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Overview
What Is a Poltergeist? is an introduction to the mysterious phenomenon examining the theories and presenting the latest research evidence for poltergeist activity.
In trying to define a poltergeist, author Geoff Holder ponders such questions as: Are they the restless souls of the dead? Demons? Witches’ familiars? Household spirits? Mysterious earth energies? Unknown powers of the mind? Or hoaxes? This ebook takes the well-known poltergeist phenomena—the movement of objects by invisible forces, the noises, the eruptions of fire, water and electrical disturbance—and maps them against changing ideas and beliefs. The author presents the latest theories and research evidence in his search for answers.
What is a Poltergeist? is part of The Paranormal, a series that resurrects rare titles, classic publications, and out-of-print texts, as well as publishes new supernatural and otherworldly ebooks for the digital age. The series includes a range of paranormal subjects from angels, fairies, and UFOs to near-death experiences, vampires, ghosts, and witchcraft.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781446359297 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | David & Charles |
| Publication date: | 01/07/2020 |
| Series: | The Paranormal |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 120 |
| File size: | 203 KB |
About the Author
Geoff Holder has written almost twenty non-fiction books on the paranormal, the peculiar, the Gothic and the gruesome, from The Jacobites and the Supernatural and 101 Things to Do with a Stone Circle to Scottish Bodysnatchers and nine titles in the Guide to the Mysterious... series, covering everywhere from the Lake District and Loch Ness to Glasgow and Aberdeen. His work encompasses folklore, archaeology, local history, parapsychology, ghosts, Forteana, neo-antiquarianism and witchcraft, with a side order of gargoyles and graveyards. He has had over thirty jobs - once lasting an entire morning in a slaughterhouse - and won numerous awards as a video scriptwriter and producer.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
POLTERGEISTS ARE ... DEMONS
Living creatures of different types and varied intelligence may exist in the unseen as in the seen. Possibly these poltergeist phenomena may be due to some of these, perhaps mischievous or rudimentary, intelligences in the unseen: I do not know why we should imagine there are no fools or naughty children in the spiritual world; possibly they are as numerous there as here.
Sir William Barrett, 'Poltergeists, Old And New', 1911
In January 1949 something disrupted a house in Cottage City, Maryland, close to the state border with Washington, D.C. Scratching noises came from under the floorboards; there was a sound of dripping, but nothing to account for it; a picture of Jesus on the wall shook. Over the next few weeks more noises – scratchings, raps and squeaking – were heard. Objects were moved, beds shaken, bedclothes pulled off. It was the relatively mild start of what would become not only a whirlwind of violence, but also form the basis of the most successful horror film ever made – The Exorcist.
The family were German Lutherans, and on February 17 they arranged for their 13-year-old son to stay overnight in the parsonage of their local minister, Reverend Luther Miles Schulze, the pastor of St. Stephen's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Washington. A few weeks later the Rev. Schulze described his experiences that night in a series of letters to J. B. Rhine, leader of the famous Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University (the details are in Unbelievable, Stacy Horn's 2009 history of the Duke Laboratory). In the summer the events were reported in several newspapers, and summarized in the New York-based Parapsychology Bulletin (August 1949, Number 14). For reasons that will soon become obvious, the family were accorded anonymity, and the boy was named Roland Doe. 'Doe' is the conventional term in North America for someone who cannot be named for legal reasons, or for an unidentified corpse, as in 'John Doe' or 'Jane Doe'; the usage dates back to medieval England. Later writers have used the names 'Robbie Doe' or 'Rob Doe'.
According to Schulze, scratching sounds came from inside the wall in the parsonage bedroom, and the boy's bed shook persistently. Unable to sleep, Roland sat in a heavy armchair with a very low centre of gravity, meaning it was difficult to tip over. As Schulze watched with the light on, the chair moved several inches. Roland shifted his position to bring his full weight on the chair, bringing his knees under his chin and resting his feet on the edge of the seat. The heavy piece of furniture backed 7.4cm (3in) until it hit the wall, then tilted over, teetered on its side, and, as if in slow motion, fell to the floor (when Schulze later sat in the chair himself, he was unable to make it tip over, no matter how hard he rocked). With the bed and the chair now out of the question, Roland fell asleep on a pallet of blankets – which promptly moved across the floor.
