[Music] thinking aloud conversations on the Leading Edge of knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey mishlove hello and welcome I'm Jeffrey mishlove today we are going to explore the nature of poltergeist phenomena with me is Dr Steven Browdy who is the author of the limits of influence a book about psychokinesis and many other books including the gold leaf lady Immortal remains and crimes of Reason Dr Browdy is a past president of the Paras Psychological Association and past chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County welcome again St thank you Jeff good to be here let's begin by by defining the term Poltergeist probably the best way to do that well literally it means noisy Spirit or noisy ghost it's a German word yes um it's probably best to distinguish Poltergeist cases from Haunting cases okay now we're still going to use the term somewhat Loosely there are always borderline cases and that can't be helped but I think it's fair to generalize um haunting cases tend to be recurrent psychokinetic events that are related to a place they center around a place they're Place centered phenomena Poltergeist cases Center rather around a person a so-called Poltergeist agent one reason we know that is because in the clearest cases at any rate when the person changes location the phenomena follow mhm and the received view of what goes on in a poltergeist case is that the agent typically a teenager or an adolescent is someone who has some serious ious emotional difficulties no conventional or easy way to deal with those very powerful emotions and it's as if the agent can't get them out in any kind of constructive ordinary way and so the phenomena are like a kind of brute psychic flailing about it's as if the person has all these intense feelings and then just goes woof and then things happen objects fly around or they shatter or burst into flame it fall off shelves and so on and cases of this sort have been reported in uh various literatures for centuries at least as far back as the 16th century yesh and cases of hauntings have also go back a long time yes what's interesting about the Poltergeist literature is that even though it goes back so far um the cases bear remarkable similarities to one another and that's significant because the people who were reporting these unusual phenomena hundreds of years ago there was no common body of literature which they had access to there was no received view of pagge at that time uh in fact these were quite independent accounts of very similar phenomena often in different countries yes and the phenomena agree and this is what's most interesting in very very peculiar details so from these independent accounts we see reports of the reigning of stones inside a house uh even more strange ly the riging of excrement inside a house the slow and gentle trajectory of um floating objects um the fact that the objects that move from one location to another are very warm to the touch and sometimes too hot to handle of course once again in in any instance of macr psychokinesis uh Skeptics are inclined to insist that this must all be fraud or or careless observation yes they often suggest it has to be um motivated misperception or uh that people are seeing what they want to see or that they have a bias in favor of the miraculous or a bias in favor of these particular kinds of phenomena I think it's a very lame argument it's hard to imagine what sort of uh bias people could have antecedently for riging of stones or excrement inside a house and also uh these are people who typically had no prior interest in the Paranormal and it's not clear why they would want these phenomena to be happening to them anyway because at least these days when someone claims to be the victim of a poltergeist attack uh they're usually subject to lots of media attention uh gawkers uh intense criticism and so on and it's a kind of attention that very few people actually I think want yeah accusations of fraud right um now we have to say that there have been some fraudulent cases sometimes even in the best cases there have been times when the Poltergeist agents have helped the phenomena along but what makes the best cases the best cases is that the strongest and most interesting phenomena can't be explained in that way well the very term Poltergeist suggests uh noisy ghost suggests that the agent of the phenomenon Is Not a Human Being but some sort of a discarnate being that's what many people thought initially before the connection between what was going on inside the agent um was was recognized let me give you an example this is a great case from the 1920s and it's also a case of a malevolent Poltergeist it's the case of Elanor zukun a Romanian peasant girl who one day was walking to her grandmother's house and she found some money on the side of the road and when she arrived at her destination she bought some sweets with the money and consumed all all the sweets and when her 105-year-old grandmother reputed to be a witch found out about this she told Elanor that uh the money was the devil's money and since she had eaten sweets purchased with the devil's money the devil was now inside her and would never leave her and the next day phenomena began objects were flinging themselves against the house um sometimes at elanora and then soon thereafter elanora started to break out and bite and scratch marks all over her hands and arms and face and what made it even more peculiar and some of this was watched very close at hand so they could see that Elanor wasn't doing this to herself the bite marks sometimes even had um spittle accompanying it and bacterial bacteriological