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Chapter Two

THE NAUGHTY LITTLE CHILDREN: THE PARANORMAL AND TEENAGERS

Renaud Evrard

1. Introduction

In his novel Théorie de la Vilaine Petite Fille (Theory of the naughty little girl), the French writer Hubert Haddad¹ described several episodes from the tumultuous lives of the Fox sisters, the ‘mediums’ attributed with launching American spiritualism. Surprisingly, he never explained the origin and associated issues signified by his title. His use of it is also peculiar because it was only 50 years after the events that occurred around the Fox family that this theory took its name. Indeed, this theory was coined by Frank Podmore (1856–1910),² one of the principal and most sceptical investigators of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in Cambridge in 1882, who developed this interpretation in 1886, using the phrase in a response to reviews of the work of Andrew Lang and Alfred Russell Wallace in 1899.³ During the 79th general meeting of the SPR in April 1896, presided over by the famous physicist William Crookes, Podmore explained the results of his investigation into 11 cases of ‘Poltergeists’, each of which he concluded was a fraud.⁴ The frauds involved a girl eight times and a boy three times. He added that in almost every case, the young ‘agent’ was physically or psychologically abnormal. Although this theory was criticized by some members of the SPR, it still remained central to the ongoing discussions on the place of the teenager within the hauntings, suggesting they were the privileged agents of fraudulent manipulation or mediumistic personalities with the associated signifiers of somatic and mental troubles. All things considered, it was deemed that the children deserved special attention.

To understand the implications of this theory, it is necessary to look more closely at the studies that link adolescence, occultism and parapsychology, with an especial focus on one case that highlights the main issues involved as published by Dr Joseph Grasset in 1904.

2. Adolescence and Occultism

In many ways adolescence and occultism are moving categories arbitrarily defined as the product of socio-historical constructions. It is not so unsurprising then that they have become so commonly associated in works of popular culture that express our deepest anxieties, such as fantasy and horror movies or – which is possibly more disturbing though increasing prevalent – discourses warning against the evils of young people and occult practices.⁵ However, real-life experiences can offer a different interpretation of the interaction between teenagers and occultism. As such, it is by listening to teenagers engaging with occult practices (speaking tables, objects moving by thought, investigation of haunted houses etc.) or developing understandings of the expression of adolescent problems through occultism that psychologists seem able to replace reactionary discourse with more appropriate approaches. Consequently, although role-playing games (RPGs), heroic-fantasy universes and heavy metal music are often denounced as precursors of cult membership and/or morbid activities, these discourses on our ‘little horrors’ are not sufficient to exhaust the question of the relationship between teenagers and the paranormal as they do not sufficiently consider what psychological panaceas adolescents can find in these practices and beliefs.⁶

Auguste Comte gave one of the first descriptions of adolescence in the age of metaphysics, in his ‘Law of the three states’ defined in the Course of Positive Philosophy (1832–40).⁷ Comte saw adolescence taking an intermediate position in the three periods of human life, one that he matched with a particular moment in the evolution of the human mind. Adolescence expressed a quest for meaning that we cannot expect from religions or from positivist science, a category which Comte thought supported the great philosophical issues of humanity. With its innocence, which is no longer that of a child, and its rationality, which is not even that of the adult, adolescence is thus placed between a belief and objectivity (or science), which reflects the principles of occultism. While the natural curiosity of the teenager, as was believed, made them more open to the occult and magic, it made them equally more inclined to suggestion because of the incomplete development of their rational abilities (as was similarly believed about women, and even more so for young ladies, at that time).

An important example in France, before the onset of spiritualism codified by Allan Kardec, is that of Angélique Cottin. She was 14 in the spring of 1846, when the first events occurred, which lasted for 10 weeks.⁸ A simple glove weaver in the village of Bouvigny in the Orne, Angélique apparently attracted or repulsed objects around her in an inexplicable manner. Her nickname, ‘the electric girl’, was based on the first hypothesis put forward to contradict the demonic interpretation of the villagers. The unexplained movement of objects seemed to follow strange laws, more or less similar to contemporary representations of electrical energy. The adolescent Angélique seemed to have developed a phobia of touch, which implicitly gave a psychological path for her experiences of repulsive actions. Quickly becoming an object of observation, the young girl was put into the hands of the medical profession and of the Academy of Sciences. A committee was appointed, which quickly curtailed the enthusiasm, through experiments, on 9 March 1846, that were unfavourable to the reality of Angélique’s ‘electrical properties’.⁹ The girl was immediately sent back home and even suspected of voluntarily producing, by skilful and hidden manoeuvres of her feet and hands, the sudden and violent movements of the chairs on which she sat. Her case remained an isolated one in France, but a year later in America two teenagers quickly became the focus of a more infamous case in the spread of spiritualism.¹⁰

