Project Poltergeist
By: Saleah Blancaflor
Tags: Movies, Horror, Storytelling, New Jersey, Journalism

Once Ernie returned to stay at Mabelle’s apartment, Roll visited them multiple times. At one point, Roll was in the hall outside the apartment when he heard a commotion. According to Ernie, an ashtray hit the power button on a remote control, shutting the TV off while the boy was in the middle of watching something. As per his notes, Roll rushed into the apartment to witness an ashtray “still moving on the floor.” Ernie was seated quietly and calmly on a couch on the opposite end of the room. Another time when Roll was inside the apartment, money went missing from Mabelle’s purse, with the visiting professor and Mabelle herself suspecting Ernie must have swiped it, however uncharacteristic of him; but his pockets were empty. When the boy took the trash to the basement, he found money strewn around the halls, including one bill ripped in half, all told adding up to two dollars more than what had gone missing, as if the forces were toying with them — this time trying to direct the adults’ ire and blame against Ernie.

Emotions ran high. Just as Roll felt he was coming closer to figuring out what was causing the disruptions, Mabelle grew agitated with the whole investigation. She told Roll and Ernie both to leave the apartment. Roll reassured Mabelle nobody would get hurt. But as Roll began to debate with Mabelle, something hard hit him in the back of the head. It was a bottle. Roll had been facing the direction of Ernie, who remained calm and composed in the same position on the sofa. Ernie later revealed that a bottle struck him, too, when he had walked out of the apartment.

Sending Ernie back to his aunt and uncle was no simple matter of convenience, but also of safety. Accounts of extended poltergeists from the same era described conditions that got so bad they became deadly. In the 1960s, a young girl in Brazil began to be tormented by strange movements of stones and bricks in and around rooms she entered. The incidents turned into an all-out assault when, according to reports, her food was tainted when poison fell into it, and she was suffocated by a series of objects that landed on her face while she slept.

When Ernie’s aunt and uncle no longer had the resources for him to stay with them, he moved back into Mabelle’s apartment. In the coming months, the two reported being terrorized by the poltergeist. The TV set, the washing machine, the refrigerator and even a kitchen cupboard crashed to the floor. Ernie lived in a constant state of terror.

Most of these larger objects were the property of the Newark Housing Authority. In his notes, Dr. Roll recorded the very practical impact: “From being a family problem, the poltergeist now mushroomed into a problem for the housing project and thereby the county authorities.”

The Herrmann family of Long Island, whom Roll had studied in 1958 until their own experiences with poltergeists faded, reached out to express their support to Mabelle and Ernie. “Keep up your courage,” Lucille Herrmann urged, “and don’t panic.” The Herrmanns had been on the cover of Life magazine, and, years later, their case was said to have inspired the classic horror film Poltergeist. While receiving their share of press, Ernie and Mabelle had turned into subjects of rumor and innuendo. Looking back, it becomes difficult not to sense racial bias in the way the compassion for the Herrmanns, who were white and middle class, contrasted with suspicion and distrust of Ernie and his family. The tenants at 125 Rose Street, some of whom had witnessed incidents, generally believed the family’s accounts but also feared a malevolent spirit.

With nowhere left for Ernie to stay, Mabelle brought him to the Newark police station and begged them to take him in to protect him. They refused. They said there was nothing they could do for him unless he broke the law or was deemed mentally unstable. Mabelle brought Ernie to the house of one friend and then another. At each house, a disturbance reportedly occurred and nobody would allow Ernie to stay. The forces — whatever their cause, whatever they were — had broken free of the confines of the housing project and crescendoed.

For the NHA, policy dictated removing problems, or at least shuffling them elsewhere. Irving, the division director, worked closely with a case work supervisor from the Essex County district office and a representative from the New Jersey Board of Child Welfare. A decision was made. Ernie would be removed from Mabelle’s custody and placed in a group home.

Dr. Roll saw a unique chance to more deeply explore a once-in-a-lifetime case. But he was operating under a ticking clock — RSPK cases tended to end abruptly, which investigators believed made them so elusive to observe. Consulting with Charles Wrege and experts at NYU who did an examination of Ernie, Roll scrambled to arrange a trip that December for Ernie to come to the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. Since the events seemed to begin and intensify when Mabelle was around, they wanted to make sure she was present, too. Ernie and his grandmother had not seen each other for a month when they were reunited to go to North Carolina. If Roll felt pressure to make a discovery, so did Ernie. This could be his last chance to have an authority figure advocate returning him to his grandmother.

The West Duke Building

The Parapsychology Laboratory, which had been established in 1935, occupied the second floor of what was known as the West Duke Building, a grand Neoclassical structure of white pressed brick. The winter afternoon they arrived in Durham, Ernie and Mabelle were walking down a hallway outside of Roll’s office when a book that was on Roll’s desk fell to the hallway floor. “The poltergeist was still active,” Roll concluded, “and was ready to be confronted on laboratory territory.”