analysis was done of it and it was found that the bacteriological content was different from that of Eleanor's own saliva okay well that would suggest there might well have been some sort of an external entity well that's certainly how Elanor thought about it she thought drau the devil was inside her and what's interesting is that once she started to get her period the phenomena disappeared and then Elanor just settled down to the peaceful life of a hairdresser in Bucharest well typically uh Poltergeist cases are of limited duration yes uh some have gone on for uh quite a while um there's an really good Australian case the mayano case I'm not sure I'm pron anouncing that correctly that began in the 1950s but went on for several decades thereafter several decades uhhuh and once again centered on a particular person yeah it's not always easy in these the two best Australian cases to know um whether there's just one agent or a collection of Agents they're very interesting dynamically MH but what you're suggesting from your studies of the Poltergeist and I know you have a big interest in the survival literature as well is that one need not conclude that Poltergeist phenomenon are produced by a discarnate entity no there's really no evidence of that the evidence more strongly at least to me suggests that the living are responsible for the phenomena because typically when the agent's emotional problems are resolved as in the case of Elanor apparently uh the phenomena go away so it makes more sense psychodynamically than uh a survivalist conjecture in that case and there's no real evidence from the Poltergeist cases that somebody has survived bodily death and dissolution mhm so as survival cases are extremely weak as cases of macro PK among the living they're very strong okay well one of the cases uh that has been in the media a lot uh in the last uh decades is is the Enfield Poltergeist in England it went on for several years and uh was studied by colleagues of of ours from the society for psychical research in London where um uh they uh at at the end of their analysis were still I I would say mystified as to whether the phenomenon were produced by two young uh teenage girls who who lived in the house where most of the phenomenon occurred or not because many phenomenon uh occurred when those two girls weren't around at all right that case is actually a difficult one to figure out because there were voices that were manifesting as well it's not just objects flying around or in one of the cases one of the girls flying around apparently um so in that sense the Enfield case is a little bit different from some of the more classic ptic ice cases in the other cases what distinguishes them is the peculiar movement of objects for example so in many cases um the quantity of stones or rocks raining inside a house is much more than any one person could have surreptitiously uh thrown or managed to and when you say raining inside of like a hail storm it's as if they have to materialize under the ceiling or something sometimes they're observed materializing under the ceiling and other objects are observe materializing under the ceiling um what's interesting about some other cases is that um large objects the size of pumpkins have been thrown and it's clear that no if it's a large rock that no one person could have just lifted that rock without being observed doing so MH it would require a catapult or something like that so Paras cycologist have endeavored to study these cases both in terms of the physics involved the the energy required to move these objects around as well as the psychodynamics it's a very tempting uh strategy to pursue I not equipped to say how successful it has been or will be yeah well I guess it's fair to say say that even after centuries of observations and I under the impression there may well be over a thousand cases that uh researchers uh have described in in the literature uh at this point we still have very limited understanding yes um one reason is we can't predict when they're going to occur um if poist agents are really producing this themselves um we can't conclude that every teenager adolescent or even a married person in a very difficult marriage is going to produce these kinds of phenomena it may just be one way of expressing emotional or psychological distress available to those people who are more psycho kinetically endowed or inclin uh one of the most interesting cases that comes out of England is the case of Matthew Manning who was a a a teenager at the time and he was the center of poltergeist activity but eventually he seemed to develop the ability to control his uh psychokinesis and seemed to develop other sorts of psychic abilities and ended up uh having quite I think a successful career as a psychic after that uh yes and in that respect the Matthew Manning case is again different from the norm or the average so if these were in fact his abilities as the case seems to suggest uh he would was able to find a way to channel them more productively yeah it doesn't always work out that way I think it almost never works out that way I uh know of another case uh popular case in the United States where the uh focal point of the Poltergeist activity had a bad life ended up I think being uh jailed and accused of murder and uh I think it's controversial case um I don't know that one Tina R oh Tina r yes yes yes yes uh that's a complicated case as well yeah but the point being that these poor people who have Stones flying about and and as you say excrement sometimes flying around they it's like they're being persecuted by some invisible force sometimes the phenomena just seem to be