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The first sign that something is wrong was the furniture began to rearrange itself in August 1992. Then there were the unpleasant smells and strange noises whose origins could not be traced. The Griggs family had only moved into the council house in Portsmouth, England, two months previously, and the were already beginning to regret their decision.

All signs pointed to a classic case of poltergeist disturbance. There was one room on the ground floor of the two-up, two-down building that seemed to be the focus of the activity, and the whole family was afraid to enter. In desperation, Mrs Griggs called in a priest and a psychic, and was terrified to hear that they believed the cause was her young daughter Jasmin, who was possessed by the spirit of a former tenant.

This theory was apparently borne out when Jasmin suddenly began speaking in strange accents and voices which sounded unnervingly adult. She would regularly answer her mother in a guttural Northern dialect.

Phantom Friend.

Two further mediums were called in, who identified the presence as a man called Percy, originally from the north of England. Jasmin and Percy had become firm friends, they said. Mrs Griggs presented these findings to the council and refused to pay rent until damages caused by the spirit to the family home were repaired. Council officials and paranormal researchers are still examining the authenticity of her claims.

Poltergeists are not a recent problem. There was a case in China around AD900 and an even earlier one documented in Roman Italy in AD530. The actual term is German and means ‘noisy spirit’, which is appropriate as the phenomenon often includes loud and strange noises.

The main difference between poltergeists and ghosts is that the phenomena are generally attached to a person rather than a place. Wherever the person - or ‘epicentre’ - goes, the poltergeist activity follows. Typically, though by no means exclusively, poltergeist phenomena are connected with a young person - often female - who is usually under a certain amount of stress.

Andrew Green, a renowned paranormal investigator, is aware of the connection between poltergeist activity and young females. But, having been involved in numerous investigations, Green believes that there is no general pattern. He is convinced that poltergeist activity is actually instances of psycho kinesis - the ability to move objects and create noises allegedly by thought alone. This, he argues, can be produced subconsciously by people of either sex from the age of 3 to their late 40's, usually as a result of mental trauma.

One case that Green investigated supported this theory. A four-year-old boy and begun to behave strangely, and his worried parents suspected the presence of a supernatural entity. The family heard crackling sounds around the house, noticed that objects seemed to be moving around of their own accord and that electrical items often stopped working. The activity always seemed to be concentrated around the child.

The Ghostly Monk.

The boy’s father, Tom Johnson, had recently been made redundant and his wife Julie had already commented on paranormal sightings, most noticeably a ‘ghostly monk, gliding down the stairs’. They were put in contact with Green in June 1983, by which time they were frantic with worry. As he set off for their home in Gravesend, Kent, Green looked over his notes of their experiences. He felt that the ‘ghostly monk’ was odd since there was no historical link between their home and a monastic community. It seemed likely that fear of the inexplicable activity had made the wife imagine the phantom.

All the evidence - the strange sounds, erratic functioning of electrical items, slight movement of small objects, a family under stress - led Green to believe that ghosts were not the problem. An alternative explanation was the phenomenon of recurrent spontaneous psycho kinesis (RSPK), usually associated with one disturbed person in a family. Once Green met with the Johnson's, he knew that the source of the trouble was not supernatural, but their young son.

Green believed that the poltergeist activity could have been triggered by the child feeling neglected and unloved, and the family agreed that life had been strained recently. On Green’s advice, the Johnsons made an effort to re-establish ‘normal’ family relationships. Shortly after, the poltergeist activity - and the monk - vanished.

Green believes that this case illustrated how the powers and problems of the mind can often be mistaken for supernatural activity. This has also been supported by the US parapsychologist William G. Roll, who found that in 92 cases of ‘person-centred poltergeists, four of the presumed epicentres were diagnosed epileptic’.

After studying Roll’s research, Green also accepted that some poltergeist cases may result fro temporal lobe epilepsy. In this condition, people suffer blackouts that can anything from a minute to half an hour. During these blackouts, some power of the mind may be released that creates RSPK. But, as Roll found, epilepsy was at the rot of only a small percentage of cases.

