Poltergeist

From the German *poltern*, to make noise, and *Geist*, spirit. The literal translation is the noisy ghost. The category names a particular kind of household disturbance: knocks, thrown objects, doors that open and close without a hand, furniture that has moved between dawn and waking. The figure is rarely seen. The figure is heard, and the room is rearranged, and the inhabitant is left to reconstruct the night. Modern parapsychological literature, beginning with William Roll in the nineteen-seventies, associated the disturbances less with returning spirits than with the unwitting projection of a single living person, often an adolescent, in the household.

The earliest poltergeist accounts in the European record are German and appear in monastic chronicles of the late mediaeval period. The disturbances are domestic, repetitive, and bounded to a single dwelling. They begin without warning and, in most accounts, end without explanation. The archive holds no position on the projection theory.