My cousin, Rachel __, grew up in a house that was for a time believed by many to be the site of a poltergeist attack. I grew up in this house in my teens years when my parents (as some of you know) were proved unfit to raise me due to engaging in child abuse. My aunt is a Jehovah's Witness, and this how a Jewish kid got mixed up with the Witnesses for a few years until I was an adult and left on my own.
Now, before I arrived I remember hearing reports from my family on how poor Aunt Grace lived in that haunted house. I didn't know at the time, but apparently something in the house was determined by the Witnesses to be the object at the root of the "evil" in the home: a Ouija board my cousin Rachel had found in a storage shed behind the garage, left by the previous owners.
When I moved in all this had ended, or course. I would later learn that something almost like a ceremony or ritual occurred in which elders from the congregation along with each member of the family burned all the items in the shed, including the Ouija board, said prayers, and then used the newly-cleaned shed as storage for Watchtower publications which my aunt, a pioneer at the time, could use to store the various books, tracts, and magazines from the Society (and keep the demons at bay from ever returning since, according to her, they had the name "Jehovah" written in them which worked like a repellent--kinda like deet for mosquitoes).
It obviously "worked like a charm," to intentionally use the pun, because the demons never seemingly returned, although Rachel and Aunt Grace would tell me stories from "those days" on how all present witnessed that the Ouija board resisted burning, whereas all the other items from the shed quickly went up in flames. "Not until the last item from the shed burned and we said prayers, using the name of Jehovah very loudly and repeatedly, did the Ouija board finally give into the flames!" I was told. (Kinda brings chills down your back listening to the story, huh?)
Now I don't believe in demons or evil spirits. We don't have any of that or the Devil in Judaism. So I decided that it I ever got to talk to my Aunt and cousin again now that I'm out of the Watchtower, I would ask. They, or course, shunned me after I returned to Judaism, but that recently changed--briefly. Though still Witnesses, recently they had restored ties all of a sudden and actually reached out to me, inviting me to dinner one night "back home."
So I asked about the "poltergeist" as they call it, and they still firmly believe it was all real. It would cause hanging light fixtures to swing, open cabinet and closet doors, and toss selected items out of closets and cabinets like record albums and glasswear. It would often toss water out of the cat's drinking dish and even, reportedly, out of the toilets. Odd shapes would appear on the window blinds when closed for the night (so horrifying that they had to switch to curtains), but then the curtains would get torn down. Occasionally an odd, deep humming sound could be heard. They were many who witnessed the events, including non-JW family members of mine and folks from the congregation, including elders and one circuit overseer.
A month later after I had visited for dinner the events suddenly began again. Unable to find the cause, my Aunt Grace admitted to the elders that she and Rachel had let me in the house again instead of shunning me. Certainly I had cursed the home somehow by my returned presence, the elders concluded after being unable to locate anything on the premises that was likely demonized. Perhaps Jehovah had removed his protection from the house due to my aunt's failure to be loyal to the Organization. Aunt Grace left her home of 50 years and moved into an apartment community for retired people, sending me an email informing me of what my Jewish/apostate presence had caused her to suffer.
But my cousin Rachel was not so quick to agree with my aunt or the elders. Her son (a physics major in college--and never baptized as a JW) was there for the new "ghost attack" and noticed something in the events that reminded him of something he had once learned. And thus he set out to have things tested out.
There is a natural phenomenon known as "the hum" that can affect certain buildings. While the cause or origins of the hum can be different in each case, the effect is similar: a low frequency or infrasound hum that produces soundwaves that are more felt than heard (some people can hear it while others cannot). Sam (Rachel's son) did some checking, and sure enough there had been an earthquake hundreds of miles away that went unnoticed by the community at large. It was too far away to be felt, but some swimming pool owners in the area complained about water sloshing out suddenly or making odd waves for a minute or two.
Aunt Grace's house became the scene of a little science experiment by Sam and his friends as a result of this information. Employing speakers capable of generating frequencies as low as 16hz, Sam aimed bursts of this inaudible soundwave out into the neighborhood. A few dogs barked, but no one who lived on the street noticed...except for the college physics club inside Aunt Grace's now-on-the-market home.
In the home when the infrasound was sent out an audible rumble was actually heard, but when you stepped outside you could not hear a thing. Hanging light fixtures still in the house swung back and forth. Curtains left behind in one room fell. Window blinds in another room actually created odd wave patterns as a result whenever the infrasound was sent out. Closet and cabinet doors opened in a few rooms, and test items like glassware came tumbling out but items like towels and canned goods (too heavy to vibrate) did not.
Ta-da! There was finally an answer. The house was on a sturdy cinder block foundation. But this left a gap between the actual ground and the floor of the home (almost four feet), and the house though large, was itself was essentially a large wooden box. It acted as a perfect subwoofer amplifier for infrasound.
An earthquake zone hundreds of miles away appears to have been causing the hum phenomenon in the house which uniquely seemed designed (by accident) to amplify the infrasound of strong far away quakes. When these quakes occurred, the infrasound traveled, got amplified in the house and caused the "paranormal" activity. Sam was even able to get water to slosh around a bit in the toilets (though not come out as in some reports) in his testing, and admittedly it played out like something out of a horror movie even from the perspective of those conducting the tests who knew what was going on.
Sam also checked old news reports from years past, and sure enough there was a series of horrific earthquakes and aftershocks in that zone (far away in Mexico, to be exact) that timed perfectly with the series of "poltergeist" attacks my Aunt and Rachel had witnessed so long ago. What made the activity seem "demonic" was something Sam called "the Philip Experiment" effect.
While not fully conducted under today's fought science experiment standards, in 1972 two scientists and several academics set out to see if people could cause so-called "paranormal" activity, and in the ensuing panic actually "conjur" up a "ghost" out of the shared experience. Apparently yes, and the imagined "ghost" was named "Phillip" who eventually got blamed for all the phenomena witnessed in the experiment. The was never a real ghost conjured by these acadmics, but they demonstrated that one's beliefs can be projected on such events to make things seem "paranormal."
Apparently the infrasound hum caused a series of events in the home that mixed with JW belief and fear of demons to become the "Philip" or poltergeist demon my Aunt experienced. The story that the Ouija board would not burn was actually imagination at work. Rachel admits it was the last thing to be tossed into the fire and that for a simple board it took much longer to burn that expected. The reason? It was an antique, one of the first produced by Parker Brothers once they took over the trademark in 1966 and was far larger in size than you find today (about twice the size of today's Ouija boards to be exact) and composed of far more durable materials than the board games of the present.
Rachel and Aunt Grace still returned to the world of ignoring me, but Sam remains in contact.