Over the next two weeks various items flew through the air in the Doe house, furniture moved, Roland's desk at school shook vigorously, and marks or scratches appeared on his skin, which some witnesses thought spelled out words. It is (rather dubiously) claimed that the boy spoke in Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic, the latter the language used in the Holy Land during the time of Christ. Between February 28 and March 2 Roland was examined at Georgetown University Hospital, to relatively little effect (an exorcism is sometimes claimed to have taken place at the hospital during this visit, causing the priest involved to retire with both physical and mental scars; this claim is false, one of the many myths that have grown up around the case).
According to Schulze, the Georgetown psychiatrist concluded that: 'the boy did not seem to want to grow up and assume responsibility, but preferred holding on to his childhood.' To the deeply religious family, this was just scientific mumbo-jumbo. Having toyed with the idea that the cause of the disturbances was the ghost of Aunt Tillie, a recently deceased relative in Missouri who had introduced Roland to the Ouija board, the Does were moving towards the idea that Roland was afflicted with an evil presence. The Lutherans and the shrinks had proved to be no help, so now it was time to call in the real demon experts: the Catholics. A local priest was consulted and provided blessed candles and holy water, which however proved ineffective.
In the first week of March Roland's family removed him from school in Maryland and, at great inconvenience and expense, took the boy more than 1280km (800 miles) to stay with relatives in Normandy, Missouri, on the northern edge of St Louis. The scratchings, skin-written 'messages' and violent bed movements continued. A Roman Catholic priest was called in. As the phenomena increased in intensity, three initially sceptical Jesuits from St Louis were granted permission by their archbishop to undertake an exorcism. It was the first exorcism any of them had attempted. By all accounts it was a trial of violence and noxious bodily fluids. The harrowing process lasted a month, the exorcism ritual being repeated day after day.
While Roland was in St Louis being exorcised, in Washington the Rev. Schulze was writing about the case to J. B. Rhine. (In The Enchanted Voyager, Denis Brian's 1982 biography of Rhine, we learn that the Duke University parapsychologist suspected Schulze may have unconsciously exaggerated his descriptions.) The Lutheran minister wasn't entirely happy with the way Roland's case was being systematically moved into the area of Catholic demonology – he thought it was more likely to be a poltergeist than a possession – and wanted the hardheaded scientist to investigate. The Doe family, however, had had enough of fancy university intellectuals, and rebuffed the approach: for them, the only way was exorcism.
On the night of 18 April 1949 the exhausted Jesuits finally achieved their goal, and all evil spirits were allegedly expelled from the boy's body. Roland returned to Maryland 12 days later and spent the rest of his life in utter normal anonymity, untroubled by paranormal irruptions, while the Doe family converted to Catholicism.
The few partial newspaper reports of the summer of 1949 inspired William Peter Blatty to write his 1971 bestseller The Exorcist, in which the fictionalized events are shifted entirely to Washington, D.C. and the protagonist/victim becomes a 14-year-old girl (many of Blatty's more extreme elements are actually borrowed from an earlier exorcism, which took place in Iowa in 1928). The film version was released in 1973, and, with its graphically physical depictions of demonic possession, changed horror cinema for ever.
Sheared of its sensational pop-culture allure, however, the Cottage City/St Louis case reads very much like any number of poltergeist episodes in the rest of this book. The difference is that (a) a religious interpretation was explicitly placed on the events, in which the disturbances were laid at the door of an inhabiting demon, leading to (b) an exorcism lasting a month, and, ultimately, (c) infamy through association with the novel and film several decades later. One question obviously arises: was the poltergeist-demon real?
By the time the first newspaper account appeared (The Washington Post, August 10, 1949) the poltergeist events and associated exorcism were four months in the past, and most of the available information was coming from the Rev. Schulze, who had only witnessed one night's worth of phenomena and had to rely on hearsay for the rest. Twenty years later, after the film's success, hitherto unknown details started to come out, beginning with Blatty's book William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist from Novel to Film (1974) and 'The Truth Behind The Exorcist,' Steve Erdmann's in-depth article for Fate (January 1975), which revealed that a 'diary' of the events had been kept by one of the exorcists. The next major investigation had to wait until 1999, when Mark Opsasnick wrote 'The Haunted Boy of Cottage City: The Cold Hard Facts Behind the Story that Inspired The Exorcist' for Strange magazine. Opsasnick identified the Doe house as belonging to the Maryland community of Cottage City – not its neighbour Mount Rainier as had now become a standard assumption. He also interviewed several people who had known 'Roland Doe' in 1949. Two – including Roland's best friend – demanded anonymity, and Opsasnick also promised not to reveal some of the more sensitive elements. What emerged was a portrait of a disturbed, lonely, bad-tempered boy, prone to violence against other children and sadistic behaviour towards animals.
