What is a Poltergeist?

The term poltergeist is made up of two old German words. Polter means "noisy" and the second half geist means, "ghost". Basically a poltergeist means a noisy ghost. Modern theories and studies today don't associate poltergeist activity with a ghost however. It is usually associated with a human agent who is under some type of extreme stress, or emotional turmoil. The agent is often unaware that they are actually causing the phenomenon to occur.

Poltergeist activity tends to occur around a single person called an agent or a focus (typically a prepubescent female). The hypothesis among parapsychologists that the "poltergeist effect" is a form of psychokinesis generated by a living human mind (that of the agent). The "poltergeist effect" is the outward manifestation of psychological trauma. Skeptics believe that the phenomena are hoaxes perpetrated by the agent. Indeed, many poltergeist agents have been caught by investigators in the act of throwing objects. A few of them later confessed to faking. The longevity and consistency between poltergeist stories has left the matter open for debate within the parapsychology community.

Another version of the poltergeist is the "wrath version." When a person dies in a powerful rage at the time of death, that person is believed by some to come back to fulfill that vengeance. In some cases, the vengeance is too strong to let go or forgive, and the metaphysical ghost becomes a poltergeist, in which the newly formed ghost can affect solid objects, and in some cases are deadly. According to yet another opinion,  (The visible disembodied soul of a dead person)  ghosts and poltergeists are "recordings." When there is a powerful emotion, sometimes at death and sometimes not, a recording is believed to be embedded into the fabric of time, and this recording will continue to play over and over again until the energy embedded disperses.