3. The Case of Jeanne

At the crossroads of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emerging field of psychology developed critical tools to explain somnambulistic states, behavioural automatisms and double consciousness. Several psychopathologists relied on teenagers to demonstrate the mechanisms behind the occult and the dangers it represents. Carl Gustav Jung examined his young cousin, the medium Hélène Preiswerk, in his medical thesis¹¹; Théodore Flournoy became famous for his study of the young medium Catherine Elise Muller, who began creating convincing stories of past or extraterrestrial lives during her trance.¹² Young mediums who exposed their gifts in front of scientists were often accused of hysteria, melancholia, neurasthenia or other clinical aberrations applied in response (such as ‘mythomania’, by Dupré, applied on Marthe Béraud¹³). Dr Joseph Grasset, a physician in the south of France, and faithful reader of the psychologist Pierre Janet,¹⁴ proposed his theory of the polygon and psychic disintegration of 15-year-old Jeanne at the epicentre of the case of a haunted house. He proposed to use this case as the starting point for a comprehensive study of spiritualism in science.¹⁵ Indeed, Flournoy wrote, in the Archives de psychologie, that this case was ‘a beautiful illustration of the English theory explaining Poltergeists by the hypothesis of the naughty little girl’.¹⁶ These researchers support the deep movement of modernization of psychology that fought against the marvellous in order to demarcate this discipline as a legitimate science. This movement was led by Janet, who, since his experiments of hypnotizing at a distance in 1885–87, never stopped treating all psychical research with a condescending scepticism.¹⁷ In 1902, he gave a presentation at the Institut général psychologique on Meb, a young woman who fraudulently produced ‘apports’ (material objects produced out of the air), so as to suggest that hysteria was the best hypothesis to explain this kind of phenomena.¹⁸

Grasset’s tale is titled ‘Story of a Haunted House’.¹⁹ In a medium-sized town in the South of France, troubling events occurred to an unnamed family, ‘Family A’, that consisted of a couple, their six children and the paternal grandfather. Each of the protagonists is the subject of a short clinical description, and Jeanne, the eldest daughter, is immediately presented as being hysterical with a detestable morality. Grasset also produced a plan of their home (see Figure 2.1) and attempted to describe quite accurately the ostensible phenomena (based probably on the detailed testimony of the mother). Family A rented Part 2 of the house, which was on wasteland, but the owner of the house also allowed them to live in Part 1 of the house free of charge. In Part 1, the entry was through a kitchen, which connected to the bedroom of 20-year-old Jean (the eldest son), itself communicating with the grandfather’s bedroom. There are no other openings in the room that opened onto the street. Shortly before the events began, there had been talk of the sale of Part 1 of the house in the future, which would force the family to move. Grasset suggested that this element acted as a trigger.²⁰ The first phenomena happened in the grandfather’s bedroom, which is noted as occurring on 4 December 1901. That same morning, Jeanne had searched the bed linens after the departure of Jean and his grandfather to work and noticed nothing. It was not until that afternoon that the mother of Family A discovered ‘the upset bed, the mess of blankets on the floor, the mattress folded at the foot of the bed’.²¹ Jeanne, and later her grandfather, denied being responsible for the mess, and the grandfather was quick to interpret the events in a paranormal way, speaking of a visit from his late son and daughter, who, respectively, died 6 and 14 years earlier, and consequently recommended attending masses. Jean was thought to have been the possible prankster behind this.

Figure 2.1The house inhabited by Family A.

Source: Renaud Evrard, ‘Montrer la violence intérieure: Figures cinématographiques de l’adolescente hantée’, in L’adolescente vue par le cinema, ed. S. Dupont and H. Paris (Paris: Erès, 2013), 13; © 2015, Renaud Evrard. Used with permission.

