The Columbus Poltergeist: Tina Resch and the Flying Phone, 1984

1 March 1984. Columbus, Ohio. After an argument between Tina Resch and her adoptive mother Joan, the home of John and Joan Resch began to misbehave. It was a foster home. Tina was 14, adopted, and at the centre of everything that followed.

It started with electricity. The numbers on a digital clock radio started racing. A heart monitor kept sounding, even after it was replaced and serviced. Televisions and lights switched on and off. Tape fastened over the light switches disappeared. The wall clock's minute hand was seen spinning. Then the taps all over the house opened at once.

Then objects began to move. Eggs seemed to pass through the door of a fridge. Sticks of butter crept over a surface. Plates and glassware smashed against walls. A table pinned Tina to the floor. A kitchen knife was flung at her. Her adoptive brother Craig saw furniture move by itself, and a dark shadow.

Columbus Dispatch columnist Mike Harden brought in veteran photographer Fred Shannon. Shannon said he saw things happen. But nothing happened while he aimed his camera. So he changed tactics. "I decided I would outfox the force," he told UPI. He pointed the camera at Tina, looked away, and pressed the shutter when he caught motion from the corner of his eye.

He got two frames. In one, a telephone is midair, leaping over Tina, its cord taut above her lap. Her hands are pulled up in an awkward, defensive posture. The Dispatch ran the photographs on 6 March 1984. The Associated Press carried them to papers worldwide.

13 March. Joan Resch turned away James Randi, the magician investigating for CSICOP. The same day William Roll arrived, director of the Psychical Research Foundation and the man who coined the term recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis. On 14 March, Roll logged fifteen movements of objects and five unexplained sounds in 52 minutes. He said a teacup moved while no one was close enough to touch it. Skeptical accounts say Roll never saw an object move on its own.

The skeptics had something harder to dismiss. During the press day on 8 March, the camera of WTVN-TV operator Drew Hadwal was left running by accident. The footage showed Tina, having made sure no one was watching, yank a lamp to the floor. Then she screamed. She later said she was tired of reporters pressuring her to make something happen.

Randi bought the contact sheet of Shannon's roll. He argued that Tina threw the phone while the photographer looked away, her arm in one frame positioned in a direct line as if she had just thrown it. Roll replied that Tina was right-handed, that Randi's diagrams altered the room, and that he never took statements from the three people present. Formal tests at the Institute for Parapsychology came out at chance. CSICOP chair Paul Kurtz called Tina a disturbed teenager who craved attention.

Roll defended the case for the rest of his life, including in the 2004 book Unleashed. Randi called the evidence "anecdotal and thin, at best." Then the story turned darker. In 1994 Tina, by then Christina Boyer, entered an Alford plea in the death of her daughter Amber and was sentenced to life plus 20 years. Unsolved Mysteries, the Hulu docuseries Demons & Saviors and photographer Jan Banning have kept the Columbus poltergeist in view. The phone is still in mid-air.