What are poltergeists?

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Magical Realist

Magical Realist

Valued Senior Member
No doubt everyone has seen the famous Spielburg flick called "Poltergeist." Such over-the-top "horrorized" versions of this phenomena probably do more harm than good. So what are the facts about poltergeist phenomena? Are there any documented accounts? What are the common traits shared between them? Here's what may be considered the definitive study done in this field---a compilation and computer analysis of 500 cases of poltergeist hauntings thru out history, several investigated firsthand by the authors themselves. Here's a short review of this book:

http://www.acampbell.org.uk/bookreviews/r/gauld-cornell.html

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The poltergeist phenomenon is probably the most difficult explanatory challenge that the would-be skeptic has to face. It has been reported in many countries for hundreds of years and the manifestations are remarkably constant over different times and cultures.
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Don't be silly. "Report" is a fancy word for story. A story isn't scientific evidence.
It has been reported in many countries for hundreds of years and the manifestations are remarkably constant over different times and cultures
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Hmmm, constant. That would be interesting, it must manifest in a uniquely specific way, I would like to hear about it.
A poltergeist (German for "noisy spirit") is an "entity" which typically moves objects, throws things about, and may cause damage of various kinds. Witnesses are seldom injured, although they may be. Sometimes stranger phenomena occur, including levitation of people as well as objects and the mysterious appearance or disappearance of various objects.
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Oh, so it's lots of different things, mostly falling under the header of "things that move". So, what we have here are stories about things that move.
 
Well, seeing as you've never witnessed a poltergeist haunting yourself and so lack any "story" either way, you'd definitely be the last person I'd turn to know if it is real or not. On the other hand:

"Poltergeist activities have been reported in many countries, and chronicled by occult writers such as A. R. G. Owen and Colin Wilson. Well-known instances of poltergeist activity include the Epworth Poltergeist, the Bell Witch in 1817, and activity surrounding the Fox Sisters, whose experiences started the Spiritualism Movement of 1848. Others include the Tidworth Drummer (1661), where poltergeist activity and phantom drumming noises plagued a magistrate who arrested and confiscated the drum of a vagrant drummer, and the Livingston Wizard (1797) of West Virginia, where all cloth items were cut into spiral shapes, and objects flew about without explanation.

The twentieth century saw an increase in the recording and investigation of poltergeist phenomena. With more scientific interest in parapsychology, more researchers investigated poltergeist activity from a scientific perspective. Cases like Eleonore Zugun, a Romanian girl who experienced over four years of poltergeist activity during the 1920s, were investigated by psychical researchers including Austria's Fritz Grunweld and the world-famous English researcher Harry Price.

The Rosenheim Poltergeist in 1967, where a Bavarian attorney's office was plagued by electrical phenomena such as the unscrewing and bursting of light bulbs, the tripping of switches, and phone numbers called thousands of times, was investigated not only by psychical researchers, but also psychologists and physicists, as well as the electric company. It was found that the phenomena always occurred in the presence of a 19 year old female employee.

The Miami Poltergeist case, also from 1967, centered around a disgruntled and recently suicidal employee in a warehouse, around whom items would fly off the shelves and break. Researchers recorded 224 separate incidents, and numerous tests were carried out to rule out fraud. The paranormal phenomena were witnessed not only by parapsychologists, but also by police officers and a professional magician."

Read More: http://ghosts.monstrous.com/poltergeists/all_pages.htm#ixzz3QwJvbG8b
 
Your link is nothing but a Craigslist style book review left over from 1999. It could be you are the last vestige of people naive enough to support such nonsense. The Spielberg movie you refer to is so old that cute little Drew Barrymore is now well into middle age. Normal people, including Spielberg himself now groan at such trite nonsense as that film. Even when it was new, small children understood it to be fantasy horror, and here you are thirty years later treating it as if it were a documentary.
 
