What is a poltergeist?

Answer 1

My son says it's "energy from angry teenagers"

Answer 2

"Poltergeist" is a German word meaning "noisy spirit." Current research indicates, however, that poltergeist activity may have nothing to do with ghosts or spirits. Since the activity seems to center around an individual, it is believed that it is caused by the subconscious mind of that individual. It is, in effect, psychokinetic activity. The individual is often under emotional, psychological or physical stress (even going through puberty). Effects can include rappings on walls and floors, the physical movement of objects, effects on lights and other electric appliances - even the manifestation of physical phenomena.These are the major theories for poltergeist phenomena.

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Poltergeist activity originates with agents
Poltergeist activity tends to occur around a single person called an agent or a focus. Focuses are often, but not limited to, pubescent children. Almost seventy years of research by the Rhine Research Center in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, has led to the hypothesis among parapsychologists that the "poltergeist effect" is a form of psychokinesis generated by a living human mind (that of the agent). According to researchers at the Rhine Center, the "poltergeist effect" is the outward manifestation of psychological trauma.

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Separate existences
Poltergeists might simply exist, like the "elementals" described by occultists.

Another version posits that poltergeists originate after a person dies in a powerful rage at the time of death. According to yet another opinion, ghosts and poltergeists are "recordings." When there is a powerful emotion, sometimes at death and sometimes not, a recording is believed to be "embedded" in a place or, somehow, in the "fabric of time" itself. This recording will continue to play over and over again until the energy embedded disperses.

However some poltergeists have had the ability to articulate themselves and to have distinct personalities, which suggests some sort of self-awareness and intent. Practioners of astral projection have reported the existence of unfriendly astral life forms, which Robert Bruce called "negs" (who we might also identify with elementals). If they exist, these may well have the ablity to affect the physical world.

See also:

Mischievous fairies
Undead
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Caused by physical forces
Some scientists propose that all poltergeist activity that they cannot trace to fraud has an explained physical explanation such as static electricity, electromagnetic fields, ultra- and infrasound and/or ionised air. In some cases such as the Rosenheim poltergeist case, the physicist F. Karger from the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik and G. Zicha from the Technical University of Munich found neither none of these effects present, and psi proponents claim that no evidence of fraud was ever found, even after a sustained investigation from the police force and CID, though criminologist Herbert Schäfer quotes an unnamed detective watching the agent pushing a lamp when she thought nobody was looking, however if this is true or not police officers did sign statements that they had witnessed the phenomena. John Hutchinson has claimed that he has created poltergeist effects in the lab. Also worth noting is that some scientists now propose that poltergeists and ball lightning may be linked phenomena. Some scientists go as far as calling them pseudo-psychic phenomena and claim that under some circumstances they are caused by obscure physical effects.

See also:

Hutchinson effect
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Self-delusion and hoaxes
Skeptics think that the phenomena are hoaxes perpetrated by the agent. Indeed, many poltergeist agents have been caught by investigators in the act of throwing objects. A few of them later confessed to faking.

Skeptics maintain that parapsychologists are especially easy to fool when they think that many occurrences are real and discount the hoax hypothesis from the start. Even after witnessing firsthand an agent throwing objects, psi-believing parapsychologists rationalize the fact away by assuming that the agents are only cheating when caught cheating, and when you do not catch them, the phenomenon is genuine. One excuse given is that the agents often fake phenomena when the investigation coincides with a period of time where there appears to be little or no 'genuine' phenomena occurring, which the agents believe makes them look foolish.

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Examples
William Roll, Hans Bender and Harry Price are perhaps three of the most famous poltergeist investigators in the annals of parapsychology. Harry Price investigated Borley Rectory which is widely regarded as "the most haunted house in England."

But according to the two physicists this did not rule out what they called "short duration forces" or the case that the effects that they were looking for were not constant, but only happening at the time of the phenomena, which was witnessed by Hans Bender, the police force, the CID, reporters, and the physicists present and the phenomena such as the rotation of a picture and swinging lamps were captured on video (which was one of the first times any poltergeist activity has been captured on film) and strange sounds that sounded electrical in origin were recorded. The claims were aired in a documentary in 1975 in a series called "Leap in the Dark".

Answer 3

A molevolent spirit that inhabits a building and terrorizes people. It is usually demonic, or a wraith (a person who died a horrible murder)

Answer 4

a ghost (the opposite of Casper)

Answer 5

a haunting, a ghoust in your house

Answer 6

it's a mischievious ghost.

Answer 7

they're mischief ghost...

Answer 8

They're here.... ARRGGGHHHH!!!