The Córdoba poltergeist: the P.B. family, 1973

Argentina, the early 1970s. Parapsychology had found a home in an unlikely place. At the Catholic University of Córdoba, a Jesuit priest named Enrique Novillo Paulí worked at the Institute for Parapsychology. He corresponded with J. B. Rhine, the American pioneer of the field. And now and then, the field came looking for him. In 1966 he investigated a poltergeist in the city of Santa Fe. In 1973 it was Córdoba itself.

The family lived in the city of Córdoba. Middle class. The father was a qualified worker. Their names were never published. Novillo Paulí identified them only by the initials P.B.

Then the stones came. According to his account, they fell into the house, thrown by nobody. Objects moved on their own. The disturbances reportedly lasted more than a year. Renderings of his paper also describe furniture moving by itself and blankets falling, though those lines may belong to a second Argentine case he discussed alongside this one.

What was missing matters too. No hallucinations of demons. No visions of the dead. No figures, no lights. For Novillo Paulí, that absence was the whole point.

Psychiatrists, physicians and other professionals reportedly studied the case. On 6 September 1973, Novillo Paulí wrote to Rhine about a poltergeist involving a 14-year-old girl and "desplazamientos de objetos", displacements of objects. "Estoy trabajando con doctores de la universidad: neurólogos, clínicos, pediatras, endocrinólogos," he wrote. The letter does not name the place. It may describe the P.B. household. It may not.

How it ended is unclear. One version says a priest and a psychologist calmed the family and the phenomena stopped. Another attaches that ending to a different case. No police report and no newspaper coverage have surfaced.

The case survives in a comparative paper, "Comparative study of the interpretation of the cases of poltergeist in Brazil and Argentina", listed for the 1979 International Conference on Psychotronic Research in São Paulo. Novillo Paulí set Córdoba beside a 1978 case at Covunco Abajo in Neuquén, and beside Brazilian cases such as Guarulhos, which H. G. Andrade read as sorcery. The phenomena were almost identical. The interpretations were not. Brazilian investigators leaned toward spirits and witchcraft. Novillo Paulí warned that fear of magic, witchcraft and occult powers could push families and researchers alike toward flawed conclusions. What people perceive, he argued, depends on their culture.

No hoax was ever alleged, and no sceptic examined this case specifically. The standard readings of poltergeists point to a family member, often an adolescent, secretly throwing objects, or to ordinary events magnified by fear. If the 14-year-old girl of the Rhine letter lived in the P.B. house, she would be the obvious focus of such a theory. No source makes that claim.

The paper ended up in the CIA's STARGATE holdings on psychic research. It was never a CIA investigation. Novillo Paulí's 1975 book Los fenómenos parapsicológicos mentions the case in a single line, and an interview in Sebastià d'Arbó's Posesiones y exorcismos... en profundidad adds more. In 1987, at the Primer Encuentro de Parapsicología in Buenos Aires, J. Gimeno presented a study of the priest's work, posted online in 2020. The family itself remains two initials.