Magical Realist said:
The Rosenheim Poltergeist in 1967, where a Bavarian attorney's office was plagued by electrical phenomena such as the unscrewing and bursting of light bulbs, the tripping of switches, and phone numbers called thousands of times, was investigated not only by psychical researchers, but also psychologists and physicists, as well as the electric company. It was found that the phenomena always occurred in the presence of a 19 year old female employee.
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Really?
In April 1970 a story in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit reported that co-authors Albin Neumann (Allan), Herbert Schiff, and Gert Gunther Kramer suggested in their book "Falsche Geister, echte Schwindler?" ("False spirits, real swindlers?") that the claims of unexplained disturbances initially made by Adam were fraudulent. The authors wrote that they visited Adam's law offices and discovered nylon threads attached to office fixtures such as overhead lights and wall plates that, when pulled, would cause the fixtures to move, and concluded that "the public had been tricked by tricks."
 
Dywyddyr said:
Really?
In April 1970 a story in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit reported that co-authors Albin Neumann (Allan), Herbert Schiff, and Gert Gunther Kramer suggested in their book "Falsche Geister, echte Schwindler?" ("False spirits, real swindlers?") that the claims of unexplained disturbances initially made by Adam were fraudulent. The authors wrote that they visited Adam's law offices and discovered nylon threads attached to office fixtures such as overhead lights and wall plates that, when pulled, would cause the fixtures to move, and concluded that "the public had been tricked by tricks."
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Funny, but aside from the claim you quote here from Wiki, I find no evidence for that on Google anywhere. You'd think skeptics would be all over this by now, fully exploiting it to prove how paranormal activity is really just strings and wires. Otoh, I DID find that this case was thoroughly investigated when it was happening, by physicists and police and electricians and parapsychologists, with absolutely NO evidence of fraud. Wow. You'd think a nylon string attached to a light socket would be obvious to them! lol!

"In the Rosenheim case, Dr. Friedbert Karger was one of two
physicists from the Max Planck Institute who helped to investigate
perhaps the most validated poltergeist case in recorded history.
A 19 year old secretary in a law firm in Rosenheim, a small town
in southern Germany, was seemingly the unwitting cause of
much chaos in the firm, including disruption of electricity and
telephone lines, the rotation of a picture and swinging lamps
which were captured on video (which was one of the first times
any poltergeist activity has been captured on film) and strange
sounds that sounded electrical in origin were recorded. Fraud
was never proven despite intensive investigation by the
physicists, journalists and the police. The effects moved with the
young woman when she changed jobs until they finally faded out,
and Friedbert Karger's whole perspective on physics changed.
'These experiments were really a challenge to physics,' Karger
says today. 'What we saw in the Rosenheim case could be 100
per cent shown not to be explainable by known physics.' [1]. The
phenomena were witnessed by Hans Bender, the police force,
the CID, reporters, and the physicists. The claims were aired in a
documentary in 1975 in a series called "Leap in the Dark".
 
The skeptics all over this by now? It happened in the 1970s. The skeptics along with the charlatans are dead or in nursing homes.Why do you insists on dredging up a bygone era's sensationalist paranormal magazine fodder and pretending it is something worth our consideration?
 
Stone said:
The skeptics all over this by now? It happened in the 1970s. The skeptics along with the charlatans are dead or in nursing homes.Why do you insists on dredging up a bygone era's sensationalist paranormal magazine fodder and pretending it is something worth our consideration?
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Yeah by now. It's been 40 odd years since this case happened, and yet nowhere in any skeptic blog or website is this "string claim" repeated. And let's not forget it was a sensationalist German tabloid that published this supposed "debunking" to start with. So who was trying to sell newspapers here? Certainly not the Law Office or the physicists or cops or electricians who observed and recorded this activity themselves.
 
Magical Realist said:
Otoh, I DID find that this case was thoroughly investigated when it was happening, by physicists and police and electricians and parapsychologists, with absolutely NO evidence of fraud. Wow. You'd think a nylon string attached to a light socket would be obvious to them! lol!
"In the Rosenheim case, Dr. Friedbert Karger ...
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On the other hand, Karger IS a bit of gullible nutcase:
The intellectual masculine ability is complimented and guided by feminine abilities of intuition and clairvoyance. This is reflected in our counseling and authoring activities, as well as in our lectures and TV appearances.
']...
']Hygiene of the Soul
...
Dangers of Occultism [intended for teens and schools]

Karger ALSO failed to discover that Uri Geller is a fake after "investigating".
 
