The Poltergeist

Informative, deep and convincing, he looks at it from an objective point of view, has witnessed the phenomena himself so remains confident and unbashed by the skeptics. Fantastic

Over the years I have bought several copies of this book to give as gifts. My father was the decetive who investigated the "House of Flying Objects" in Seaford,NY.(Joe Tozzi)Before the days of internet it was pretty hard to track down these out of print books. I wrote to Dr. Roll several years ago after seeing him on unsolved mystries trying to aquire a copy. He wrote back and told me that that case was his first real intro to the papapsychology world.He didn't have an extra copy but photocopied the whole chapter for me. My dad never did know what to make of that case. He died last year leaving behind a trunk of magazine articles and books dealing with the house of flying objects. I have for years wondered what became of the Hermans, the family who lived this nightmare back in 1958.

"The Poltergeist" by William G. Roll, Ph.D., is a book that I think should certainly be ranked among the classics within the literature on parapsychology and psychical research, alongside books by other notable authors such as Drs. J. B. & Louisa Rhine, G. N. M. Tyrrell, and Frederic Myers, to name a few. It is both an academic book and a nonfiction book for the general public that takes an in-depth look at one of the most fascinating types of ostensible psychic phenomena that is still a focus of parapsychological research in the present time: the poltergeist. Following an introductory chapter that recounts the background leading up to the development of serious parapsychological research on the poltergeist and Dr. Roll's personal role in it, each chapter of the book gives a detailed and interesting account of several well-documented cases of reported poltergeist phenomena (including 2 chapters that summarize historical poltergeist cases and cases reported in Europe, respectively), 7 of which were personally investigated by Dr. Roll and other researchers in the field. Among them, the first case ever investigated by Dr. Roll (along with Dr. J. G. Pratt) involving a "house of flying objects" in Seaford, Long Island; a case in Indianapolis that seemingly involves a "biting" poltergeist, a case of strange lights and flashes in Clayton, North Carolina; and an attempted semi-controlled experiment during a poltergeist case occurring in a Miami souvenir warehouse, in which objects seem to mysteriously fly off shelves and sometimes break without any apparent force acting upon them. The last 4 chapters of the book attempt to weigh and interpret the evidence from each case in order to begin to develop a theory of the poltergeist. Based on the observation that the disturbances in each case seem to occur and center around a certain individual, Dr. Roll considers the possibility that the unusual events in each case are not due to "noisy spirits" (as the term "poltergeist" literally implies), but rather to notable instances of ostensible mind-matter interaction (called recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, or "mind over matter" on a frequent and large scale) that may originate from the mind of that central individual, called the "agent." Dr. Roll's theory is further supported by the observation that the agents in each of the cases are often experiencing repressed psychological tension or emotional problems in their lives, and that these anomalous displays of "mind over matter" may perhaps represent a kind of "body expression" of their distress. Once the agents receive counseling, the poltergeist occurrences often suddenly disappear along with their problems. This seems to provide an interesting hint at the psychological basis for these anomalous occurrences. Also presented in these chapters are Dr. Roll's classic "psi field" theory under which different forms of psychic phenomena may be understood, with some analogy to known physical forces, and a distincti

a fine read for a dark, dreary night with the wind howling through the rafters of your house in the isolated Maine woods.

This book magnified, to me, a already spectacular movie. I learned more about the characters, how they felt. What they learned. It was more interesting to follow the movie after reading this book.