and explode, showering glass everywhere; fluorescent ceiling lights would go out, sometimes with a bang. (On one occasion, electricians found that the fluorescent tubes throughout the building had been twisted ninety degrees in their sockets. After replacing them all, there was another bang and the same distortions were found in the new tubes.) Fuses blew with monotonous regularity; sometimes cartridge fuses seemed to have been pulled out of their sockets.
Problems with the telephones were the most severe inconvenience for the lawyer’s business. Frequently, all four telephones would ring at once when no one was on the line. Calls were interrupted or cut off. Telephone bills rose astronomically and the office was charged for numerous calls that the staff denied making. Developing fluid from photocopying machines would spill while nobody was near the machine.
Because the disturbances appeared to be confined to electrical and telecommunications equipment, the lawyer called in the appropriate authorities. Experts from both the electricity supply company and the telephone company were able to install monitoring equipment which gives some factual non-human record of what went on. The local power station’s monitoring showed up large irregular surges in the power supply and these continued even after, bewildered, they installed a generator to guarantee a continuous regulated supply of electricity to the offices.
The telephone company’s findings were even more surprising. By recording every outward call, what time it was made and how long it lasted, they found that over a few weeks many calls were made to the speaking clock, often at the rate of six times in a minute, and at times when it is certain that nobody in the office could have been responsible. On one day, forty-six calls were made to the clock in a fifteen-minute period.
With so many staff and technicians in on what was happening, it is hardly surprising that news got out to the local press and, as a result, two television companies made short documentaries about the phenomena. The lawyer, at his wit’s end because his office was being destroyed daily, and business and staff morale were suffering, filed a formal charge with the police against the (unknown) mischief maker. He hoped that, if he were the victim of an elaborate practical joke, this would persuade whoever was doing it to stop. The local CID launched an investigation.
By this stage, Professor Hans Bender, Professor of Parapsychology at the University of Freiburg, Germany, had arrived on the scene with some colleagues, including two physicists who took over the investigation of the electricity supply and the telecommunications equipment. They recorded erratic power deflections and loud bangs, and eliminated causes such as static magnetic fields, variations in the electric current, ultrasonic effects (including vibrations) and, amongst other things, manual intervention or faking.
Bender and his team soon decided that Anne-Marie Schneider was the focus of the activity, which always occurred during office hours, and sometimes started the moment she crossed the threshold. His announcement that he believed they were dealing with a poltergeist precipitated a greater variety of phenomena: paintings began to swing and even turn over on their hooks; decorative plates fell off the walls; drawers opened and closed by themselves; a heavy filing cabinet moved about a foot away from the wall. A video film was made of one of the pictures rotating.
As the investigation progressed, Anne-Marie became more and more nervous and hysterical. Eventually, she was sent home on leave and, immediately, all the problems stopped. She found another job and, although a few disturbances happened at her new place of work, there was nothing so dramatic and eventually these died away. The lawyer’s office remained peaceful after she left. There were about forty witnesses who had observed the phenomena, including the technical experts, clients of the lawyer, journalists and scientists, as well as the staff at the office.
There are some marked similarities between this case and the occurrences in Miami during the same year. In both instances, the poltergeist activity occurred at the workplace of the agent. Personality-profile tests have shown that both agents have some characteristics, which might be important, in common. Both, for example, seemed to have felt some aggression towards those with whom they worked, but were able somehow to displace their aggression into poltergeist activity. (Both, incidentally, had forbearing and long-suffering employers. Other similar cases may be lost to research because employers would justifiably become fed up with such a catalogue of disturbance.)
In the case of the Miami poltergeist, the agent was a nineteen-year-old boy. Julio Vasquez, a Cuban refugee, was a clerk working in the warehouse of a wholesale company dealing in cheap souvenirs and novelty items. The warehouse contained tiers of shelves arranged in aisles and on the shelves were stacked and stored the goods to be supplied to retailers. Many of the items were breakable and many of them were broken, because Julio appeared to cause them to jump off the shelves and smash on the floor, even if he was at the other end of the warehouse.
The strange happenings at the warehouse came to the attention of a writer of popular books on parapsychology, Susy Smith. She was answering questions on a radio phone-in when a member of the warehouse staff called and told her, over the air, what was going on. Smith alerted two prominent American psychical researchers: W.G.Roll, Director of the Psychical Research Foundation in North Carolina, and Professor J.G. Pratt from the University of Virginia. Miss Smith and the two academics witnessed and recorded the astonishing effect Julio appeared to have on the goods on the shelves, detailing two hundred and twenty-four separate incidents in their reports. These were probably only the tip of the iceberg: the Julio effect had been felt for three or four weeks before they became involved and there were days when objects were falling from the shelves more or less non-stop.
The police had been called in more to pacify the other employees than because the owners of the warehouse held Julio to blame. The poltergeist was not shy: four police officers witnessed what was happening, as did several other independent witnesses apart from the staff and the parapsychologists. Among these witnesses was a professional magician, a friend of the owners, who had been unable to spot any possible fraud by Julio or anyone else.
Because the phenomena were fairly straightforward and confined to the area of the warehouse, it was relatively easy to arrange good scientific controls to monitor both Julio and his effect. From vantage points at opposite corners of the warehouse the two parapsychologists were able to make careful notes of who was where and when and Julio’s position relative to anything falling off the shelves. The sheer amount of detailed information they were able to supply, though in many ways tedious and repetitive compared to some of the more exciting poltergeist activities in other cases, makes this one of the strongest cases ever recorded.
On one occasion, the object that fell off the shelf travelled twenty-two feet before it hit the ground. In other instances, a souvenir would leapfrog items in front of it on the shelves and crash to the floor. Sometimes the broken items had been deliberately placed on the shelves by the investigators in positions which seemed to particularly attract the poltergeist activity. Concerted efforts were made to discover natural or fraudulent causes for the succession of breakages: shelves were shaken and prodded, dry ice was used to balance objects precariously on the edge of shelves (with the result that they fell when the ice melted), but the researchers were left with no explanation of how objects from the back of shelves fell. Despite the close scrutiny under which he was held, nobody found any evidence of Julio faking the disturbances. He was a rather mixed-up and unhappy young man, pining for his mother and grandmother who had been left behind in Cuba and facing the prospect of having to move out of his stepmother’s house. There was no doubt that he was under stress. After leaving his job at the warehouse, Julio served a short prison sentence for shoplifting and he was later shot while refusing to hand over the takings from the petrol station where he worked to two armed robbers. Since then, his life, according to Roll, has settled down and there have been no more paranormal phenomena.
One of England’s most famous – and most controversial – poltergeist cases is the Enfield case, investigated by two members of the Society for Psychical Research, Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair. The case lasted for eighteen months, starting in August 1977, and centred round one family: a divorced mother and her four children, thirteen-year-old Rose, eleven-year-old Janet, ten-year-old Pete and Jimmy, aged seven. It started with furniture moving about and rapping noises in the family’s Enfield council house and progressed through some of the most startling phenomena reported: there were levitations, fires, water appeared