The Olive Hill Poltergeist (Callihan Family), Carter County, Kentucky, 1968

John and Ora Callihan lived on Henderson Branch, near Olive Hill in Carter County, Kentucky. John was 85, a retired brickyard worker. Ora was 71. Their grandson Roger Callihan was 12. Friday, November 15, 1968. The glass in their picture frames started to break. John said it looked "shot with a BB gun in the center." Their son Archie said it cracked "corner to corner."

"Then things began to break all at once," Ora said. A bath oil bottle flew against the wall and "cracked like a shotgun." Her washing machine "boomed," yet she found no damage when she opened the lid. A chalk doll's head popped off. Over the month, most of their ceramic lamps and figurines were destroyed. "Things break, and us sitting here looking at them, with no one touching them, no one near them," Ora said. "It looked like death itself was in this house."

On the Saturday before Thanksgiving the Callihans moved to a house on Zimmerman Hill, about a half mile away. It did not end there.

Saturday, December 7, 1968. The house was full. Small objects flew. Tables overturned. Heavy chests tipped onto their edges. Family friend Odie Crank watched plastic cups come out of a cabinet. "When we put them on the table, they just flew up in the air again." Odie was hit by flying Tupperware. John got a knot on his head from a flying bowl. Roger caught a chest that nearly fell on him.

Reporter George Wolfford of the Ashland Daily Independent wrote: "Picture frames spun on the wall, and small kitchen items flew around." Archie compared it to a moving picture show slowed down "so you could see it." Ora spoke of apparitions too. She said the renewed activity followed her seeing a dead friend.

John Stump of the Psychical Research Foundation arrived on December 12. Over a Friday evening and Saturday morning, more than 50 incidents took place while he was in the house. A clock moved forward and landed about 4 ft from the television. He found "no strings or other contrivances."

William G. Roll arrived on December 15. Just after midnight, in his full view, the kitchen table rose, rotated 45 degrees and landed on the backs of the chairs around it. It was the first such event Roll had seen himself. Later that night a coffee table of 60 lb or more flipped upside down while Roger was in view. At 12:20 a.m. a bottle of "rose gel" flew off a dresser and landed about 4 ft away.

Roger's parents were Jehovah's Witnesses. They blamed a demon. On December 17 his mother Helen ordered the investigators out. The congregation carried out an exorcism and burned Roger's new clothes. It did not stop the activity. After the family left for Ohio, it subsided.

Ora felt the weight of disbelief. "I'm ashamed to tell about this because people who hear me think it's a lie." Sceptics point to Roger, who was present at 178 of the 199 incidents reported. Child-centred cases are usually explained as unseen trickery. Against that, Roll and Stump observed ten occurrences in which Roger could not have touched the object that moved. No hoax was ever exposed.

Roll saw no ghost and no demon. He called it recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, possibly linked to adolescent stress, and counted it among six authentic cases in The Poltergeist (1972), in a chapter titled "A Demon in Olive Hill, Kentucky." In 2009, in Susan MacWilliam's film Some Ghosts, he recalled a table levitation he had witnessed 40 years earlier.