Unleashed. Of Poltergeists and Murder: The Curious Story of Tina Resch

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Fall, 2005 by John Palmer

UNLEASHED. OF POLTERGEISTS AND MURDER: THE CURIOUS STORY OF TINA RESCH by William Roll and Valerie Storey. New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2004. Pp. 309. $14.00 (paperback). ISBN 0-7434-8294-8.

The long-awaited book describing the Tina Resch poltergeist case was published in 2004, 20 years after the outbreak occurred. Although reports of the case had been presented much earlier at conventions of the Parapsychological Association (e.g., Roll, 1993), to my knowledge no reports have appeared in professional journals. Much of the book consists of detailed accounts of the numerous poltergeist events, which Roll labels as recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK), including the viability of conventional interpretations of many of them. It thus comes close to providing the level of detail found in journal reports of previous cases Roll has investigated (with the exception of exact measurements of the distances objects traveled, and the like). At the same time the book is obviously intended for a lay audience, and toward this end Roll collaborated with a popular writer, Valerie Storey. The result is a book that is quite readable and entertaining as well as informative, despite several instances, mentioned below, where more information would have been desirable.

The events surrounded one Tina Resch, the 14-year-old adopted daughter of Joan and John Resch, a middle-class couple from Columbus, Ohio. Tina had five adult siblings, who were no longer living regularly at the house, and Joan had taken on four much younger foster children as well. The events began on March 1, 1984, and a few days later Roll was informed of the case by Mike Harden, a news reporter for a major local newspaper. Roll, accompanied by an assistant, began his investigation on March 12. Dates and times of events are given only sporadically and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of the timeline. Particularly difficult to place is a 3-day period during which the family escaped the house to live in a motel. According to the location of this section in the text, one would think the absence occurred sometime toward the end of the 1st week of activity, but reports of disturbances in the house covered more than 3 of these days. The last day of Roll's investigation is also not stated, although the duration of the "turmoil" is given on p. 163 as 2 weeks. If this refers to the turmoil that occurred during Roll's visit, we can estimate the departure date as March 26 and the duration of the outbreak as 25 days. Tina left with Roll for the first of three visits to North Carolina, and when she returned home, there were no further disturbances.

Prior to Roll's arrival, events were witnessed (according to my count) by 17 persons (excluding the foster children), most (at least) of whom Roll subsequently interviewed. In addition to Joan, John, and Tina, they included three of the older siblings who were visiting the house, Harden and his photographer, an electrician, two preachers, and Tina's caseworker. Events were witnessed by several more persons during two of three visits Tina made to North Carolina, including parapsychologists James Carpenter and Steven Baumann.

The case is similar to previous RSPK cases investigated by Roll in a number of respects, including, of course, the age of the focal person. I also found it strikingly similar to two published cases I investigated myself in my younger years, in both of which the focal person was not living with his or her biological parents (Palmer, 1974; Pratt & Palmer, 1976). Another dimension of similarity was the nature of the disturbances. As was true in both of my cases, movements of objects over a distance were not the first events to occur. In the Resch case, the initial disturbances were what I call "electromechanical" events, such as appliances turning on and off by themselves. The first event was the numbers on a digital clock rapidly changing on their own. There were also a couple of sightings of an apparition, described as a "dark shadow." However, the case was dominated by the usual panoply of object movements, often occurring in clusters with respect to time. Sometimes the objects were large; a particular favorite was a love seat that Tina liked to sit on. As in earlier cases, the object movements conformed to the principles of object and area focusing--the same objects and objects from the same location being repeatedly affected--as well as an inverse relation to the distance from Tina. (This, of course, is part of what defines her as being the focal person.) Roll arrived during the object moving phase and was able to observe a number of events in which Tina's whereabouts were established to be such that she could not have thrown the objects, pulled strings, or the like. In one especially hectic 52-minute period there were, in addition to 5 presumably independent sounds, 15 object movements, 6 of which Roll considered evidential. Before Roll arrived, a photographer from Harden's newspaper, Fred Shannon, accomplished the rare feat of capturing on film an object in motion, in this case a telephone receiver flying in front of Tina's body, with Tina not touching it. This photo, along with several others of Tina and other relevant persons, are included in the book.