Is a Poltergeist a Ghostly Interference or a Manifestation of a Suppressed Female Psyche?

Many people are familiar with the word poltergeist due to the scary 80s movie of the same name. Due to that movie's creepy content, you may also know that poltergeists seem to be linked to haunting by otherworldly forces and that some individuals (like the movie's main character, Carol Anne) seem to be more susceptible to such forces than others. In addition to information derived from exposure to scary movies, TV shows, books, and other mediums that may be more or less fictionalized, you might have also heard some firsthand or secondhand accounts from relatives, friends, or casual acquaintances about their own unsettling experiences with the supposed supernatural or at least the unexplained. Are such unexpected encounters truly otherworldly or strange flukes or something else? Do poltergeists really exist? If so, where do they come from and what are they? If you're curious about the answers to these questions, read on for some intriguing perspectives on poltergeists and then decide for yourself what you choose to believe.

The word poltergeist comes from the German words 'poltern' meaning knock and 'geist' meaning spirit, so it basically translates to noisy spirit. Indeed, a recurring motif that often accompanies the presence of a supposed poltergeist is knocking, rapping, and other noisiness, as well as other kinds of disruptions-and a poltergeist is commonly defined as a kind of ghost that announces its presence with the creation of disorder. Poltergeist activity usually occurs at night.

Sometimes poltergeists are considered to be merely mischievous; other times, they are perceived as malevolent and a strong sense of fear is associated with their manifestation. In addition to unexplained noises, poltergeist activity may also announce its presence with the raining down, throwing, or moving of objects, sometimes including large objects such as furniture. More extreme cases of poltergeist activity may include levitation of objects, electrical interference, unexplained shrieks, vile smells, and/or the appearance of blood in inexplicable places. There are also accounts of poltergeists physically or sexually assaulting people.

Although there is much anecdotal evidence surrounding alleged poltergeist activity, such evidence is not usually viewed as scientifically credible and the investigation of poltergeist activity is generally considered to be a pseudoscience. The anecdotal evidence has been available for many years, though. Before the 19^th century, poltergeist activity was often blamed on the Devil, demons, witches, or ghosts of the dead. In the present day, poltergeist activity is still sometimes attributed to ghosts or other otherworldly or paranormal forces, but another interesting theory has also become more prevalent.

Oftentimes in cases of poltergeist activity, one individual person seems to serve as a focus for the activity, almost as if they are a magnet for the activity. Perhaps this could be a matter of some individuals just being more susceptible or vulnerable to paranormal forces than other individuals, or perhaps this could be indicative of something more. This leads me to the alternate theory about what causes poltergeists. In this alternate theory, the poltergeist activity is not being caused by ghostly forces at all; rather, it is being caused by the subconscious mind of one of these susceptible individuals herself.

This may sound difficult to believe (but then again, the existence of ghosts is also difficult for some to believe), but it is certainly an interesting theory, deserving of closer scrutiny, especially for those who are interested in human psychology and the power of the human brain. It is not unlikely that people's subconscious minds may be able to access powers that they are not even consciously aware of. Thus, in this alternate theory about poltergeist activity, it is posited that the aforementioned disturbances (unexplained noises, movement of objects, etc...) are physical or psychic manifestations that are being created not by outside forces, but by the minds of human agents. In this theory, the poltergeist activity might be more accurately described as psychokinetic activity-or then again, maybe not. You see, the word psychokinetic typically implies an ability to harness and control one's own psychic powers in order to move or deform inanimate objects. The ability to bend spoons with one's mind would be an example of exercising psychokinetic power--and while being able to bend spoons with one's mind is certainly a highly unusual ability, it is presumed to be an ability that the spoon bender has control over. However, in some of the theories about poltergeist activity that is being caused by the mind of a human agent, it is suggested that this person may be unknowingly controlling energy. How could this be?

My research yielded several possibilities for this strange phenomenon, most of these ideas related to intense repressed emotions or unresolved emotional conflict being suffered by the human agent and perhaps further exacerbated or catalyzed by a vulnerability brought on by poor physical or mental health (and interestingly enough, there have allegedly been cases in which psychological therapy eliminated the poltergeist activity). What makes such theories all the more intriguing to me is that the in the majority of cases in which poltergeist activity is associated with an individual human agent, that human agent is a female under twenty years old-and furthermore, the poltergeist activity often coincides with some sort of troubled adolescence and/or the onset of puberty.

We all know that movies offer fictionalized accounts, but at this point I can't help but to think again of the movie Poltergeist, with its troubled preadolescent protagonist, Carol Anne, who was definitely the magnet for her family's poltergeist invasion. Then I think of the movie Carrie (adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name), which features some very interesting variations on some of the ideas mentioned above. For those who may not be familiar with Carrie or might not recall the details, the title character is a teenage girl who lives with her disturbed and abusive mother. This mother has a tenuous grip on reality and a warped perspective on right and wrong, filtered through an askew lens of religious zealotry. She forcefully imposes this warped perspective upon her daughter and attempts to shield her daughter from the sinful and unclean nature of reality, going so far as to hide certain seemingly unclean details of human nature. Thus, when Carrie begins menstruating, having never heard anything about this natural reality before, she does not know what is happening to her and thinks that it is something unnatural and that she might be dying.

To make matters worse, Carrie's first period happens at school, in the girl's locker room, where her lack of personal awareness combined with the cruel insensitivity of the other high school girls makes for a very unpleasant and traumatic experience. Carrie had always been regarded as a misfit, but now she was being treated as a freak-and she received no sympathy at home from her unstable mother, who essentially punished her daughter for showing signs of impending womanhood.

