Reviewed by Johan Theorin
The phenomenon known as poltergeist activity may seem straightforward when described with a few words (such as “a temporary commotion caused by an unseen and unknown force in a house”), but turns into a large labyrinth filled with darkness and dead ends once it is properly examined. It is a labyrinth which most people at one time or another take a peak into, through entertaining but inaccurate Hollywood horror films, or through paranormal podcasts or dubious footage on the Internet. Almost everyone has heard the old German term, poltergeist, popular in English literature. In my home country of Sweden it is sometimes translated as “bullergastar.”
As a boy I first heard of bullergastar from my grandfather, who was puzzled by several spooky and unexplained cases which had occurred on Öland, a Swedish island in the Baltic sea, during the 18th and 19th century. I later ventured into the poltergeist labyrinth by looking for original Scandinavian texts in an attempt to find the centre of it, where the absolute truth about this mystery hopefully dwells. However, like many poltergeist researchers before me, I am nowhere near the centre but still enjoy walking the corridors.
The British-American entrance to the poltergeist labyrinth is probably the most travelled as far as non-fiction books are concerned. For example, we got Price’s Poltergeist over England, Sitwell’s Poltergeists: An Introduction, Owen’s Can we Explain the Poltergeist?, Thurston’s Ghosts and Poltergeists, Roll’s The Poltergeist, Playfair’s This House is Haunted, and Poltergeists, by Gauld and Cornell. These are well-known if now rather old titles. Now, in 2025, they have been followed by the folklorist Andrew Pickering’s The Rise of the English Poltergeist, a study which guides us through a selection of twenty-seven documented cases from 1591 to 1718. Many of these are found in the theologian Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions from 1681, a text seen by Pickering as very influential, creating an interest in the subject in intellectual circles.
Despite his chosen title, Pickering has also included American and Scottish poltergeists in his account. His aim is not geographical pedantry but to examine how alleged poltergeist phenomena were described and treated in the age of the British and American so-called witch craze, from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth, when demons and demonologies were taken very seriously indeed by Glanvill and many others. There were sceptics four hundred years ago just as there are sceptics now, but the motto selected by Pickering on the book cover is “I know what I heard and saw”, a quote from Glanvill who himself became a witness in 1663 when he visited an afflicted house in Tidworth.
Poltergeists and witches have been linked together in books before; my own favorite work is The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, the classic 1959 tome by Dr Rossell Hope Robbins where the author devotes several entries to poltergeists, both generally and through accounts of some old British and Scandinavian cases. This is just done to provide “amusing reading” as the sceptical Robbins puts it. However, Pickering is much more serious about the subject, and interested in finding out how the old poltergeist reports helped shape the theological debates and shifts of their time. Often, according to Pickering, the events were seen as “willed by God to test men’s faith and to persuade them to lead less sinful lives”. They were less likely to be seen as signs of witchcraft, he argues: “The Tidworth affair”, Pickering writes, “as in pretty much every other instance of poltergeist haunting in early modern England, lacked the vital element in making a witchcraft accusation stick: no-one was hurt.”
Pickering’s twenty-seven cases were perhaps not always amusing but are definitely entertaining for the reader, each presentation ranging from just one single page to twenty pages in the book but giving all the necessary information available in the original sources.
Statistics is in my view definitely a way forward with poltergeist research – there is much to glean from these case studies (or “relations” as Pickering calls them, in the style of the old demonologies). Every case is unique but there are also many similarities. The reader can study his reports, compare them with modern cases and conclude that this particular phenomena have been remarkably consistent throughout the ages. Even if poltergeist outbursts almost always take place in a house, they are centered on people (if the afflicted house is abandoned and left empty, all troubles cease), and almost always on one or two focus persons or ‘mediums’ in particular, often young and often just temporary visitors to the household, such as maids, nieces or step-children. This is noted in the witness reports of several of Pickering’s accounts and I suspect was the case in many more, just not noted in the general pandemonium.
There are other interesting discoveries to be made when studying them; one of them being that poltergeists prefer performing during the winter months, rather than during the summer. Dates are not always given in the reports but when they are, they take place from late autumn to early spring. A case found by Pickering in Leasingham, Lincolnshire is an exception since it began in May of 1679, but in his poltergeist case list, there is little to no activity reported during June, July and August. Since I have already concluded that poltergeists have a fixation on houses and people in combination, I myself would explain this with the simple fact that people like to leave their houses and be outside more in the summer. Exactly why poltergeists seem to appear mostly at the darkest and coldest time of the year is just another mystery. Ultimately, The Rise of the English Poltergeist tells as much about the time it covers as about this strange phenomena, revealing many peculiar reactions when people find themselves in the labyrinth of the unknown.