Poltergeits???

Thank you all for your responses. This is very thought-provoking. I have a few questions. Among the more violent poltergeist activities that you have experienced or heard of from an immediate friend or acquaintance have you ever heard of someone actually being hit by a flying knife? Or struck and severely injured by a thrown heavy object?

In my experience and to my knowledge poltergeist activity is usually more along the lines of being a pest than being an actual threat. In the cases that there were genuine violence and danger I see this as a more demon type of haunting than a poltergeist type of activity. About the most violent thing that I have run across that was probably a poltergeist were a few smaller scratches and one lady that had one that pinched her inappropriately.

In my situation, the cause seems to be related to me rather than a specific place or thing. I guess that something could attach to a person as well as a place or thing though. One of the things that I found rather comforting is that my wife has seen this phenomenon where something just vanishes in a small area and there is no possible explanation of how it could have been moved from that area. She also has helped me look for something only to later have it pop back up in some obvious place that we know that we both had looked. I have debated whether these things are actually not there and then are returned or whether they were always there but for some reason, we are unable to see them.

So many questions, so many thoughts and possibilities. I think that those of us that like to seek answers are the fortunate ones. We are of a more inquisitive nature than many others. If nothing else I think that our curiosity makes our world a much more interesting place...
 
This may sound completely random, but following on the idea of the missing things I have posted about, one of the items missing has taken on a new angle. I had mentioned a pair of long black knit socks, which I wore to a funeral in Ohio last year. The hotel room where Jim and I stayed had some bad energy, and I had nightmares most of the night until I woke up and took measures, after which I was able to sleep. Now I am wondering if those socks are missing because of the energy that was in that room. I had two pairs, one of which I wore to the funeral, and another brand new pair still wrapped up. I am using the new ones now, to keep my legs warm when I sit at my computer. The others have completely vanished.

I tend to look for patterns and putting together all the parts of this one still mystifies me.
 
I’ve enjoyed reading all your thoughts on this. My feelings on this topic have changed over the years. I’m leaning toward the theory of “its just unknown”. Weather the cause is chaotic energy released from stressed individuals or from entities using that energy to effect the material world, I don’t know. It seems every event has different components. This is what keeps me looking for answers.
 
I’ve enjoyed reading all your thoughts on this. My feelings on this topic have changed over the years. I’m leaning toward the theory of “its just unknown”. Weather the cause is chaotic energy released from stressed individuals or from entities using that energy to effect the material world, I don’t know. It seems every event has different components. This is what keeps me looking for answers.
Me, too! I am always curious to learn more.
 
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I have been trying to understand a bit more about this. I was thinking of starting a new 'Nature of Poltergeists' thread, and then I found this one. I have been in touch with the Ghost Club as part of my trying to better understand the experience that my mother and father had many years ago and which I wrote about in a previous thread. What I have found out so far raises more questions than it answers. According to the reply I received from Ghost Club:
" About 75% of poltergeist cases seem person centred, usually on a person undergoing some degree of stress in their lives. The other 25% seem to be more place-centred, involving a set location and carrying on regardless of a change in occupiers. And some seem to be a mixture of both, and perhaps this was example."
This raises some questions. I know that there is no consensus on what a poltergeist actually is, but I wonder if anybody here can help with any ideas/opinions? If a poltergeist is, or seems to be person centred, would the phenomena happen wherever that person is? And if a poltergeist appears to be more place centred, is that likely to be the spirit of a deceased person? One thing I have found out about the place where we stayed is that there used to be a public house there and it burned down; some time in the 1870's there was quite a terrible fire there. I find it intriguing that whilst my mother and father experienced quite high levels of activity in this place, nobody else seems to have and nobody seems to know anything about the place being haunted. Which brings me to the question, can a spirit sit dormant, so to speak, until the right person comes along and stirs it up? There was a lot of tension in our family and I was quite a disturbed teenager, although I don't think I realised it at the time. My level of anxiety and paranoia was quite extreme. We certainly seemed to stir something up, but surely there needs to be something there to be activated in the first place?
 
Sorry I'm late in answering, but it's been quite a week.

To all of your questions, we have best guesses. Nobody really knows for sure. Poltergeist energy has been known to manifest even when the original "source", ie human agent, is not present. Energy is energy...it can hang out and suddenly manifest in a form. Some feel this is often like a Tulpa...an energy form that has intelligence and/or awareness. As to triggers, yes, it appears that some people can trigger the poltergeist energy to activate even after long periods of inactivity. This is also true when people do renovations on a home.

Much of what we know is based on experiences, history, myths, and past records of such activity. We have to make a lot of assumptions as there is no current way to test or measure these things....yet.
 
If anything there does not seem to be a "typical" poltergeist. By original German definition it means noisy ghost compared to 'normal' ghosts I presume which are not noisy.

Of the ones I have experienced they certainly seem sentient and of an active spirit, but strangely I have not 'seen' them as I do with other types of spirit. I don't know whether this is a lack of my ability or a lack of theirs to be seen. Closest I have come to being injured by one is my partner who was pushed on stairs- twice and had to hang on to the rail hard, and being electrocuted in the same building.

I did have a thought that if some people can cause PK phenomenon when alive when they get frustrated, can this ability also apply to spirits when they get frustrated? What happens to SLIders if they became active spirits?
 
It has taken me a while to post again, I do appreciate the feedback I have been given from my posts here. My way of coming to terms and trying to be as much at peace as I can be with past events is to try to make sense of them and to understand as much as I can. I realise that there are no definitive answers, and I guess that is what I was looking for initially.

Some of the literature seems to view spirits and poltergeists as two quite seperate phenomena and I was confused as to what it actually was that my parents experienced in our holiday apartment that I posted about in a previous thread. There does seem to be elements of both in what they described. Much of it seems like a ‘classic haunting’ with some elements of fairly mild (compared to what some people experience) poltergeist type activity. As we were on holiday and were only in this apartment for three weeks, there is no way of knowing whether the activity would have escalated further if we had stayed for longer. This definitely seemed like an active spirit and not just energy unknowingly produced by one of us. It was the definite sound of human footsteps my parents used to hear, although nothing was ever visibly there, and it felt like a human hand that stroked my mum's face. She was horrified and shot down under the bedclothes.

I haven't mentioned this before because I thought it might have a rational explanation. It was a very hot summer that we stayed in that apartment, but one night there was a storm. My father said that on the night of the storm he heard a huge crash that sounded like a full-size cooker or something like that being thrown out of an upstairs window; a really almighty crash. I haven't mentioned it before because as there was a storm that night, I thought it might have been thunder that he heard or perhaps something being blown down outside. But if it was poltergeist type activity that they were dealing with, it might be significant? In the space of a couple of weeks my father went from being one of the most sceptical people you could meet, to attributing everything that happened to poltergeist activity; even if some of those things might have another explanation.

I have gained some useful insights from reading various threads on this forum, especially that sometimes activity increases the more that we acknowledge it and that the energy generated by our fear and stress over the situation can also increase activity. I think that might be what happened in our case. My mother was the first to hear footsteps at night, and at first it was just footsteps. She was unnerved by it, and she did get up to investigate, but she would just go back to bed afterwards and didn't pay too much attention I don't think. When my father became aware of it, he was very scared. Apparently my mum would just be getting off to sleep at night and he used to wake her to ask her if she had heard anything yet. So there was that fear, that anticipation; and things did escalate.
 
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Weather is often associated with odd events. Perhaps the energy produced by them fuels the activity.