In the midst of puberty, this traumatic incident, and an escalation of physical and mental abuse, something was triggered and inanimate objects began to move in the presence of Carrie, often with deadly results. These violent episodes of psychokinetic activity (also called telekinesis) occurred when Carrie felt trapped in a traumatic situation that was seemingly beyond her control or outside of her normal ability to escape. These episodes of psychokinetic activity share certain similarities with what is sometimes labeled as poltergeist activity. They also share certain similarities with defense mechanisms extreme enough to be classified as mental illness, such as Dissociative Identity Disorder (which used to be known as Multiple Personality Disorder), which is also linked to intense repressed emotion. The most well-known case of Dissociative Identity/Multiple Personality Disorder is Sybil (another movie, based on another book that was supposedly a real life account) who had suffered such traumatic abuse as a girl (also by the hands of her own mother) that her young mind developed the defense mechanism of dissociating from itself (or taking on the identity of alternate personalities) in order to cope with this trauma. A deeper exploration of such mental disorders may be a topic for a different article, but for the purposes of this article, I will pose a few interesting questions. Is it possible that psychokinetic powers are a different manifestation of a similar defense mechanism as that which causes Dissociative Identity Disorder? Is it possible that individuals who have developed this defense mechanism are unaware of it and/or unable to control their own powers, at least at first? Is it possible that this lack of awareness and lack of control over seemingly bizarre phenomenon that are revolving around them plays a large role in the strong sense of fear that often surrounds the victims of so-called poltergeist activity? After all, even if someone's own mind is somehow serving as the magnet or catalyzing force behind such strange activity, if this is happening on a subconscious level that she is not fully cognizant of or in control of, that would surely be a cause for unease and maybe even an unnaturally powerful-feeling fear.

In Carrie's case, it seems there was a certain ambiguity as to whether or not she had control over her own telekinetic powers. My impression was that when her powers first manifested, she had no idea what was going on and was just as terrified by the seeming chaos surrounding her as anyone else. As these violent incidents continued to occur around her, she must have developed some semblance of awareness that this strange power was indeed associated with her in some way, but how does one chart the cryptic terrain in between such an unsettling realization and the ability to exercise some control over one's peculiar powers?

I am not an expert on poltergeist activity, but it is undeniably interesting to me that such activity is often associated with young females on the brink of developing into women. On a related note, is such poltergeist activity really malevolent or is it just perceived as such because it is out of place? Yes, in the case of Carrie (and other fictive accounts), the episodes of telekinesis were terribly violent, but Carrie was a movie in which a certain kind of satisfying resolution was achieved due to her acting out against the norms. What happens when a woman acts out against the norms in real life? What happens when she crosses the boundaries of female propriety? When does personal expression cross the line into transgression? Are we as a society so uncomfortable with certain manifestations of female power that we might tend to label them as paranormal before we would seek to acknowledge and explore such manifestations?

I think that our subconscious minds hold much unharnessed power, which may also have something to do with certain unexplained phenomena. I think that we are too quick to write off the unexplained as being attributable to mysterious otherworldly forces because that kind of quick attribution is easier than attempting to explore what challenges our comfort levels. I very much appreciate this quote from an article I read some years back that explored portrayals of females (especially adolescent females on the cusp of adulthood or maybe I should say menstruation or maybe I should say female bleeding) in horror films: "The link between femininity and the harboring of otherworldly power signals a cultural anxiety about the very nature of being female and gestures towards a historical view of women as being both cursed and unclean." Might such anxiety have something to do with a cultural tendency to dismiss inexplicable female displays of power in real life as supernatural or sinister or evil? Think back if you will to the witch trials (among other trials). Hasn't our society always had a tendency to demonize the uncomfortable and unexplained?

Now think again about mainstream horror movies. Yes, they're just movies, fictions, entertainments, but why do you suppose there is such a widespread tendency to kill off teenage and young adult females in such films? Why does young female victimization seemingly appeal to the mainstream movie-going audience's sensibilities to such an extent? Is it because young females on the cusp of womanhood make us uncomfortable and so we want to symbolically eliminate this threat to our comfort levels? Is it because female (menstrual) blood and the inherent power it represents (the potential to use their bodies to birth new life, as well as the prerogative to not make use of that power) makes us uneasy? Do we want to take that power away from them? Do we want to repeatedly cast female blood in a different context-a sacrificial context, a victimized context, a crime scene context?

Seriously, how would you explain the proliferation of female horror movie victims, whose victimization often takes place in the context of females trying to assert some sort of sexual agency or sense of independence? I mean how many times in mainstream horror films have we seen scenes that involved an enthusiastic sexually active female getting killed, almost as if she was being punished for having sex appeal or a sex drive that wasn't entirely submissive-or a woman at home alone getting methodically stalked and slain, almost as if she was being punished for trying to exist independently?

What is the message behind these recurrent motifs of young female victimization? Formulaic entertainment value aside, there's some part of me that thinks this is some kind of lashing out (whether conscious or subconscious) related to a cultural discomfort with female blood and its easy association with both life and death, but why do we keep wanting to recast it in the context of death, death, death? What do you think?

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http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/p/poltergeist.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poltergeist

http://ezinearticles.com/?What-Exactly-is-a-Poltergeist-Anyway?&id=814786