According to B.C., the former best buddy, 13-year-old Roland Doe was 'a mean bastard'. He hated school and was shunned by his classmates. Opsasnick formed the opinion that this dysfunctional boy drew on his family culture – his mother and grandmother were obsessively religious to the point of superstition, and dabbled in Spiritualism – and created the disturbances simply as a hoax to get out of school. For his pains, Roland Doe found himself strapped to a bed in St Louis with three Catholic priests relentlessly attempting to expel Satan from his body.
Opsasnick's suspicions were confirmed when he spoke to Father Walter Halloran, the last living witness to the exorcism. Halloran pulled the rug out from under many of the more dramatic stories circulating about the events in St Louis. Roland, he said, had not exhibited any demonic knowledge of ancient languages – just Latin, and in that he was mimicking the priests rather than understanding what he was saying. He was certainly violent towards the priests (Halloran received a broken nose, for example), but he had not shown supernatural strength. His voice did not change beyond all recognition. The raging, swearing and struggling boy did spit frequently and over great distances, but one of the Cottage City contacts had already told Opsasnick that Roland had perfected the art of spitting accurately at a target ten feet away. Marks and so-called 'brandings' did appear spontaneously on Roland's body, but the priest could not tell if they had a more mundane origin, such as Roland's fingernails. Father Halloran also could not remember the much-mentioned urinating and puking that supposedly took place throughout the exorcism.
On the other hand – when it comes to paranormal controversies, there is always an 'on the other hand' – we have Troy Tayler's 2006 book The Devil Came to St Louis. The exorcism took place in three separate locations, one of which was the Alexian Brothers Hospital in south St Louis. Tayler includes accounts from hospital staff who remembered the screams and demonic laughter, the sense of horror, and the copious quantities of urine and vomit that needed cleaning up. Even worse was the icy, breath-clouding micro-climate around the door into Roland's room, which was always freezing cold no matter what the temperature elsewhere. Once the exorcism was completed, the room was locked, and remained deliberately sealed until the hospital was demolished in 1976; as far as the Jesuits were concerned, this was a room where Satan had been confronted and defeated.
Taylor also spoke to Father Halloran shortly before the old man died. As he had done on several previous occasions, the 83-year-old made several contradictory statements; he seemed less inclined to dismiss the supernatural element than he had been with Opsasnick. It remains a moot point what actually happened during the tumultuous, endlessly-repeated exorcism sessions in 1949. Some things were definitely not 'normal'. For example, Halloran told Opsasnick he had witnessed poltergeist-type activity: Roland's bed moved vigorously; and 'I saw a bottle slide from a dresser across the room — there was no one near it.'
Despite being relatively well-documented, the Maryland/St Louis case is sufficiently ambiguous to support any one of the three hypotheses suggested at the time. It could be a piece of fakery perpetuated by a teenager with severe emotional problems (for more on fraudulent polts, see Chapter 8). It could be an example of RSPK (Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis – see Chapter 3), where a disturbed psychology manifested through destructive telekinetic outreach. And it could be that Roland Doe was possessed by a malevolent discarnate intelligence: a demon.
