The Naturalization of the ‘Poltergeist’

Ostensible ‘poltergeist phenomena’ are the very epitome of ‘things that go bump in the night’, and most modern scientists would probably relegate them to the realm of fairy tales without thinking twice. And yet, for historians studying the historical continuity of scientific interest in the supposed ‘supernatural’, they offer surprising insights.

Probably coined by Martin Luther (a professed poltergeist victim) in sixteenth-century Germany, ‘Poltergeist’ means ‘rumbling spirit’. There is a vast number of historical records of dramatic poltergeist outbreaks afflicting people from all walks of life, not infrequently resulting in interventions by state authorities, which in turn have produced some of the most detailed records. Among the bizarre but apparently robust features of alleged poltergeist phenomena over time are:

• The centre of events is usually a specific person, often an adolescent.
• Unexplained recurring sounds are heard, ranging from raps from within walls or furniture to deafening blows.
• Sounds are sometimes responsive.
• Household objects of all sizes and weights are observed to move, sometimes slowly and appearing as if carried.
• Moved objects appear to penetrate closed windows or walls without causing damage, and they are often reported to be hot.
• Stones are observed to be thrown from without, sometimes from a considerable distance.
• Large quantities of water suddenly appear and disappear, and fires ignite spontaneously.
• Persons may be hurled out of bed, slapped or beaten as if by invisible hands, and bitten.
• Writings and drawings appear on walls or in closed spaces.
• Apparitions are perceived, sometimes simultaneously by more than one witness.
• The alleged disturbances correlate with pets and animals panicking or behaving unusually.
• In post-industrial times, disturbances correspond with malfunctions or erratic performances of electronic equipment.

Many figureheads of the Scientific Revolution believed in poltergeist phenomena and interpreted them in traditional religious terms, i.e. as caused by witchcraft, devils or evil human spirits. Early members of the Royal Society like Joseph Glanvill, for example, investigated poltergeist cases and published their findings. Among their now better known supporters was Robert Boyle, who sponsored the English translation of a French poltergeist case, the ‘Devil of Mascon’, to which Boyle also wrote the preface.

During the Enlightenment the respectability of the ‘supernatural’  declined dramatically on the backdrop of continuing wars of religion, clerical corruptions and the horrors of the witch crazes. However, rather than natural philosophers or medics it was religious and political writers such as Joseph Addison who began to treat the ‘occult’ as a shorthand for Catholic irrationality and backwardness and ridiculed it out of intellectual discourse. Addison’s play The Drummer, for instance, was a caricature of the ‘Drummer of Tedworth’, a poltergeist case investigated by Joseph Glanville, poking fun of ghost beliefs as well as of atheistic free-thinkers.

However, not all Enlightenment savants agreed that reports of ‘things that go bump in the night’ were necessarily to be treated with contempt. G. E. Lessing in Germany, for instance, openly opposed the fashionable wholesale rejection of reports of apparitional experiences and poltergeist phenomena. (According to the German historian Carl Kiesewetter, this was shortly after Lessing became involved in an incident in Dibbesdorf near Braunschweig, where members of a working-class family afflicted by a prolonged poltergeist outbreak were, without further ado, imprisoned for breach of the peace.)

In the mid-nineteenth century, modern spiritualism emerged as a major grassroots religion from a case featuring responsive knocks in a cabin in Hydesville, USA. The poltergeist began to be further domesticated when eminent representatives of science such as Alfred Russel Wallace, William Crookes, and Alexandr Butlerov investigated spiritualist mediums and became convinced of the reality of its phenomena. When the Leipzig astrophysicist Johann F. Zöllner tested his theory of a fourth dimension of space by having a medium experimentally reproduce poltergeist-style phenomena, this became an explosive political issue during the infancy of the modern psychological profession in Germany. Zöllner, who was joined in his unorthodox investigations by physicists like Gustav Theodor Fechner, was publicly attacked by Fechner’s disciple Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of the first German institute of experimental psychology who worried that scientific interest in the phenomena of spiritualism would threaten the social and religious foundations of civilization.

