One of the most well documented and infamous hauntings in America started on the night of
May 6th, 1961. It was Ernie Rivers' birthday, a shy kid with few friends who lived with his
grandmother, Mabelle Clark, in a small apartment in the Felix Fuld project in Newark, New Jersey.
Ernie was a quiet and lonely kid with few friends,
but on the evening of his 13th birthday, something came to Ernie- and it was not leaving willingly.
It all began with what seemed like an accident. That night as
Ernie sat in his room playing by himself, his grandmother, in her own room,
jumped as a glass jar suddenly fell from its perch atop a dresser and crashed on the floor.
This would just be the start.
Two days later, Ernie and his grandmother were eating dinner
in the kitchen when to their amazement, six punchbowl cups all come off their
wall hooks one by one and fell to the floor. The startled duo stared numbly at the cups,
trying to rationalize how all six cups had just fallen off their hooks in perfect succession. But
the night wasn't over yet. A few hours later, as Ernie and his grandmother were relaxing,
several glass bottles inside the bathroom smash on the floor. Rushing to investigate,
the two watch in amazement as a bottle of antiseptic comes flying into the living room
and lands with a thud on the floor. Believing an intruder was in the house, Mabelle rushes
to the bathroom only to find the door closed, and once opened, the bathroom completely empty!
How in the world did a bottle of antiseptic fly
through a closed door and land in the living room?!
Shaken, Mabelle invited a neighbor over to take her mind off the troubles. She was hesitant to
speak about what was going on- she didn't want to be labeled as crazy by the building tenants-
and she feared being discovered by the building manager. In an age of institutionalized racism,
the last thing Mabelle and her grandson needed was to be labeled as 'troublemakers'.
But if Mabelle wasn't going to come clean about the happenings inside the apartment,
whatever malevolent force had invited itself inside wasn’t going to go away.
As the two older women chatted, a cologne bottle suddenly darts into the living room and begins to
zig and zag through the air. Finally, it smashes on the floor, spilling the contents everywhere.
The neighbor then watches in amazement as a glass decanter begins to move by itself from its perch
atop the refrigerator, and hurries to catch it before it too falls and smashes on the floor.
Looking at Mabelle expectantly and demanding answers, she is forced to come clean about
the phenomena she and her grandson had been experiencing lately. Despite what she has just
witnessed, the neighbor remains skeptical- until suddenly the lamp in the living room
shatters into a million pieces completely on its own! Mabelle, the neighbor, and Ernie all flee
the apartment... but they will have to return eventually and face the evil entity within.
The incident would become known as “Project Poltergeist”,
and would become the first haunting documented by American parapsychologists.
Young Ernie had grown up in Montclair, New Jersey, with his mother and father.
Whatever happy childhood Ernie had hoped for though would be destroyed two weeks
before Christmas in 1956. His mother, Ann, had battled random illnesses all her life,
and she had once more fallen ill. Complaining of her illness to Ernie's father, Ernest Sr.,
the two got into a fight as they had no money for a doctor visit and what
little money they did have Ernest was saving for his son's Christmas gifts.
Angry, Ernest Sr. rolled over in bed and complained, “You're nothing but a doctor's bill
to me.” before falling asleep. Later that night, Ann had a fever dream that Ernest was trying to
kill her to put an end to the financial drain on the family. Waking up from the evil nightmare,
she found the .38 revolver her husband kept hidden inside a suitcase under the
bed and tucked the weapon under her pillow for protection as she drifted back off to sleep.
But something may have been prodding Ann to kill her husband, and it wouldn't rest until she did.
An hour later, Ann woke up again, unable to shake the evil feeling from the nightmare
she'd had earlier. Watching her husband sleep, Ann shook him awake and asked,
“Ernest, are you tired of me?”. Ernest didn't reply, and simply went back to sleep.
That's when Ann pulled out the revolver and shot him twice in the chest, killing him instantly.
Ernie's mother would go on to be sentenced to 18 to 22 years for the murder of his father,
and Ernie was forced to go live with his grandparents. However, shortly after arriving
at their apartment, Ernie's grandfather passed away, leaving him alone with his grandmother,
Mabelle. Then, in April of 1961, Ann escaped from the minimum security prison she was being kept at,
but remained at large as an evil force entered her child's life.
The haunting activity continued when Ernie and Mabelle were forced to return back to
their apartment after seeking safety for the night at a neighbor's place. Poor and living
on a fixed income, the two had little choice but face the evil inside their home head on,
though they desperately hoped that the activity would wind down or die out.