However, unsure of a definite attribution of blame, the mother decided to conduct an investigation. The next morning, she accompanied Jeanne into the bedroom of her grandfather after he had left and once again found that the bedding was thrown in the middle of the room. The grandfather was confronted but vehemently denied these alleged facts and Jean concurred. The next day, 6 December, the grandfather called his stepdaughter to show her that everything was in order. Everyone then went about their business, when suddenly the grandfather found that his bedding has been disturbed. The same routine happened three times during the same day, with the room being put into disorder without anyone being seen entering it. The grandfather, alarmed, asked to sleep in another bedroom.

On 7 December, the same phenomenon of spontaneous disorder occurred. Jeanne, accompanied by her mother, stated that she had seen a skeleton on a mattress move on the terrace. The family fled the house and sought refuge with neighbours. Rumours spread in the neighbourhood and beyond, even reaching the city. The father mobilized friends to increase the level of surveillance and catch the pranksters. On 8 December, the phenomenon continued. Having locked the door that communicated between Jean’s room and that of the grandfather, the father and his friends found it smashed, the lock broken away and the two rooms turned upside down. Grasset then summarized the story by saying that the same phenomenon took place on 9 and 10 December, despite the intervention of a priest called to ‘ward off the spell’. On Wednesday, 11 December, on the advice of a neighbour from Paris, they decided to set a trap for the prankster by tying the bedding to the wood of the bed, affixing stamps everywhere and sprinkling sawdust on the floor. Thus, both rooms where the phenomenon occurred were well prepared, but nothing happened either on Thursday or on Friday. Mrs A then decided to remove the trap and each man was reinstated in his room. Two days later, on Sunday, 15 December, everything was upset again, and so the sawdust was once more sprinkled on the floor. The next day, mattresses and blankets were dragged into the kitchen, but no footsteps were visible in the wood dust. New precautions were taken: a lock was installed at the entrance of the house (kitchen) and an aggressive watchdog was locked inside. An hour later, Mrs A was surprised to meet the dog outside. The door was still locked and the furniture was upset, but oddly the dog had not barked. The phenomenon continued without the family being able to control or observe all that was occurring.²² On Saturday, 21 December, the phenomenon changed: the family heard raps, then Jeanne began crying because her long hair had just been cut. The priest said that the evidence was insufficient to conclude that it was due to the intervention of the devil. In the days that followed, the family also noted the disappearance/reappearance of a wallet emptied of its contents, either from the pants pocket of the father or from under the pillow of the mother. In addition to the events in the rooms of Part 1 of the house, plants were uprooted in the garden, and Jeanne and her 6-year-old brother claimed to have seen a cabinet autonomously open and empty itself of its contents.

A hairdresser from the town contacted the editor of the Messager de l’occulte. The journalist replied on 5 January 1902, speaking of mediumship and of a ‘fluid’ comparable to electricity. The remedy, he said, is to pierce the air with iron spikes. He directed towards the search for the presence of one or several mediums. And more specifically, he indicated the need to focus research on ‘a girl about to be nubile’ because ‘it was noted that, almost always, it was so in haunted houses’.²³ The theory of the naughty little girl expressed in its self-fulfilling logic. The hairdresser’s answer gave details confirming the suspicion. He said that the parents ‘already suspected that it came from the girl, without guessing the cause’.²⁴ During this time, Jeanne seemed to wither and lose her appetite. A doctor advised that she be hospitalized, which, in addition, would also allow an assessment of her influence on the phenomenon. She manifested, in the hospital, some hysteria and somnambulism, but refused to be hypnotized. During the eight days she remained there, no occurrences were reported at the family house; however, they resumed on her return. Unsurprisingly, Jeanne was then identified as a medium and brought to a professional female somnambulist. The somnambulist prompted her to scan a glass filled with water placed on a white plate and consequently was able to see a wicked woman who had allegedly put a curse on Jeanne’s family. Mrs A immediately made the connection with the history of a witch she had molested because she believed she was responsible for the long agony of her own mother. The family, via the raps on the wall, interrogated ‘the spirits’ using the formula of two raps for ‘yes’, three for ‘no’. The origin of the raps was uncertain because Jeanne’s bed was very close to the partition wall where the knocks were heard. Still, the ‘spirits’ supported the theory of a spell being used against her. The girl even succeeded in recognizing the ‘witch’ among a group of women in a picture.

