Poltergeist reports follow a recognisable pattern across centuries and cultures: unexplained knocking or rapping, small objects thrown or displaced, furniture moving, and occasional physical disturbances like scratches or bruises, typically concentrated in one household over a period of weeks or months and then stopping.
The German folk term, poltergeist, "noisy ghost" or "rumbling spirit," reflects the traditional explanation, a mischievous or malevolent spirit haunting the location. Investigators noticed early on, well before formal parapsychology existed, that these disturbances almost always clustered around one specific living resident of the household, most often a child or teenager, rather than the building itself, which is part of what eventually led researchers away from a haunted-place explanation and toward a haunted-person one. The most famous twentieth-century case in this reframing is the 1967 Rosenheim disturbance at a Bavarian law office, investigated by parapsychologist Hans Bender and two Max Planck Institute physicists, where lights flickered and objects moved specifically when a 19-year-old secretary, Annemarie Schneider, was present, and the disturbances stopped when she left the company's employment.