Project Poltergeist: the Felix Fuld housing-project poltergeist

Felix Fuld Court opened in Newark, New Jersey, in 1942. It first housed war workers. By 1961 a 13-year-old named Ernest "Ernie" Rivers lived there with his grandmother and guardian, Mabelle Clark. His mother, Ann Clark, was in prison. In December 1956 she had shot Ernie's abusive father. Ernie was shy, serious and calm.

May 6, 1961. Ernie's 13th birthday. That evening a glass jar on Mabelle's dresser crashed to the floor. It seemed to have moved by itself. She brushed it off.

May 8. Six punch-bowl cups came off their hooks on the living-room wall, one after the other. That evening a bottle of antiseptic flew into the living room, though the bathroom door was closed. A cologne bottle darted out, "turning a jig in the air," and broke. "Everything started smashing," Mabelle said.

Ernie watched a light bulb unscrew itself before crashing to the floor. He saw a pepper shaker rise above the stove and float across to land beside him. Newark News reporter Douglas Eldridge was there on May 11 when a cup fell from a sturdy bookshelf. Neighbour Yetta Mandle saw a five-pound iron fly into her room, its cord "stretched out stiff behind it."

From May 12, Charles D. Wrege of Rutgers examined the apartment. A lamp toppled about 15 feet away, and he found no strings or wires. Ernie set a mustard jar on the kitchen table. About 20 minutes later it passed over the heads of Wrege and Ernie's uncle, William Hargwood, and seemed to shatter before smashing against the wall. Wrege called the case RSPK, recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis.

In September William G. Roll of the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory arrived with J. Gaither Pratt, his partner on the 1958 Seaford case. On the evening of September 15, 1961, Roll said it did not hit people. At that instant a small bottle hit him squarely on the head.

From December 18, 1961, Ernie and Mabelle were in Durham. The activity followed. A book fell from Roll's desk. An ashtray fell at the Jack Tar Hotel. Then Ernie threw two measuring tapes he had hidden under his shirt. He denied it, and a polygraph read his denial as truthful. Psychologist Ben Feather hypnotized him and concluded he had thrown them while dissociated. John Altrocchi's tests found strong suppressed anger. Duke recommended that Ernie and Mabelle be permanently separated.

The Newark Housing Authority first suggested "magnetism" and talked of exposing a hoax. Its own checks found no evidence of trickery, and it hired an exorcist, Edward Del Russo. Sceptics point to the tapes and say unconscious throwing could explain some or all of it. Against that stand the independent witnesses, events while Ernie was in another room or in plain view, and a Star-Ledger reporter who worked out that Ernie would have had to "teleport" to cause one incident. Critics including Joe Nickell have called Roll credulous.

Ernie passed through foster homes before the Hargwoods took him in at Belleville. Weaker incidents faded by the time he joined the Marine Corps. Roll published "The Newark disturbances" in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1969 and retold it in The Poltergeist. Writers have since set it beside Seaford, where a white, middle-class family got a Life magazine cover.