The Grrl Power theory of poltergeist phenomena basically states that adolescent girls are like psychokinetic pressure cookers. Puberty heaps on the hormones, while historically male-biased cultural norms encourage young women to repress their burgeoning sexuality. Teenage angst! Social pressures! Familial stress! In certain young women, the combination of these factors supposedly leads to involuntary Carrie-style outbursts that are suspiciously similar to activities traditionally labeled as poltergeist goings-on.

To be fair, the theory doesn’t apply exclusively to the fairer sex. Psychologist Nandor Fodor, who was fascinated by the notion that poltergeist activity could be the result of an unknowing human agent’s psychic temper tantrums, felt that anyone with an undue amount of repressed rage or sexual desire was a likely candidate for psychokinetic agenthood (though his most famous case, the 1938 Thornton Heath poltergeist, did involve a neurotic woman). It wasn’t until the 1960s, when North Carolina’s William Roll got into the action, that blame fell squarely on the smooth, freckled shoulders of womanhood. Roll, of course, admitted that male teenagers have the capacity for psychic upheaval, but that young women, due to the aforementioned social and cultural factors, combined with their sugar-and-spice genetics, are much more susceptible to what he dubbed Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK).

Remember Gauld and Cornell, the guys from Monday’s column who allegedly collated over 500 poltergeist reports and created a percentage-based list of case-to-case similarities? They weren’t fans of Roll or Fodor, and claimed that both parapsychologists’ methods and conclusions were spurious (this is interesting in light of Roll’s claim that he used all of 116 cases in crafting his claims about the prevalence of teenage females in poltergeist incidents). Unfortunately, neither researcher ever detailed a plausible alternative theory. Even today, those who reject Fodor’s and Roll’s talk of unbounded psychic energy argue that most poltergeist cases are caused by angry ghosts. In recent years, poltergeist research has moved beyond teenagers to look at RSPK (or similar phenomena) in adult schizophrenics, depressives, manics and psychotics.

Knee-jerk feminism would almost certainly accuse Roll of sexism, but I think there’s a bit more to his ideas. The man’s a liberal-leaning fringe psychologist conducting his research amidst the cultural revolution of the 1960s. If anything, Roll’s theory is a back-door indictment of the repressive ideals of the ‘50s packaged as a finger-wagging pseudo-scientific document of the chickens-coming-home-to-roost variety. Women are robbed of irrepressible conscious power that then manifests unconsciously and unpredictably. Really, every poltergeist theory centers on the empowerment of the societally disenfranchised, whether they be kids, women or the mentally ill (and, hey, ghosts are corporeally disenfranchised). More than that, if we accept that a majority of poltergeist cases do, in fact, center on members of at least one of the aforementioned groups, and that, in all likelihood, the reports are fabricated, or the phenomena is rigged, by said disenfranchised people, then, at the very least, the empowerment is real. The mere possibility of poltergeist activity, via hoax or RSPK, has led to discussions about society’s attitudes towards women and the mentally ill, and about the emotional needs of adolescents. So all of you sexually repressed neurotic chicks, and all of you disregarded crazy dudes – keep flipping tables and slamming doors. Become agents. Grab the world by the light fixtures, and make yourselves heard.

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