ABSTRACT
The most interesting phenomenon here is the ‘poltergeist’. The word is German and means ‘noisy ghost’. Such ghosts are typically active in a household setting; they may cause domestic objects such as bottles to move along a shelf, fall off it and break. Their activities are generally unseen, but sometimes a witness will see a bottle or an ornament in motion, or observe an item of cutlery being thrown. Such a thrown object may appear not to travel in the usual gravitational parabola, but to move in flight as if some force were being exerted on it during its travel. Interestingly, such a thrown object may sometimes hit a human being, but even if it seems to have been going fast, it seldom hurts the target or causes injury. As their name implies, poltergeists often make 106noises (I have discussed acoustic effect in Chapter 11). It is also often possible to ‘converse’ with a poltergeist, using a code based on ‘raps’. The human makes them by hitting something; the poltergeist somehow makes ‘raps’ in response. My musings about the deceitfulness of the unconscious mind seem reinforced by the sad fact that a poltergeist often lies.
