Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On: Poltergeists, Geophys' and Expectancy

“I have yet to find a violent poltergeist case where subterranean conditions make the geophysical theory manifestly inapplicable.” – G.W. Lambert

The thing I enjoy most about skepticism, and something I absolutely detested in my misspent conspiratorial youth, is that curious frisson which accompanies the realisation that you’ve been wrong about something; As it does, after all, suggest that you are now right. My most recent such frisson is one I owe to my favourite Cantabrigian parapsychologist Anthony D. Cornell and his 16' steel vibrator. As discussed in my previous articles on inattention blindness and top-down processing, Tony was seemingly wrong about a whole lot of things; in this case, however, his error had so much frisson that it literally brought the house down.

Between June and August 1961, Tony, with the assistance of fellow parapsychologist Alan Gauld, as well as special access obtained through his position as a Cambridge councillor chairing many a planning committee, cemented a 16’ steel ‘vibrator’ (his words, not mine) into the base of a condemned end terrace, strapped a massive weight to its chimney breast, and proceeded to shake the building it to its very foundations. The experimenters concluded the level of vibration necessary to disturb the thirteen test objects placed strategically around the house would be detected by occupants and cause severe structural damage long before any violent so-called poltergeist activity would be suspected.

This extraordinary experiment was a practical follow up to an article Tony and Alan penned in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research earlier in that year using back of the envelope calculations and stats from the BRS* Digest to contest the claim that much so-called poltergeist activity was in fact the result of tides, earth tremors and underground rivers. Unfortunately, Tony and Alan’s dispute seems to have been with something of a strawman of the actual geophysical theory of poltergeists; a straw-manning seemingly repeated without question by those subsequently reporting on the experiment, including Richard Wiseman, William G. Roll and Michael A. Persinger, and, most regrettably, myself.

Guy W. Lambert, the main proponent of the theory, in a commentary appended to Tony and Alan’s article that same issue, clarified he did not, in fact, expect tides, earth tremors and underground rivers to create the kind of violent activity featured in their calculations and subsequent experimentation. Rather, Lambert suggested these geophysical factors could create what we would now call priming effects, and in this regard, he produced a table comparing reported poltergeist and haunting effects with earthquake effects outlined by the Mercalli Scale. The more violent effects he put down to result of Tony’s great nemesis expectancy, an old theory Lambert credits to psychologist Edmund Gurney.

In the correspondence section of subsequent issues in subsequent decades, Dr Michael Coleman explored how such a sequence of events could play out by refering to an incident in Wisbech in January 1979. Over the course of a few days that month a handful of houses on the Mount Pleasant estate reported intermittent rumbling noises and the displacement of household objects. Authorities quickly traced the cause of the disturbance to an automatic air relief valve on a sewer rising main; but, contends the good doctor, what if they hadn’t? Doubtless, Tony would have rejected the possibility that such priming could lead to the false perception of poltergeist activity; I, however, am not so sure.

*Building Research Station

Sources: 

• Cornell, A. D. & Gauld, A. (1961). ‘The geophysical theory of poltergeists’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 41 (709), 129-147.

• Lambert, G.W. (1961). ‘The geophysical theory of poltergeists by A.D. Cornell and Alan Gauld (comments by G.W. Lambert)’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 41 (709), 148-153.

We discussed some more of Tony's research as part of our 2021 Halloween special on the seemingly pseudoscientific ideas put forward to explain the phenomenon known as ghosts on Cambridge Skeptics: