SEAFORD POLTERGEIST

Opening

On 3 February 1958, in the Herrmann family's house at 1648 Redwood Path, Seaford, Long Island, bottles began opening and spilling on their own. Over the next five weeks screw caps came off holy water, bleach, shampoo, and ink, and figurines, lamps, and a bookcase moved or overturned. The last recorded incident was on 10 March.

A Nassau County detective spent weeks on the case, reporters slept in the house, and two parapsychologists from Duke University logged 67 disturbances. They proposed a new term, recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, for what they thought was happening. Sceptics proposed a twelve-year-old boy. Nobody confessed and nobody was caught.

Timeline

3 February 1958Twelve-year-old James (Jimmy) Herrmann comes home from school to find a ceramic doll and a model ship broken on his dresser. His mother finds a small holy water bottle on her dresser, on its side, cap off. Over the next 45 minutes bottles open and spill in several rooms, and a half-gallon bottle of bleach smashes on the floor in front of James and his mother.

Early FebruaryJames Herrmann Sr. suspects his son until, by his police statement, he stands in the bathroom doorway and sees a shampoo bottle and a medicine bottle slide across the vanity at the same moment, in different directions, while the boy is brushing his teeth.

9 FebruaryMrs Lucille Herrmann calls the police. Patrolman J. Hughes, in the living room with the whole family, hears a noise from the bathroom and finds a bottle on its side.

11 FebruaryDetective Joseph Tozzi of the Nassau County police is assigned to the case full time. He interviews everyone present at each incident, including those before his arrival.

Around 13 FebruaryThe disturbances spread from bottles to other objects: figurines fly and smash, and larger items such as a night table, a phonograph, and a coffee table move.

15 FebruaryA visiting cousin, Marie Murtha, sees a figurine "wiggle" and fly about two feet towards the television.

20 February, 21:45 and 21:50With Mrs Herrmann on the phone and James beside her, an ink bottle pops its cap and lands in the living room. Five minutes later, with the mother and both children together in the hall out of sight of the living room, a male figurine flies about ten feet and shatters against a desk.

23 to 25 FebruaryDave Kahn of Newsday sleeps in the house and hears a dresser fall and a lamp overturn. A physicist, Robert E. Zider, hears James's bookcase turn upside down on 24 February.

Late February to 1 MarchJ. Gaither Pratt of the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory visits and witnesses two disturbances early on, then nothing for days, and leaves on 1 March. Incidents resume the next day.

4 MarchJohn Gold of the London Evening News sees and hears incidents while family members are in other rooms.

7 to 10 MarchPratt and William G. Roll return for an unpublicised week. They hear two thumps from James's room on 9 March. On 10 March a bleach bottle is uncapped and moved with a loud thump. Nothing more is recorded.

June 1958Pratt and Roll publish "The Seaford Disturbances", a 45-page report in the Journal of Parapsychology.

Key figures

James Herrmann Sr. moved from suspecting his son to defending him. He refused a stage magician's offer to help and, with his wife, declined lie-detector tests for the children.

James Herrmann Jr., 12, was at the centre of most incidents. Pratt and Roll noted that he was questioned hard by his father and by Tozzi and held to his denials, at one point in tears. His sister Lucille, 13, was also present for many events.

Detective Joseph Tozzi produced the police record, about 60 pages according to the sceptic Joe Nickell, who later obtained it.

J. Gaither Pratt and William G. Roll of Duke's Parapsychology Laboratory compiled the count of 67 disturbances and mapped where each one happened.

Physical and documentary trail

The record consists of the police file, with signed statements from the family, patrolmen, and visitors; Pratt and Roll's 1958 report, with floor plans marking every incident; newspaper coverage from Newsday, Time, The New York Times, and the London Evening News; and Robert Wallace's "House of Flying Objects" in Life on 17 March 1958.

The house was tested during the outbreak: police lab checks for foreign matter in the opened bottles found none; the electrical system and appliances were checked; a chimney cap was fitted; cellar storm windows were removed; a well, the water table, and the structure were inspected; an oscillograph was run; and flight times at a nearby airport were compared. None matched the incidents.

Both bottles moved at the same time.

There is no film of an incident in progress, and no object from the house was kept as an exhibit.

Things you might not know

• The family moved out four times. They stayed with friends and relatives for a total of six nights.
• The ghost's catalogue was domestic. The spilled contents included starch, wine, ammonia, antacid, paint thinner, perfume, and ink.
• Pratt and Roll tried to fake it chemically. Their experiments found that gas pressure in a screw-top bottle leaks past the lid or bursts the container. It doesn't unscrew the cap.
• The magician fooled the parapsychologist. Milbourne Christopher staged fake bottle-poppings for reporters and repeated tricks for Pratt, who, by Christopher's account, could not see how they were done.
• The dusting trap was never sprung. According to Nickell, objects dusted with a powder visible under ultraviolet light were left alone.
• It may have helped inspire a film. The publicity is often cited as one influence on Steven Spielberg's 1982 production Poltergeist, though that link comes from later retellings.

Competing explanations

Recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis. Pratt and Roll's favoured, though not conclusive, reading: an unconscious force centred on James. They argued that in 17 incidents the children's positions were known to someone else and ruled out physical contact. Roll later noted that most targets belonged to the parents and that the number of incidents fell off with distance from the boy. This reading depends on a force no laboratory has demonstrated.

Trickery by one or both children. Christopher and Nickell argued the incidents happened mostly when James was nearby, avoided observation, and could be done with misdirection or thread. Pratt and Roll conceded many incidents could in principle have been faked. Against it: the independent witnesses who described events with the children elsewhere, and no catch in five weeks of police and press attention.

A physical cause in the house. Vibration, drafts, radio interference, groundwater, and aircraft were all proposed during the outbreak and checked without a match. Bottles uncapping themselves, and figurines flying ten feet, are hard to fit to any of them.

Later life of the case

Christopher called Seaford "the most discussed poltergeist case of the twentieth century" in his 1970 book Seers, Psychics and ESP. The term Pratt and Roll used, recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, became standard in parapsychology. Pratt and Roll went on to a similar case in a Miami warehouse, and Roll to the widely publicised 1984 case in Columbus, Ohio. Nickell revisited Seaford in The Science of Ghosts in 2012.

Finding

Settled: between 3 February and 10 March 1958, the Herrmann household reported 67 disturbances, a full-time police detective investigated, physical causes were tested and excluded one by one, and several outsiders, including a patrolman, two reporters, and a physicist, reported incidents first-hand. No confession, no caught trick, and no decisive test came out of it.

The strongest sceptical reading is a child working mostly unobserved; the strongest case against it is the handful of incidents where the children's positions were vouched for. What still will not resolve: those 17 incidents. The family's refusal of lie-detector tests left a gap that neither side has filled.