mischievous and annoying but in any case it certainly is annoying um again the two best Australian cases fall somewhere in between uh one is called Humpty Doo and the other as I mentioned is called mayup um in the Humpty Doo case um objects would I think it was in the Humpty do case objects would change trajectories sometimes in mid-flight it would go this way and then suddenly make a curve yeah um objects would um hit the ground at a great speed but um make a sound as if o only a soft object had been hitting the ground even though the object was anything but soft or some sometimes times um objects would hit the ground very slowly but make a very loud noise M contrary to what you'd expect or sometimes objects would hit the ground with great force but not go anywhere as if they had no momentum they just stop dead in their tracks well you mentioned the voices in the Enfield Poltergeist case and uh there were also wrapping sounds in other words attempts in different ways to communicate with the supposed entities and and one of the Intriguing features is that these sounds and voices were recorded and the uh audio signals produced uh didn't resemble uh those that would have been produced by a normal human vocal cords my impression was that they resembled a former resident of the house well that no I I I don't know about that but well I could be having a senior moment my my recol ction is that they were nonhuman entirely non-human and the same thing is true with with you know when you rap on on wood for example like I've just done it creates a very recognizable audio yes signal uh and rappings that have been produced by uh spirits and poltergeists and and in the Enfield case uh produce a different acoustical signal yes Barry covin did a very interesting study of wraps produced Paran apparently paranormally and found they do have a different acoustical uh signature than uh normally produced WS so uh we have some evidence that something um different than normal human activity is going on um certainly different than normal human activity but it may still be human activity right in other words human psychic activity I guess the point is that it wouldn't be fraudulent if if a normal wrap uh is produces a different kind of no not at all acoustic signal and it reinforces the point I made earlier that there are lots of borderline cases so um it's not just that there's there are sometimes fuzzy boundaries between Poltergeist and haunting cases um but the Enfield in some ways has uh similarities with with bothh I know when I did this study with Ted Owens the PK man who consciously produced a wide variety of macro PK phenomenon he also complained that uh he was being hounded by various forms of poltergeist activity um I've heard that before in other cases as well for example the uh Gold Leaf lady case which I studied that began as a poltergeist case before the woman Katie started to break out in this golden colored foil she was experiencing uh very classic poist phenomena objects appearing and disappearing Furniture rearranging itself um so and in fact a subject I've been studying in Argentina who appears to be able to make tables Rise by touching them very lightly um he's been a poltergeist agent for for many many years and even today when he gets agitated things fly off shelves well it may well be far more common than we appreciate the occasional episode well the reason it may be more common we we may not recognize it when it happens because what we're going to recognize are only the most histrionic or unusual events and persistent persistent yes so by the time uh researchers get there there's already quite a history and then that needs to persist in order for researchers to have anything at all to describe right and here I'm being only partially frivolous but if it if these phenomena can happen in uh more serup I icious ways then we might wonder why our socks are disappearing mhm well in in fact uh many people experience you know objects mysteriously disappearing and and reappearing which uh is uh characteristic of poltergeist cases it is characteristic and if people wonder whether they're dealing with paranormal apports or just human forgetfulness check and see if the objects are too warm to touch or at least unusually warm that would be a sign one thing that does emerge from these cases is that the larger the objects orted are the more hot they seem to get so there seems to be some correlation between the size of the orted objects and the degree of heat uh they give off well it strikes me that um just as Freud wrote this fascinating book The Psychopathology of everyday life that um somebody at some point well few people probably have written about the Paras pychology of everyday life and uh Poltergeist activity would fit right into that kind of a scenario absolutely so it's a fertile ground of research for those who are interested also in depth psychology so ideally you'd want one or at least a team of investigators who are good at uh uh setting up conditions of observation and also good at probing the inner lives of the people involved in the phenomena I know that uh our deceased colleague Dr Robert Morris did a study many years ago sort of related about people who they get near a computer and the computer stops working yes that could easily be uh a manifestation of unconscious uh uh PK I know from my studies of multiple personality that um when clinicians have been dealing with subjects who see seem to have some psychic abilities or when they're in therapy sessions with them often their recording apparatus will fail to work mhm now typically people who are experiencing Poltergeist phenomenon want somebody