Mind Powers.

Green’s own research has found another possible link with schizophrenia. One of the first cases he investigated in 1956 involved a 15-year-old girl in Battersea, south London.

Shirley Hitching was able to manifest loud and vibrant raps whenever called upon. She assured Green and the two journalists who accompanied him that the sounds came from her ‘polty, Donald’.

‘I was quite surprised when, a few days after meeting with Shirley, I received a four page letter from her ‘polty’ and later a Christmas card,’ Green recalls. ‘I asked Shirley how it was possible for an invisible entity to write a letter, buy a stamp from a post office and slip the envelope into the letter box? She replied blankly, ‘I’ll have to ask Donald’, but their was no reply on this occasion. Three specialist psychologists later confirmed that the letter from Donald was in fact penned by a schizophrenic, or at least a victim of severe mental disorientation.

One of the most infamous poltergeist cases occurred in a council house in Enfield, reported by Guy Lyon Playfair in his book This House Is Haunted, which he researched with Maurice Grosse.

For 14 months from the end of August 1977, Mrs Peggy Hodgeson’s home was plagued with poltergeist activity that centred around her 11-year-old daughter, Janet. Severe damage was caused to household objects, and several items of furniture, including a sofa, were thrown around the house. Writing appeared on the walls, and water materialized out of nowhere.

Eyewitnesses.

These Enfield phenomena, which made newspaper headlines around the world, were witnessed by many people, including the police, scientists and several paranormal investigators.

After 14 months the Enfield disturbances ended as mysteriously as they began. Investigators still cannot decide whether the house was the scene of genuine poltergeist activity or RSPK, generated subconsciously by Janet Hodgeson at a difficult time in her life.

Playfair’s own theory on the source of poltergeist energy concerns the pineal gland. Located at the centre of the brain, the pineal gland is responsible for controlling the release of sexual hormones. Playfair’s theory states that during puberty this gland can secrete ‘hormones that generate creative energy. When a child suddenly acquires this new force... there is a need for an outlet. If this outlet is lacking, the energy will be available for marauding entities to steal and put to their own purposes.’ He compares this energy to a ‘psychic football’ - ‘Along come two or three spirits or elementals, and see the football lying around. And they do what any group of schoolboys would do - they go and kick it around, smashing windows and generally creating havoc.’

Displaced Spirits.

There are still many who continue to believe Playfair’s spiritual notion that poltergeist incidents are the result of activity from some intelligent entity or even a form of evil intent on destruction or, more sensationally, ‘possession’. But Andrew Green is of the belief that poltergeist incidents arise solely from an unconscious mind and that they reflect the creative and dramatizing powers people can call upon to handle repressed emotions and emotional conflicts.

A fascinating series of experiments carried out in Toronto, Canada, in 1972 attempted to prove the human origins of RSPK. Eight members of the Canadian Society for Psychical Research created, by mental energy, a totally fictional character from the 17^th century, whom they named Philip. After months of weekly séances, ‘Philip’ began to communicate through raps and movement of a table. At one point ‘he’ was even able to levitate a table for television cameras.

This was thought to be the first case of induced RSPK - a landmark in paranormal research - yet, ironically, the experiment could not be substantiated. The researchers could not conclusively prove that they had evoked RSPK - thereby disproving the theory of poltergeists as ‘marauding entities’ - or if they had, in fact, been duped by a poltergeist.

Inconclusive Tests.

Other scientific attempts to explain the cause of RSPK have also failed. Tests on Janet Hodgeson, the girls at the centre of the Enfield case, and Matthew Manning, the psychic celebrity from the early 70's who is now a renowned healer found that they possessed extraordinary powers of ESP and precognition, but failed to explain why this was so.

Even Uri Geller, who is willing to demonstrate his abilities under any conditions, leaves experts at a loss to explain what or where his powers come from. Yet while controversy rages between the mediums, sceptics, scientists and paranormal investigators, there are organisations that implicitly accept the reality of supernatural activity.

For researchers such as Andrew Green and Guy Playfair, the search for certainty is on-going

Sources: The X Factor