Subsequently, the phenomenon changed again and took on a more symbolic twist. The grandfather, coming one night to his room, found all the candles lit and, on his bed, a crown and crosses made with dried herbs.²⁵ Various objects disappeared and were found in surprising places. Jeanne felt stung in different places of her body and there were pins, forks and nails in her bedclothes. Her mother decided to crouch in her bed, and the bed begun to shake furiously. The grandfather was called to the rescue and, following the advice of the occult journalist, slayed the air with his sword … but seemingly in vain. The professional somnambulist suggested that the spell be thwarted by the burning of a live cat. The family executed the ritual, and Grasset describes the resulting scene thus:

At this moment they hear, outside, a great ride, a thunderous noise. They look themselves with astonishment; but, on the recommendation of the somnambulist, nobody leaves. Raps are heard loudly on the door and on the wall; they expected to see ‘the old woman’ appear when, suddenly, Jeanne, who was lying down, pushes a scream. She feels tight at her throat, cries, struggles horribly. She is right in the middle of a hysteria crisis.²⁶

Grasset enforced his own interpretation of hysteria without examining any of the rooms for alternative explanations. Jeanne’s crisis, which lasted several hours and repeated every evening, encouraged her parents to hospitalize her again on 20 February 1902. This time, it was at St Eloi Hospital in Montpellier, in the Department of Medical Clinic of Drs Calmette and Grasset. The story stops here as Grasset wrote that there have been no more extraordinary phenomena in the house in the absence of Jeanne. He subsequently produced a medical description attesting Jeanne’s hysteria, verified by her variable and transient anaesthesia and other phenomena:²⁷

Big three hysterical crisis occurred in the service, small crises of ball with convulsive movements, conjunctival and pharyngeal anesthesia, bilateral ovarie with feeling of strangulation when pressing, variable and transient anesthesia with possible use of uncollected sensations (with the left hand anesthetized, she appreciates the shape of objects and recognize them), allochiria, tunnel vision with color blindness, dermographism.²⁸

This vocabulary has the effect of reducing the unexplained phenomena that occurred around Jeanne to a mere medical case, thereby restoring ‘normality’. Added to the observations made at the hospital, Jeanne is further described as stealing objects, confabulating stories and simulating raps. Grasset extrapolated these two orders of facts: ‘The obvious first impression is that there are a mixture of juggling or hoax, of hysteria or neurosis, and, finally, or gullibility or stupidity.’²⁹ He followed to the letter Janet, who, in his medical thesis,³⁰ concluded that ‘most of the mediums, if not all, have nervous phenomena and are neurotic when they are not downright hysterical’.³¹ Grasset determined that Family A wanted to scare away buyers of the house, thus giving an explanation about this gigantic fraudulent operation. Bad handling of the situation made the phenomenon elusive, which is seen when it occurred less when controls were more strictly enforced. As such, Grasset’s theory was justified when it was concluded that systematic cheating produced this ‘haunted house’; and he designated Jeanne as mainly responsible for that, completely missing the analysis of the family dynamics:

Jeanne is the lead actress: this is certain. First, she has a detestable character, and we have seen the phenomena reappear in hospital: small knocks, wallet stolen […] But here it did not last long and we made her confess juggling.³²

Grasset can be seen to have made biased assumptions and neglected more detailed and nuanced explanations. According to him, the possibility of being able to produce phenomena fraudulently was sufficient to explain all of what occurred at the house, though occultists Gaston Méry and Papus would later question the validity of this reasoning.³³

However, Grasset defended the scientific focus of his observations by saying that Jeanne’s hysteria was not feigned and that the fraud was involuntary and, therefore, unconscious. He relied on an article by Ochorowicz³⁴ that proposed the same interpretation of some recurrent frauds by the medium Eusapia Palladino.³⁵ More importantly, the assumption of unconscious fraud is an additional demonstration of the reality of the subconscious psychism. Grasset was above all the theorist of a double psychism model involving a polygon with a higher centre (consciousness) and lower centres explaining automatisms, unconscious acts, hallucinations and so on. Every time Jeanne was likely to have produced the phenomenon, Grasset stated with aplomb that although she did it, she did so unconsciously. Then, he summarized the history of spiritualism established by Janet to generalize his findings. In his view mediums are largely irresponsible people that need to be cured and whose seemingly intelligent actions are not consciously done. As such, they are not horrors, but act in a state of ‘automatism’. One sees here how studies of mediums were of great importance for the development of dynamic psychiatry.³⁶ In contrast, parapsychologists and spiritualists were fighting for the recognition of these abnormalities in young mediums as giving credence to the reality of their powers. They fought for the reconsideration of a residue of phenomena that did not fall into the category of proven frauds. Notwithstanding, in 1903, Xavier Dariex reproduced Grasset’s analysis of this case in the Annales des sciences psychiques, the major French journal devoted to psychical research at that time. Parapsychologists in the nineteenth century appreciated this tenuous link between adolescence and haunting, which subsequently opened a real avenue of research. They postulated that such extraordinary phenomena may, in fact, be the product of an extraordinary energy, which is concentrated and suddenly released, during the ‘crisis of adolescence’.