to uh come in and make it stop if only it were that easy yeah um sure they want it to stop I mean unless they're publicity hounds which is almost never the case the phenomena can be destructive they could be losing a lot of dishes and uh um objects in the house if CD players are flinging themselves around and so on and um I gather uh sometimes bringing in psychics and mediums uh can help uh mitigate the phenomenon well sometimes if you want to make phenomena go away just bring in a parapsychologist yeah the phenomenon can be shy yes and if there are a lot of observers it it it might just stop well I know when the Enfield Poltergeist case that went on for a couple of years in England and our friend guy lion Playfair was one of the researchers there the the family was frightened and and he didn't know what to do uh it kept persisting he thought it would go away in a few months because he wrote the average case lasts about two months right but this case went on for years and he said he made a point of telling the family that don't worry it's troublesome it's a nuisance but no real harm ever comes out of these cases and he writes in his book that he knew he lied to them that at least on rare occasions this phenomenon can be harmful well the Elanor zun case shows that among others there have been other cases where objects have been flinging themselves perilously at um the people who've been investigating or the agents themselves I know there's a case uh in Brazil where some young woman uh had had been punctured penetrated by needles her body was full of needles and they showed up on x-rays wow yeah yeah it was very frightening and and in in that context it's easy for to understand how people would assume this is something diabolic or that the person's filled with self-hatred so I mean let's not forget the uh depth psychological approach to these things you have to ask yourself you know what's really going on in the mental life of these people well um your former friend and colleague Dr jul eisenbud wrote about that extensively and yes he didn't deal so much with um pter cases but he certainly dealt with other respects in which the manifestation of uh the phenomena reflected the underlying psychodynamics of uh say a marital situation or a living situation of some other sort he felt that if a person had a self-destructive impulse and also had psychic gifts that those gifts might come into the service of that self-destructive impulse well there's no doubt that we use our ordinary gifts for self-destructive purposes um or we do things to ourselves despite knowledge that we shouldn't do those things yeah so if it can happen in ordinary ways why can't it also happen in paranormal way well it's it's one of the reasons that I myself am very hesitant to encourage anybody to try to develop cultivate psychokinetic abilities um yes it's hard to know what to make of that because that mean that we're just suppressing the um learning of overt manifestations of PK abilities or is this something that we're perhaps doing uh under the surface all the time again the only events that we're going to know about are those that attract our attention you know we could be causing car crashes or heart attacks and it would be very difficult if not impossible to distinguish them from the same events caused normally well in indeed and that that raises a spectre that these things are going on all the time and uh and indeed they may be that's why I've often suggested that a fertile ground of research for parapsychologist would be to study people who are uncommonly lucky or unlucky because I think that's one way in which um our own psychic resources might be marshal to uh affect our lives in some consistent ways mhm based on the psychodynamics of the individual yes I'm particularly interested in the cases of people who are remarkably unlucky um there's an old Yiddish distinction between a schlam and a schlamazel a schlam is someone who spills soup on himself and a schlamazel has it spilled on him yeah so the idea is that a schlamazel is a victim of impersonal forces or the Universe At Large someone the universe is just crapping on in one way or another and schlamazel really exist I may have even mentioned it in one of our previous interviews but um it's worth mentioning again it's it's a lovely story yeah I've I lived next door to a pair of schlamazel once and it seems as as if almost everything they bought was defective their cars were always in the shop even though uh they had Brands noted for their reliability electronic equipment would fail to work right out of the box uh their infant son was placed on a brand new rocking chair they got and within two days that chair had broken with the infant son on it and my favorite example of their schlamazel was when uh the wife bought a poster siiz photograph of what she thought was the Golden Gate Bridge had it framed and put on her wall and I had to tell her that what she had actually framed was the Brooklyn Bridge so here's a woman who both literally and figuratively bought the Brooklyn Bridge which at least your older viewers will know is a a traditional image of the sucker or the loser and doesn't look anything like the golden no so I mean I think a really sensitive examination of people who seem to be unusually lucky or unlucky would might would possibly give us some idea about the natural history of PK or psychic functioning well I and I hope that happens based on past history it's likely to be a very slow process I'm not holding my breath yeah step Browdy thank you so much for sharing this half hour with me than thank you Jeff and thank you for being with [Music] [Music] us