Dywyddyr said:
On the other hand, Karger IS a bit of gullible nutcase:
The intellectual masculine ability is complimented and guided by feminine abilities of intuition and clairvoyance. This is reflected in our counseling and authoring activities, as well as in our lectures and TV appearances.'...
']']Hygiene of the Soul...
']Dangers of Occultism [intended for teens and schools

Karger ALSO failed to discover that Uri Geller is a fake after "investigating".
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Wow..A physicist who is ALSO a nutcase? What a strange bird indeed. I wonder how having novel ideas about the paranormal effects ones ability to see nylon strings hanging from light fixtures and metal plates? lol!
 
Dywyddyr said:
Wrong on both counts.
A mad or foolish person.

Notice the "OR"?
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That's not a definition. It's called a synonym. A foolish person is not a nutcase. Everyone is foolish at some point. It doesn't make them a nutcase. A mad person WOULD be a nutcase, and as such would be someone with no credibility and unable to function in society. A physicist who experiments and finds evidence for the paranormal would not meet that definition.
 
Magical Realist said:
That's not a definition.
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Except that that definition was from the Oxford dictionary.

It's called a synonym. A foolish person is not a nutcase. Everyone is foolish at some point. It doesn't make them a nutcase. A mad person WOULD be a nutcase, and as such would be someone with no credibility and unable to function in society. A physicist who experiments and finds evidence for the paranormal would not meet that definition.
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Right, so you're choosing to use some clinical (personal?) definition, as opposed to the normally accepted one.
 
Stone said:
Your link is nothing but a Craigslist style book review left over from 1999. It could be you are the last vestige of people naive enough to support such nonsense. The Spielberg movie you refer to is so old that cute little Drew Barrymore is now well into middle age.
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Wrong movie.

Drew Barrymore was in ET.

Normal people, including Spielberg himself now groan at such trite nonsense as that film.
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I doubt it. Poltergeist remains one of the best horror movies of its time and many still consider it to be a classic.

Poltergeist was well received by critics and is considered by many as one of the best films of 1982.[17][18][19] Andrew Sarris, in The Village Voice, wrote that when Carol Anne is lost, the parents and the two older children "come together in blood-kin empathy to form a larger-than-life family that will reach down to the gates of hell to save its loved ones."[20] In the L.A. Herald Examiner, Peter Rainer wrote:

Buried within the plot of Poltergeist is a basic, splendid fairy tale scheme: the story of a little girl who puts her parents through the most outrageous tribulation to prove their love for her. Underlying most fairy tales is a common theme: the comforts of family. Virtually all fairy tales begin with a disrupting of the family order, and their conclusion is usually a return to order.[20]​

Over 30 years after its release, the film is regarded by many critics as a classic of the horror genre[21][22] and maintains an 88% "Certified Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes.[23] Poltergeist was selected by The New York Times as one of The Best 1000 Movies Ever Made.[24] The film also received recognition from the American Film Institute. The film ranked number 84 on AFI's 100 Years…100 Thrills list,[25] and the tag line "They're here" was named the 69th greatest movie quote on AFI's 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes.[26]
​

So why would they now groan at such trite nonsense as that film?

Even when it was new, small children understood it to be fantasy horror, and here you are thirty years later treating it as if it were a documentary.
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I watched it when I was 10 years of age, in primary school during a 'rain day' at the end of the year and someone brought it in on tape and we watched it on TV. The school received so many complaints afterwards, including from my parents, because it literally scared the crap out of us, they were forced to apologise.

No one treats it as a documentary, I will grant you that. Well if anyone did, it would be silly.

Even back then, we knew it wasn't real, but it still caused us nightmares. I remember running screaming from the room that night when static appeared on our TV. It took my parents about an hour to find out what had terrified me so much. I was incoherent. Which was why they complained to the school, because it was hardly an appropriate movie to allow small children to watch. And they weren't wrong. That movie was, to put it bluntly, fucked up. Especially the bit where the steak crawls across the kitchen bench.. Ugh.. I still cannot watch it again. And yet, I remember every single bit of that movie in vivid detail, it left that much of an impression.

Just because it (the movie) isn't real, does not mean it does not have the ability to terrify people.. ;)

Having said that, I do find people who obsess about the subject matter to be wasting their time. People are afraid of many imagined things (look at us kids and the stupid movie). Does not make it real.
 
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