4. Parapsychology and the Teenager as a Focus Person for Recurrent Spontaneous Psycho-Kinesis

The merge between ‘adolescent crisis’ and ‘poltergeist’ in the nineteenth century was built on many ambiguities: it grouped together ideas around the adolescent as a hoaxer, the general abnormalities of adolescence and any ‘supernormal’ abilities that may accompany them. So much so that, for decades, researchers would strive to conduct batteries of psychological tests on young subjects caught up in tumultuous events. There is a wealth of data on such cases though, unsurprisingly, much of it is contradictory (as summarized by Catala³⁷). The parapsychologist William G. Roll, who coined the term ‘recurrent spontaneous psycho-kinesis’ (RSPK), was able to detect repressed aggressiveness, hostility against the father, a hidden hostility against the mother, anger, guilt, a sense of injustice, dependency, emotional immaturity, dissatisfaction, insecurity and so on. German studies noticed an unstable personality, irritability, emotional immaturity, low frustration tolerance, uncontrolled impulses, conflicts in the areas of social esteem and sexuality, a move in aggression on other targets, covering conflicts and so on.³⁸ In short, and in the words of the German parapsychologist Hans Bender, as the dream is for Freud, so the poltergeist is ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ for parapsychologists. The unfortunate consequence of all this confusing and obfuscating data is that parapsychologists have lost sight of the individual and the traumatic cases of personal psychological conflict involved.

Many had tried to define a particular syndrome: for example, the parapsychologist and psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor spoke of a ‘poltergeist psychosis’,³⁹ which would later be studied in detail by John Palmer and William G. Roll.⁴⁰ But Fodor also supported the idea of a kind of ‘poltergeist neurosis’, this time based on the model of hysterical conversion – that is to say, the movement of a fantasy to its concrete expression.⁴¹ Both result from ‘emotional stress’, a term that still holds some vagueness. Other easy metaphors support this idea: Iris Owen thought the poltergeist was a psychokinetic channel for the expression of suppressed excitement;⁴² Daniel Scott Rogo saw it as a projection of hostility or as displaced aggression.⁴³ These psychodynamic interpretations and speculations merely repeat in chorus the postulate of an ‘inside’ that would end up ‘outside’. The image is that of a cooking pot on the verge of explosion. Roll also sought support from the field of neurology, asking if these phenomena could be attributed to a disorder of the nervous system.⁴⁴ Admittedly, some cases lend themselves to such analysis, since the chosen subjects often suffer from epilepsy or severe migraines. But, in the final account, Roll did not find a higher rate of neurological disorders in his sample group than in the general population. His theory seems too vague to be either tested or falsified. As parapsychologists were unable to reach enough evidence for a theory of poltergeist/RSPK based on its connection with adolescence, they began to criticize this faded track.⁴⁵ From this, previous investigators were shown to have worked from positions of personal prejudice, quickly selecting the teenager suspected of being behind the events, without considering the other people around them. When they detected emotional conflicts, this was often done with unquestioned ‘projective’ methods – such as evaluation using inkblots – which are generally regarded to invariably point the finger towards something psychologically problematic, regardless of the person involved. Moreover, adolescents, as often being naïve and naturally in heightened emotional and psychological states, made obvious prime targets in such cases.

