An early engraved imagining of the Cideville poltergeist. Note the pets on the ceiling.
I promised to tell you what the poltergeist is in my new audiobook, The Priest, the Witch & the Poltergeist. Most historical poltergeists described in Rupert Mathews' book Poltergeists (thanks to Living Library) share a common and somewhat quotidian set of characteristics:
They begin with slight sounds, usually a scratching noise. (Excellent way for kitchen staff to explain the persistence of rodents).
Knocking on wood or glass (big rodents).
Moving objects (the poltergeist has been working out).
The appearance and disappearance of things (common with older spirits who have forgotten where they left their keys.)
Communication, often through knocking. (Most often met with reactions of Shut up! Shut up! Shut UUUUp! and lalalalala with fingers in the ears.)
Wet spots that smell like urine. (It is a scary situation.)
An actual photograph of Paris barricades made during the 1848 revolution (see Les Misérables for a more lyrical construction).
There is one intriguing and nonreligious hypothesis for why a poltergeist visits a household. Is someone living there older than 10 but under the age of 16? Psychologists and their antecedents, doctors of physick, proposed that the tremendous upheaval of hormones and sinew and blood that torments children at the inception of adolescence can manifest in a disturbance in the home. (Modern parallels include repeated slamming of the door to an upstairs bedroom and, paradoxically, days of silence at the dinner table.)
The real French poltergeist I described in The Priest, the Witch & the Poltergeist began in 1849 and continued into 1850. One witness at trial, the priest of a neighbouring village, testified: "I took every precaution in listening to [the sounds], even placing myself under the table to make sure that the children could do nothing, and yet I heard noises, which seemed to me, however, to come more especially from the wainscot. I said in connection with this that the noises seemed to me so extraordinary I would vouch for them with my blood."
I wondered what else was happening in Europe at mid-19th century. Revolutions in France, Germany, Austria and Italy, as well as dozens in smaller states. A time of upheaval. An explosion of inventions: revolvers, propellers, early lawn mowers, passenger railways, the telegraph, sewing machines. A time of upheaval, a time of growing noise. Cacophony.
That's when I decided. My poltergeist would make knocks like any decent Doppelganger, but with taps of Morse Code and the whirr of helicopter blades: an auditory Luddite raging against the machinery of its time up to the technology of the current day. In the audiobook The Priest, the Witch & the Poltergeist, there are over a dozen carefully crafted spooky sounds that have come to haunt us—or what is worse, that we have grown to think are normal. (Like a leaf-blower.) Get yourself the newly released audiobook, enjoy the story and see if you too can figure out what the poltergeist noises are.