What is a poltergeist?
The word is German: a spirit (Geist) that makes a racket (poltert). English borrowed it unchanged. It refers to a phenomenon that is heard and felt rather than seen. There is knocking on the walls, stones fly, furniture shifts, blankets are pulled off beds. Unlike a ghost, a poltergeist is usually tied to one house and to particular people, and after a while it stops.
Famous cases
- Bingen, 858: The Annals of Fulda report that on an estate near Bingen on the Rhine, an “evil spirit” threw stones and pounded on the walls for three years and finally burned down almost the entire settlement. One man had to prove his innocence by carrying red-hot iron. It is considered one of the oldest written records of such a case in Europe.
- Tedworth, 1662: In Wiltshire, the justice of the peace John Mompesson confiscated the drum of a traveling drummer. For the next two years, drumming was heard in his house. Joseph Glanvill made the case famous, using it as an argument against those who doubted the existence of spirits and witchcraft.
- Tennessee, 1817: On the Bell family farm in Adams, a series of hauntings began that became known as the “Bell Witch.” Most of the details come from a book by Martin Van Buren Ingram published in 1894, decades after the events.
- Rosenheim, 1967: In a law office, telephones rang with no one on the line and fluorescent tubes burst. The disturbances apparently centered on a young employee. The Freiburg parapsychologist Hans Bender saw this as psychokinesis; skeptics called it fraud.
What scholars say
In many cases, a young person is at the center of events. This can be read parapsychologically or as a sign that people were behind it. Historians such as Owen Davies and Michael Hunter are mainly interested in a different question: who wrote the accounts down, and why. A monk in Fulda, an Anglican theologian in Restoration England and a local writer in Tennessee each had their own reasons.
Episodes on this topic
- Bingen 858: Europe’s Oldest Recorded Haunting
- The Drummer of Tedworth: England’s First Poltergeist
- The Bell Witch (in German)
- The Rosenheim Haunting (in German)
Further reading
- Annales Fuldenses, entry for the year 858, ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH, Hannover 1891.
- Joseph Glanvill: Saducismus Triumphatus, 1681.
- Michael Hunter: “New light on the ‘Drummer of Tedworth’,” Historical Research 78 (2005), pp. 311–353.
- M. V. Ingram: An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch, 1894.
- Owen Davies: The Haunted. A Social History of Ghosts, 2007.