This fluctuating relationship between the poltergeist and the supposed teenage anomaly can be seen to come from either a defect in how diagnoses were made or the plurality of possible profiles. This second hypothesis brings us back to the starting point as there is not one kind of person identified as being more likely to experience a haunting, and thus no typical ‘naughty little girl’. In the second half of the twentieth century, new voices have been heard in the discussion. For example, Dr Alain Assailly has drawn attention to the frequency with which a middle-aged adult has intervened in poltergeist phenomena.⁴⁶ But this search for a new socio-demographic profile has had similar faults. A more comprehensive approach has been developed, as noted by Rogo and Phillip Snoyman, that claims that family dynamics, as a whole, are more responsible for the evolution of the phenomena than just an isolated individual, at least in the poltergeist cases they investigated.⁴⁷ This view of the poltergeist as the product of an organized group, in a ‘systemic’ perspective, became the dominant approach thereafter, both therapeutically⁴⁸ and at the theoretical level.⁴⁹ The model of pragmatic information developed by physicist and psychologist Walter von Lucadou offers a phenomenological description of the four stages of development of poltergeist activity that also includes critical observers and society in general. This model applies much more constructively to the case of Jeanne, which was examined earlier. Despite this, however, the myth of the naughty little girl – or more generally the myth of the teenage source of poltergeist – still thrives in the twenty-first century. Many still give credence to this simplistic explanation and consequently repeat the damage and trauma of earlier times. Today, teenagers themselves identify and even find agency of sorts with this fascinating and frightening figure, propelled into the media through the uncontrollable Carrie created by Stephen King or Regan McNeil from The Exorcist (both reproduced and adapted across various films, novels, comics etc.).⁵⁰ It must be said that parapsychologists have contributed to the wide spread of this myth. Not only did they sometimes invite the media to share the fruits of their investigations, but some have subsequently become ‘scientific’ advisors for Hollywood. Indeed, when Steven Spielberg produced the movie Poltergeist (1982), American parapsychologists William G. Roll, Charles T. Tart and Daniel Scott Rogo signed a document, for which they were paid, authenticating the phenomena presented in the film as inspired by a true story. As such, this short chapter can also claim to be inspired by a true story.

Notes

1Hubert Haddad, Théorie de la Vilaine Petite Fille (Paris: Zulma, 2014).

2Alan Gauld, ‘Frank Podmore (1856–1910)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

3Frank Podmore, ‘Review of Mr. Andrew Lang’s “The Making of Religion”’, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 14 (1898–99): 128–38; Andrew Lang, ‘The Poltergeist and Its Explainers’, in The Making of Religion (Appendix B) (London: Longmans, Green, 1898), 324–39; Alfred Russell Wallace, ‘Mr Podmore on Clairvoyance and Poltergeists’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 9 (1899): 22–30.

4Frank Podmore, ‘On Poltergeists’, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 11 (1896): 45–116.

5Gustav Klosinski, Sectes: alerte aux parents (Paris: Brepols, 1997).

6Pascal Le Maléfan, ‘La vérité est ailleurs, La place du paranormal à l’adolescence comme mode de traitement du réel pubertaire’, Adolescence 26.3 (2008): 709–21.

7Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive [1830–1842] (Paris: Hermann, 1998).

8Louis Figuier, Histoire du merveilleux dans les temps modernes (Paris: Louis Hachette, 1861).

9Nicole Edelman and Pascal Le Maléfan, ‘Science et spiritisme: Le cas Angélique Cottin’, L’Histoire 128 (1989): 50–54.

10Haddad, Théorie de la Vilaine Petite Fille.

11Carl Gustav Jung, ‘Sur la psychologie et la psychopathologie des phénomènes dits occultes’, in L’énergétique psychique (Zurich: Librairie de l’Université, [1902] 1956).

12Théodore Flournoy, Des Indes à la planète Mars. Etude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalia (Geneva: Alcan-Eggimann, 1900).

13Pascal Le Maléfan, ‘Richet chasseur de fantômes: l’épisode de la villa Carmen’, in Des savants face à l’occulte 1870–1940, ed. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 173–200.

14Pierre Janet also prefaced Grasset’s book Le Spiritisme; see note 15.

15Joseph Grasset, Le Spiritisme devant la science (Montpellier: Coulet, 1904), 66.

16Ibid., 332.

17Renaud Evrard and Andreas Sommer, ‘Pierre Janet and the Enchanted Boundary of Psychical Research’, History of Psychology 21.2 (May 2018): 100–25.

18Pierre Janet, ‘Un cas du phénomène des apports (Séance du 5 décembre à la Société de Psychologie)’, Bulletin de l’Institut Psychologique International 1.7 (1901): 329–35.

19Grasset, Le Spiritisme, 11–69.

20Ibid., 15.

21Ibid., 15–16; all translations mine.

22Ibid., 28.

23Ibid., 36.

24Ibid., 37.