In contrast to Wundt, his American counterpart William James at Harvard advocated scientific studies of spiritualism. Collaborating particularly with researchers in England, James’s helped spawn important late-nineteenth century concepts of the subconscious mind. Two major theorists of subliminal cognition were Carl du Prel in Germany and James’s friend Frederic W. H. Myers in England. Comparing the psychology of conventional sleep-walking with features of reported apparitions of living persons, they suggested that fixed subconscious ideas might be an underlying cause of both. Moreover, they proposed an unusual psychological explanation for reported apparitions of the dead: Myers proposed that “the behaviour of phantasms of the living suggests dreams dreamt by the living persons whose phantoms appear. And similarly the behaviour of phantasms of the dead suggests dreams dreamt by the deceased persons whose phantasms appear”. Likewise, du Prel believed “If super-sensory capacities are possible without the use of the body, they must be possible without occupancy of it”.

In the early twentieth century, Oliver Lodge, Charles Richet, Cesare Lombroso, Filippo Bottazzi, Camille Flammarion, Henri Bergson, Marie and Pierre Curie, the third and fourth Lords Rayleigh and many less known scientists, medics and philosophers tried to reproduce poltergeist-style phenomena under controlled conditions. After authors like du Prel and Myers were eclipsed by psychoanalysis, mental health professionals like Carl Gustav Jung, Eugen Bleuler, Enrico Morselli and the sexologist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing continued to study poltergeist phenomena in the field and in the laboratory. However, they categorically dismissed theories involving the agency of discarnate spirits and many advocated a strictly psychodynamic approach. As Schrenck-Notzing put it: “In certain cases, emotionally charged complexes of representations, which have become autonomous and dissociated, seem to press for discharge and realisation through haunting phenomena. Hence, the so-called haunting occurs in place of a neurosis”. Holding that there were numerous cases where possibilities of fraud were practically eliminated, they proposed that poltergeist phenomena were to be explained in terms of emotional conflicts unconsciously acted out by individuals with a ‘telekinetic’ disposition, a view which was adopted by psychoanalysts like Alfred von Winterstein and Nandor Fodor.

Scientific interest in poltergeist-style phenomena persisted in the most unlikely places. Members of the Vienna Circle of Positivism such as Rudolf Carnap and Hans Hahn (who became vice-president of the Austrian Society for Psychical Research) keenly followed Schrenck-Notzing’s experimental and field investigations. Hahn’s most eminent student, Kurt Gödel, likewise attended experimental séances. The theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli believed in the intrinsic interconnectedness of mind and matter even on a macroscopic level, a view that was partly based on his own strange experiences. For example, Pauli was prohibited to enter the laboratory of his friend Otto Stern in Hamburg because Pauli’s mere presence was reported to reliably wreak havoc on lab equipment and apparatuses. Pauli corresponded extensively with Jung, and along with spontaneous and experimental poltergeist-style examples of the “Pauli effect” informed Jung’s concept of synchronicity. Pauli also corresponded with the Freiburg psychologist Hans Bender, who continued a psychodynamic-synchronistic approach to ‘occult’ phenomena and investigated the ‘Rosenheim case’, a violent poltergeist outbreak in a Bavarian law firm, which is often considered as one of the most thoroughly documented modern poltergeist cases (the term ‘poltergeist’ was soon dropped and replaced by ‘recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis’ or RSPK).

Interestingly, the OED (third edition, updated in September 2006) still relies on early modern theological notions by defining the poltergeist as “a ghost or other supernatural being supposedly responsible for physical disturbances such as making loud noises and throwing objects about”. This definition strikingly obscures the pluralism of empirical and conceptual approaches to the ‘poltergeist’ as a shorthand for a variety of questions regarding the human mind, its place in nature, and, not least, the power of belief and disbelief.

[This text is loosely based on my talk Exorcising the ghost from the machine. Affect, emotion, and the enlightened naturalisation of the ‘poltergeist’, 10 October 2012, at the Society for the Social History of Medicine Conference, Queen Mary University, London].

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© 2013 Andreas Sommer