Roll brought them to the Jack Tar Hotel, where a room waited for them. Once Roll returned home, he received messages from Mabelle that things had devolved at the hotel. When Roll rushed back to their room, he arrived to the sight of Ernie on the floor with his arms around the television. Ernie and Mabelle reported that an ashtray had fallen and that a glass smashed while Ernie was inside the bathroom. Ernie described seeing the toothpaste float from the shelf into the bathtub. Then Mabelle related how a lamp that she put on the floor to avoid from breaking flipped over and the phone fell down. That was the moment when Ernie had grabbed the television to keep it from falling over. Roll rushed Ernie to his own house to stay there instead of the hotel. Dr. Gaither Pratt, another psychologist who worked at Duke, ended up sneaking into the hotel to repair the damage.

Laboratory observations began on the Duke campus on December 18, with a bevvy of investigators involved. Stakes and tension mounted as details of what happened at the hotel and at Roll’s office were collected. “The fact that even the Parapsychology Laboratory failed to inhibit the poltergeist,” Roll later reflected, “offered an opportunity for closer observation than we had been able to achieve so far.”

Technicians placed cold metal discs on Ernie’s head as a neurology professor tested his brainwaves. At first, the neurologist concluded Ernie’s tests fell into the normal range, but after reviewing the results he noticed odd spikes of activity he was uncertain how to classify. Dr. John Altrocchi, professor of medical psychology, herded in a group of graduate students to interview and observe Ernie.

Altrocchi became fascinated by the boy. “He is the only person I have ever examined,” Altrocchi reported, “with no discrepancy between self and ideal self” — that is, Ernie did not have an idealized version of himself that he wished to present, further supporting conclusions shared across the board by the investigators that Ernie was not trying to deceive anyone about his role or understanding of the phenomena.

Altrocchi considered how difficult it must have been for Ernie to be an African American boy “being examined by strange white people in hospitals and laboratories five hundred miles from home” (the psychiatry professor’s notes also acknowledged, “I have not examined many negro boys his age”). Duke was still an all-white student body and faculty, a year away from becoming the last major university to integrate its campus. Altrocchi observed that the bashful Ernie tended to keep all his emotions, positive or negative, bottled up, to the point where they seemed ready to burst at any moment. The questioners pushed Ernie to the point that tears filled his eyes, even as he continued to deny feelings. In a word association test, Ernie responded in particular to the words “birthday” and “home,” evoking the first report of the poltergeist on the evening of his birthday at Mabelle’s apartment, which was another in a long line of places he called home that had a pattern of being ripped away from him. The experts observed that just as Mabelle wished Ernie was more open to affection, Ernie longed for a level of attention and love he was not given — or could not be given, considering all the losses of the last few years (a father lost to murder, a mother lost to prison, a grandfather lost to death).

Ernie’s strong exterior broke. He admitted that the kids picking on him at school made him angry. The taciturn boy wouldn’t have recounted the specifics, but the cruel taunting was easy enough to imagine: Look at that police car, Ernie, are they chasing your mom? However much he tried to suppress it, a storm of sadness and fury brewed inside him.

Even darker secrets spilled out. Ernie described the angriest he had ever been in his life as coming in the wake of his father beating him as a child. Altrocchi’s case notes present a fascinating snapshot of inner turmoil: It became clear at an early age, no matter how furious he was, he felt completely helpless and unable to express or act upon the anger. It is as if this way of dealing with — or not dealing with — anger has persevered and generalized so that it pervades his personality now.

What also became clear was that Ernie had quietly lived through a childhood of explosive violence. Altrocchi and his team delved further into the impact of the tragedy of Ernie’s parents on his inner life. It is interesting to note, the case records point out, that his grandmother describes him as timid, like his mother, so that it is conceivable that he has the idea that if he should ever let any anger out he would kill somebody as his mother did.

With such a breakthrough in the psychological workup, it fell on the paranormal experts to accelerate their own examination. A suite was prepared with a one-way mirror to an observation chamber. Dr. Gaither — who had been the one to clean the visitors’ hotel room — volunteered to observe from the other side while Ernie and Mabelle were placed in the meeting room and asked to wait. After a while, Mabelle left for a short period. Dr. Gaither watched as Ernie took two measuring tapes from the table and quickly hid them under his shirt. When Mabelle returned and left again, Ernie threw the two tapes after her. Not seeing Ernie throw the tapes, Mabelle called for Roll and told him another unexplained event had occurred. When confronted, Ernie denied throwing the tapes at his grandmother.

In that moment, everything turned upside-down. For the skeptics who had been circling the case, it would have seemed all that was left was to stamp the whole thing a fraud and declare that Ernie, indeed, had been fooling everyone all along. For believers, they’d have to struggle to reconcile this moment with those others that Ernie could not possibly have manipulated. The biggest twist was yet to come.

The Duke scientists swarming around Ernie came from across the university and other institutions, with experts chiming in from departments ranging from electrical engineering to mathematics. They initiated a polygraph and numerous other intensive tests including the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the Rorschach test, the Thematic Apperception Test, and figure drawing exercises. From these tests, Roll and his colleagues referred to Ernie as a “daydreamer” with “below average intelligence,” but also showed he had a latent ability to excel.