What do we mean by 'demon'? Every culture in the world has a demonology. Some of these demons have the power of world-bestriding gods, while others can only affect a small corner of Planet Earth. The universal aspect they share is that they are non-human entities that can do harm. Some demons can be thought of as terrorists or psychopathic sadists, doing evil for evil's sake; others, meanwhile, are more like mercenaries, who only do bad things when they are bribed or persuaded to do so (through gifts, sacrifices, spells, etc.). However, not all demons are actually demonic, in the sense of malign beings. Christianity, like Judaism before it, populated its conceptual world with demons that were merely the transformed gods of vanquished peoples or vanished civilisations: these defeated deities were literally demonized. So, for example, both Astarte and Baal, now major players in the Christian pantheon of demons, were originally Middle Eastern fertility deities with no evil aspect. Any listing of Western, Christianity-based demons will be similarly bursting with former gods and goddesses of the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians and other losers in the wars of religious thought. British folklore, meanwhile, is rife with 'evil spirits' which are the former cult figures of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian pagan peoples who were converted to Christianity. The Bible is quite clear on this: 'All the gods of the heathen are devils' (Psalms 95:5). The Greek word daimon or daemon refers to a belief – very common in the ancient world – in two personal spirits that accompany each of us through life: the agathodaemon, our beneficent good spirit, and the cacodaemon, our personal spirit of temptation and bad behaviour. Over time the ambivalent daemons of antiquity sadly became synonymous with the entirely unambiguous demons of Christianity, and the meaning of the original word has become lost (to be revived recently, however, in the best-selling wonder-novels of Philip Pullman, such as The Golden Compass). In orthodox Christian theology, demons are the inhabitants of Hell, former angels who fell from Heaven when, like surly teenagers, they rebelled against God the Father. Medieval Christian scholars endlessly classified the hierarchies of Hell – in 1467 the Spanish ecclesiastic Alphonso de Spina calculated that there were precisely one hundred and thirty-three million, three hundred and six thousand, and six hundred and sixty-eight demons. A figure like that makes me think that some of them must have been double-counted, nipping round the back while Alphonso wasn't looking. Despite this richness of demonic nomenclature, most Christians simplified things on a day-to-day level, and anything at all suspect was ascribed not to a worker bee in the hell-hive, but to the Lord of Hell himself: Lucifer, Satan, The Devil, Beelzebub, Mister Splitfoot, and a hundred similar epithets.
All of which means the word 'demon' has no fixed meaning. It continues to be used for reasons of semantic convenience; but it is a polysemous term which can imply 'evil being from the bad otherworld', or it can simply be cognate with 'spirit', 'force of nature' or 'bad luck'. Diseases and natural disasters can be personified as demons. I regard the word as shorthand for 'something that we think exists but which we can't see or understand'. Inheritors of the Christian worldview tend to assume that it refers exclusively to Satan and his ilk; but the word 'demon' is a floating term, the meaning changing depending on the culture and belief-system of the individual using it. My demon may be your god, and vice versa. We can consider the neutral notion of the demon as discarnate entity, free from its religious baggage. But as 'demon' is primarily a religious term, let's unpack the briefcase of belief and see how poltergeist activity through the years has been interpreted through the lens of theology.
The general rule in the propagandist clerical literature ofthe Dark and Middle Ages – such as the Lives of various saints – is that, when it comes to saint versus demon, the saint always wins. This is part of the point of such writing, which is designed to teach the reader about the power of God and the inevitable triumph of holy men over the forces of evil. In the fifth century CE, St Caesarius of Arles in France dealt with two stone-throwing demons. The first lithobolus infested the house of a Dr Elpidus and was despatched with holy water. The second, a loud-mouthed but invisible diabolical stonethrower occupying a bathhouse, was kept at bay by Caesarius' prayers and holy staff. Claude Lecouteux's masterly The Secret History of Poltergeists and Haunted Houses (2012) lists many other early medieval European cases where saints and clerics were bombarded with stones; the attacks were inevitably interpreted as being instigated by demons, which by now had become the default term for poltergeist activity. The mere use of the word does not mean that the poltergeists were actual demons; on the other hand, we cannot definitely say that they weren't. The original sources are so scanty and so compromised by religious ideology that we can't say anything definitive about the reported phenomena.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
Chapter 1 Poltergeists are ... Demons,
Chapter 2 Poltergeists are ... Witchcraft,
Chapter 3 Poltergeists are ... Ghosts,
Chapter 4 Poltergeists are ... Fairies,
Chapter 5 Poltergeists are ... Vampires,
Chapter 6 Poltergeists are ... Powers of the Human Mind,
Chapter 7 Poltergeists are ... Thoughtforms,
Chapter 8 Poltergeists are ... Hoaxes,
Chapter 9 Poltergeists are ... Forces of Nature,
Chapter 10 A Conclusion of Sorts,
Bibliography,