Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Harry Price was well known as a ghost hunter and psychic investigator before his first book on Borley Rectory appeared. Hall (1978) has shown that Price’s regard for the truth was as poor in the other paranormal occurrences that he reported as it was in the case of Borley Rectory.

If Borley Rectory is the most famous haunted house in England, the “Amityville Horror” house in Amityville, New York, is probably the most famous haunted house in the United States. This house has a much more gruesome history than the rectory. In late 1974 six members of the DeFeo family were shot to death by a seventh member of the family, twenty-three-year-old Ronald DeFeo. In 1975 the house was purchased by George and Kathy Lutz. Within hours of their moving in, they were witness to the most astonishing and horrible hauntings in the history of parapsychology, according to Jay Anson’s 1977 book The Amityville Horror . It was so bad that the Lutzes stayed in the house only twenty-eight days.

What happened while they were in the house? The incidents read like the script for a horror movie—one with lots of special effects. And the book did, in fact, spawn a series of dreadful, low-budget horror films and made-for-TV movies. Large statues moved about the house with no human assistance. Kathy Lutz levitated in her sleep. Green slime oozed from the walls. Mysterious voices were heard, sometimes saying, “Get out, get out.” A large door was ripped off its hinges. Hundreds of flies appeared seemingly from nowhere. In fact, the book was made into a movie in 1979.

It has since been revealed that the book was a hoax from start to finish, dreamed up by the Lutzes for the sole purpose of making money. In a long review, Morris (1977–78) pointed out numerous problems with the claims in the book even before it was known to be a hoax. Moran and Jordan (1978) investigated some of the incidents reported in the book and found that the events described never happened. For example, a Father Mancuse is said in the book to have attempted to rid the house of its ghosts by using holy water. He is said to have had a mysterious car accident very shortly thereafter, and to have had his hands break out in a terrible rash. His own living quarters began to reek so badly that he and other priests couldn’t stand to live there. This entire story was made up, as Moran and Jordan show. Not only did none of these dramatic incidents happen to Father Mancuse, he never even entered the Lutzes’ house. Other incidents reported in the book also turned out to be fictitious when subjected to Moran’s and Jordan’s investigation.

In the summer of 1979 lawyer William Weber, who defended murderer Ronald DeFeo, revealed the origin of the hoax. Weber had been planning to write a book about the case itself when the Lutzes contacted him regarding their experiences in the house. Thinking that these might make an interesting addition to his own book, Weber spoke with the Lutzes at length. In a United Press interview in July 1979 (see Frazier 1979–80) Weber said, “We created this horror story over many bottles of wine that George Lutz was drinking. We were really playing with each other. We were creating something the public would want to hear about.” When Weber mentioned that the murders took place about 3 A.M., Kathy Lutz said, “Well, that’s good. I can say I’m awakened by noises at that hour… and I could say I had dreams at that hour of the day about the DeFeo family.”

Owners of the house since the Lutzes moved out have not noted a single incident of anything out of the ordinary. Barbara Cromarty, who lived in the house after the Lutzes left, said, “We know everything was a hoax” (Frazier 1979–80, p. 3). The Cromartys, however, were troubled by another type of manifestation: the curious people and crackpots who came from miles around to gawk or to look for ghosts.

Like UFO reports, it is not possible to track down and conclusively explain the real cause of each and every ghost report. Joe Nickell has investigated numerous reports of ghosts, as well as other paranormal phenomena. In several books (Nickell 2001; Nickell and Fischer 1988, 1993; Baker and Nickell 1992) he has reported the results of those investigations. Nothing paranormal ever turns up. What Nickell does find are misperceptions, hoaxes, wishful thinking and the considerale power of suggestion at work. His report on his investigation of the haunting of the Mackenzie House in Toronto (Nickell and Fischer 1988) is a classic in which he tracked down the real cause of this famous haunting. The report reads much like a Sherlock Holmes story and is just as entertaining. I won’t spoil things by giving away the ending.

Closely related to classical hauntings is the poltergeist, German for “playful spirit.” The two are sometimes reported together, as was the case at Borley Rectory. Some of the goings on in the “Amityville Horror” house would have been classified as poltergeists, had they not been revealed as part of a hoax. The vast majority of the thousands of poltergeist reports that have accumulated over the years are of mild, even humorous, events such as objects moving about when no one is watching, breaking of crockery, spontaneous small fires, and showers of pebbles and small stones, the latter often being inflicted on some particular adult such as a priest. Poltergeists, when they occur alone, are almost invariably associated with adolescent children. This association has led some parapsychologists (i.e., Fodor 1964) to propose that the approach of puberty and attendant increase in sexual energy and feelings in adolescents causes a release of psychic energy that is responsible for the poltergeist activity. This association between adolescents and poltergeist activity causes the more skeptical to reflect on adolescents’ well-known love of pranks and practical jokes—particularly when played on adults. Those who believe poltergeists are a paranormal phenomenon will quickly point to many cases, mostly decades old, that “have never been explained.” This is quite true, but is merely another example of the “irreducible minumum” argument used by UFOlogists and other proponents of pseudoscience to shift the burden of proof to skeptics. And, as usual, poltergeist reports are based entirely on eyewitness testimony. The case for their reality as anything other than teenage pranks is exceedingly poor.

In March 1984 a poltergeist occurrence in Columbus, Ohio, received nationwide and even worldwide media attention. Typically, the coverage was totally uncritical. In New York City, for example, WCBS-TV used the phrase “Poltergeist for real!” as the teaser for the story on the evening news. At the center of the incident was, predictably, a fourteen-year-old girl named Tina Resch.

Shortly after Tina, an emotionally disturbed adoptee, saw the movie Poltergeist, objects began to fly about in the Resch household. This phenomenon quickly came to the attention of the Columbus Dispatch , which published several photos showing, allegedly, a telephone flying through the air under its own power while Tina looked on in horror. Parapsychologist William Roll of the Psychical Research Foundation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, stayed in the Resch house to investigate the case. He concluded that “when I felt I had Tina under close observation” she demonstrated “genuine recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis” (quoted in Randi 1984–85, p. 232). “Recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis,” or RSPK, is Roll’s term for the poltergeist phenomenon.

Randi, a well-known magician and fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, also came to Columbus with a team of scientists to investigate the case, but was denied entrance to the Resch house. Nonetheless, their investigation, reported in Randi (1984–85), revealed that Tina had faked the entire string of occurrences. Not only were the media easily duped by this fourteen-year-old girl, but also, in several cases, the media knew about the fraud but failed to report it.