but normally does not. When the same kid cheats without being caught, parapsychologists think it doesn't cheat. Crazy, but that's how it is. A person with a normal ego would say: ah, I caught her once, but she fooled me in most cases. But parapsychologists seem to be too full of themselves to consider the possibility that they can be fooled by a kid. --Hob Gadling 10:32, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Re IT. Maybe the problem is that parapyschologists and people with "normal" egos alike think of a kid in terms of "IT".--BZ(Bruno Zollinger) 08:59, 4 July 2006 (UTC)