25Ibid., 44.

26Ibid., 47.

27Ibid., 48–52.

28Joseph Grasset, L’Occultisme, hier et aujourd’hui: Le merveilleux préscientifique (Montpellier: Coulet, 1907), 165; my translation.

29Grasset, Le Spiritisme, 52.

30Pierre Janet, L’état mental des hystériques, 2 vols (Paris: Rueff, 1892–94).

31Grasset, L’Occultisme, 165.

32Grasset, Le Spiritisme, 53.

33Gaston Méry, L’écho du merveilleux: revue bimensuelle, 15 June 1903, 222; Gerard Encausse, a.k.a. Papus, L’initiation: Hypnotisme, théosophie, kabbale, science occulte, franc-maçonnerie, vols 58–59 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 243.

34Julian Ochorowicz, ‘La question de la fraude dans les expériences avec Eusapia Paladino’, Annales des sciences psychiques 6 (1896): 79–123.

35Grasset, Le Spiritisme, 55–57.

36Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970); Pascal Le Maléfan, Folie et spiritisme: Histoire du discours psychopathologique sur la pratique du spiritisme, ses abords et ses avatars (1850–1950) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999).

37Pascale Catala, Apparitions et maisons hantées: Réalité inquiétante ou fantasme? (Paris: Presses du Châtelet, 2004), 180–81.

38Hans Bender, ‘Täuschungen und Tatsachen bei “Gellerini” – Versuche zur Objektivierung des “Löffelbiegens”’, Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie 17 (1975): 57–61.

39Nandor Fodor, ‘The Poltergeist-Psychoanalyzed’, Psychiatric Quarterly 22 (1948): 195–203.

40John Palmer, ‘A Case of RSPK Involving a Ten-Year-Old Boy: The Powhatan Poltergeist’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 68 (1974): 1–33; and William G. Roll, ‘Some Physical and Psychological Aspects of a Series of Poltergeist Phenomena’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 62 (1968): 263–308.

41Nandor Fodor, On the Trail of the Poltergeist: A Record of an Alleged Occurrence at Thornton Heath in 1938 (New York: Citadel, 1958).

42Iris Owen and Margaret Sparrow, Conjuring Up Philip: An Adventure in Psychokinesis (Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1976).

43Daniel Scott Rogo, ‘Psychotherapy and the Poltergeist’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 47 (1974): 433–46.

44William G. Roll, ‘Poltergeists’, in Handbook of Parapsychology, ed. B. B. Wolman (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977), 382–413.

45Alfonso Martinez-Taboas, ‘An Appraisal of the Role of Aggression and the Central Nervous System in RSPK Agents’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 78 (1984): 55–69; Alfonso Martinez-Taboas and Carlos Alvarado, ‘Poltergeist Agents: A Review of Recent Research Trends and Conceptualizations’, European Journal of Parapsychology 4 (1984): 99–110.

46Alain Assailly, ‘Parapsychological Influences of Middle-Aged Persons on Young Sensitives’, in Proceedings of Four Conferences of Parapsychological Studies (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1957), 165–67.

47Daniel Scott Rogo, ‘The Poltergeist and Family Dynamics: A Report on a Recent Investigation’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 51 (1982): 233–37; Daniel Scott Rogo, On the Track of the Poltergeist (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986); and Phillip Snoyman, ‘Family Therapy in a Case of Alleged RSPK’, Parapsychological Journal of South Africa 6 (1985): 75–90.

48Djohar Si Ahmed, Parapsychologie et psychanalyse (Paris: Dunod, 1990); and Sylvain Michelet, Lorsque la maison crie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994).

49Walter von Lucadou, ‘Der flüchtige Spuk’, Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie 24 (1982): 93–109; Walter von Lucadou and Frauke Zaradhnik, ‘Predictions of the Model of Pragmatic Information about RSPK: Paper for the Parapsychological Association Convention 2004’, in Proceedings of Presented Papers: The Parapsychological Association 47rd Annual Convention August 5–8, 2004, ed. S. Schmidt (Vienna: Vienna University, 2004), 99–112.

50Stephen King, Carrie (New York: Doubleday, 1974); and Renaud Evrard, ‘Montrer la violence intérieure: Figures cinématographiques de l’adolescente hantée’, in L’adolescente vue par le cinema, ed. S. Dupont and H. Paris (Paris: Erès, 2013), 217–25.

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