Evidence of poltergeist knocks?

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Paranormal rappings associated with apparent poltergeist activity have been described for many hundreds of years. It is only now that an interesting pattern has been discovered within the fine detail of the paranormal rapping sounds. No explanation can be found for this pattern at present.

The current edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), a learned publication dating back to 1882, carries an article by scientist Dr Barrie Colvin B.Sc., Ph.D., showing instrumental evidence for an inexplicable and objective banging sound detected in recordings made during alleged poltergeist activity.

Whereas raps and knocking sounds produced by ordinary means exhibit a normal acoustic pattern, those recorded in alleged poltergeist cases show quite a different sound signature.

Regular double rap

Irregular double rap

Doctor Colvin has analysed recordings of alleged poltergeist knocking obtained from around the world over a 40-year period. The earliest was a recording made by a local physician at Sauchie (Scotland) in 1960 and the most recent was obtained from a poltergeist case at Euston Square, London in 2000.

Whilst the two types of rap sound rather similar, they are actually acoustically different, although the effect is only made apparent when the recordings of raps are submitted to detailed analysis.

The sample involved 10 separate recordings recorded on different recording apparatus.

In each of the recordings, when subjected to acoustic analysis, a particular sound pattern is detected which so far remains unexplained. Attempts to replicate this pattern in ordinary ways have so far been unsuccessful.

[Read on at spr.ac.uk]

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Ghosts & Hauntings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Evidence of poltergeist knocks?”

TCS Says:
August 4th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
You can get a similar sound profile if a knock is heard THROUGH a solid object. Suppose someone knocks on a wall and the tape recorder is on the other side. The high frequency element will be missing (absorbed by the wall). In addition, the sound will take longer to reach maximum intensity. That’s because there are two modes of sound transmission in solids, one of which is twice as fast as the other. So part of the sound takes longer to reach the other side of wall than the other bit, resulting in a slower rise to maximum amplitude.