By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor

In the summer of 1982, a five-year-old girl reached her hands up toward a glowing television screen filled with static, a ghostly hand emerged to meet hers, and she said "They're here" in a quiet singsong voice. American audiences decided they were afraid of television static, and they never quite recovered.

Poltergeist gave people a picture of what a haunting is supposed to look like. The distressed family in the ordinary suburban home. The team of researchers with equipment. The escalating phenomena. The medium brought in when science reaches its limits. The climactic confrontation with something that can ultimately be defeated. That picture has settled deeply into the expectations of people who contact investigators, and understanding it is part of doing this work honestly.

A Real Case Often Connected to the Film

The film is sometimes described as drawing from actual events documented in Seaford, New York, in 1958, at the home of James and Lucille Herrmann and their two children (Screen Rant, 2024). Whether the Herrmann case directly influenced the production is reported rather than confirmed in sources I have been able to examine, but the case itself is worth understanding because it represents the kind of documented poltergeist activity the film draws from culturally.

Beginning in early February and continuing through March 10th, the Herrmann family reported approximately seventy incidents of unexplained activity, a count recorded by investigators rather than independently verified: bottles popping their caps, objects moving, furniture displaced, a holy water bottle crossing a room in front of witnesses (Far Out Magazine, 2022). The story was publicized in Life Magazine and spread nationally.

The investigators who responded included Dr. J.B. Rhine from Duke University and his colleague William Roll, the same Rhine whose Zener card research I discussed in my earlier Ghostbusters entry in this series (Screen Rant, 2024). Rhine and Roll documented the case carefully. The activity ceased on March 10th without a fully satisfying resolution. Roll later suggested that while some phenomena might have involved pranks by the Herrmann's twelve-year-old son, other events remained unexplained to his satisfaction.

One Influential Hypothesis the Film Ignores

The popular understanding of a poltergeist, reinforced by the film, is that it is an external entity invading a location and targeting its occupants. One influential hypothesis within parapsychology proposes something considerably stranger.

William Roll and J. Gaither Pratt coined the term Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis, or RSPK, in 1958 to describe poltergeist activity from a different angle (Williams, 2019). Rather than attributing disturbances to an external spirit, the RSPK hypothesis proposes that the phenomena may originate from a living person in the household who unconsciously generates the activity during periods of significant psychological stress (ParaRational, 2026). In Roll's survey of 92 cases drawn from historical records where a likely agent was identified, 41 percent coincided with significant family problems or life changes, though this describes a correlation in selected cases rather than establishing causation (Williams, 2019).

I want to be precise about what RSPK is and is not. It is a hypothesis developed within parapsychological literature, not an established scientific conclusion. Although researchers have proposed psychological and neuropsychological explanations, the evidence has not established a mechanism by which unconscious distress could produce physical disturbances in the external environment. The hypothesis remains unproven, and psychological findings alone cannot demonstrate that psychokinesis has occurred (Williams, 2019).

What I find useful about it as an investigator is not that it proves anything but that it redirects attention productively. When I arrive at a location where a family reports poltergeist activity, one of my earliest questions is not what is in this house. It is who in this house is carrying something heavy. That question is a communication question and a welfare question, not a claim that emotional distress generates physical phenomena. It is simply a recognition that the people in the location matter as much as the location itself.

What the Film Got Surprisingly Right

The investigative team the Freelings bring in is more accurate than it usually gets credit for. Dr. Lesh and her colleagues arrive with recording equipment, document the activity systematically, and treat the family's experiences as real. They are not credulous believers who accept everything they see, and they are not cynical debunkers. They are investigators trying to understand something genuinely puzzling, and that posture is the right one.

The film also captures something true about how poltergeist activity typically presents before it escalates. The early phenomena in the Freeling home are strange but not threatening. Objects move playfully. The family is bewildered but not yet frightened. That early phase is consistent with what clients describe. The call to an investigator rarely comes on the first day. It comes after the experience has shifted in character, after something has felt personal rather than simply strange. The film understands that escalation curve, even if it dramatizes it far beyond what any real investigation encounters.

What the Film Got Wrong

The burial ground.

Late in the film, Steve Freeling confronts his boss and realizes that the development was built over a former cemetery, that only the headstones were moved while the bodies remained. The boss's defensive line is explicit: "It's not like it's an ancient tribal burial ground. It's just people."

The film itself makes the distinction. The cemetery is not identified as Native American. That is worth noting because the film is frequently misremembered on this point, and that misremembering exists within a broader cultural pattern in haunted house storytelling in which Indigenous burial sites are invoked as a reliable supernatural explanation. That pattern is one I have encountered in my work investigating properties near such sites, and it shapes client expectations in ways that require careful attention. The moral weight in the film is about a developer's greed and disrespect for the dead. The jump from that theme to a generalized supernatural danger associated specifically with Indigenous burial sites is something the broader culture has made, and it is worth naming clearly.

The escalation curve of the film is also several orders of magnitude beyond anything I have encountered in investigation. Furniture moving is documented in parapsychological literature. A dimensional portal in a child's bedroom closet is not. The film takes genuine phenomena and amplifies them dramatically, which creates a practical problem: clients arrive with expectations calibrated to Hollywood and feel confused or dismissed when actual investigation looks nothing like what they saw on screen.

What Happened in My Own Poltergeist Case

The first poltergeist case I ever investigated looked nothing like the movies, and I think it is worth linking to it here because it illustrates the gap between cinematic and actual investigation more clearly than anything I could describe in the abstract. [link to poltergeist blog]

What I can say from that case is that the resolution came not from confronting a spirit but from asking practical questions about the people and the location, installing motion cameras, running fishing line across a broken window, and following the evidence where it led. When the cameras showed what they showed, my concern shifted immediately from the paranormal question to a safety question, and I told my client plainly that someone had been entering her home and that she needed to contact the police. The case produced a clear answer. Whether that answer was accepted was not something I could control.

That is often how this work ends, not with a climax but with a conversation, and not always with the outcome you hoped for. Poltergeist was not designed to be a training manual. But it has functioned as one by default for many of the people who contact me, and understanding that is part of approaching this work with honesty and care.

Listen first. Investigate what remains.

References

Far Out Magazine. (2022, October 22). The eerie true story behind Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/terrifying-true-story-steven-spielberg-poltergeist/

ParaRational. (2026, March 1). RSPK: Recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis — the science behind poltergeists. https://www.pararational.com/encyclopedia/rspk-recurrent-spontaneous-psychokinesis/

Screen Rant. (2024, October 18). The horrifying true story that inspired Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist. https://screenrant.com/poltergeist-movie-true-story-inspirations-herrmann-house/

Williams, B. (2019). Psychological aspects of poltergeist cases. Psi Encyclopedia. https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/psychological-aspects-poltergeist-cases/