Their wish never came true. In fact, the phenomena they experienced would only grow in intensity.
In the days after Ernie's thirteenth birthday, he and Mabelle recorded nearly two dozen incidents
of plates, mugs, mirrors, light bulbs, and other random objects either shattering,
being thrown across the apartment, or simply falling from their perches and breaking on the
floor. One day as Ernie sat at the dining room table doing homework, a pepper shaker
levitated from the top of the stove and floated over to him, landing beside him on the table.
Whatever was behind the activity seemed to focus on Ernie. When the activity became too intense,
the two would flee to Mabelle's daughter's home the next town over,
but they couldn’t stay there forever. Inevitably,
the duo would have to return and face the grim reality of living inside a haunted apartment.
A popular theory is that poltergeist activity is attracted to children entering their teenage
years, and especially children who have suffered great emotional distress
or experience difficulty and frustration with social interactions. The greater the
distress or social difficulties, the more intense the activity.
Ernie fit the bill for a poltergeist haunting perfectly. He had become a quiet, introverted
child after the murder of his father, and the fact that his mother had escaped from prison and was
now on the loose didn't help matters. He wouldn't show or acknowledge any emotions, and in hindsight
may have been suffering from a form of autism, compounding his emotional difficulties. Mabelle's
grandmother loved the child dearly however, calling him an “unbelievably good boy”. Much
to her frustration though, Mabelle's love didn't seem to get through Ernie's thick emotional armor.
The activity that haunted Mabelle and Ernie didn't restrict itself to their apartment,
and seemed to grow in power over time, spreading its evil influence to adjoining
units in the building. Neighbors began to report similar disturbances as well as weird noises,
to the point that local media began to pick up the story.
A few months after the activity started, Mabelle's son-in-law, William, along with
another relative were visiting the two when a reporter from the Newark News, Douglas Eldridge,
stopped by. He asked for an interview, but didn't hide the fact that he believed the entire event
to be largely a joke. Mabelle reluctantly agreed and invited him to the apartment,
as she recounted the events of the haunting to him. Suddenly,
a cup that Eldridge confirmed he had seen sitting securely atop a bookshelf,
smashed on the floor. On the verge of tears, Mabelle admitted this was the fifth incident
that day alone, with a small mirror, a bottle of antiseptic, and a light bulb had all fallen to
the floor- the light bulb was even witnessed by Ernie to unscrew itself before falling.
Eldridge wasn't laughing anymore, and the story went to press.
The local press named the activity the 'Project Poltergeist', and the housing development opened
an investigation into the incidents. Irving Laskowitz, Tenant Relations Division director
of the Newark Housing Authority was placed in charge of the inquiry. Mabelle feared that the
investigation would look for any excuse to remove them from the housing project,
as African American residents often experienced evictions for even minor
incidents. The only recourse left for them then was to find housing in any number of
private buildings where predatory landlords charged exuberant prices to desperate people.
Irving was immediately dismissive of the idea of a poltergeist, and remarked that
the activity would die down as soon as Mabelle ran out of things to break. Clearly he believed
the haunting to be a hoax, and yet he also admitted that she had had a clean 20 year
long record prior to these events. Why she would suddenly start causing issues
for herself mystified him and any other housing authority investigator. Yet Irvin was determined
that there was a reasonable explanation for the activity, and carefully examined every square
inch of the apartment for some kind of building flaw or signs of trickery. They would find none,
but as the activity intensified Irving would later comment, “I only wish we had”.
The Newark Housing Authority was forced to acknowledge that something was happening
with the apartment, though exactly what they couldn't say. To some controversy,
they accepted the services of Edward Del Russo, a self-proclaimed exorcist and full time contractor.
Russo claimed that a lost soul was inhabiting the apartment and trying to get a message across to
Mabelle. He attempted to exorcise the spirit with a small ritual and the aid of a beeswax candle.
The activity did not go away. In fact, it returned with a fiery vengeance. Now though,
Mabelle and other building tenants became fearful that it was in fact the spirit of
Ernest Sr., and it would do anything to get Ernie away from Mabelle.
As the haunting activity intensified,
media attention from around the country grew and drew the attention of Dr. Charles D Wrege,
a native of Newark and assistant profession in the department of Management at Rutgers
University. Dr. Wrege also had a lifelong interest in parapsychology, and news of an
active haunting in his hometown was all the lure he needed to immediately seek out the family.
Dr. Wrege believed in the popular theory of Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis,
or RSPK. This theory postulated that some unseen force interacted with a human agent- typically a
troubled adolescent- in order to manifest direct physical effects on the environment. Often the
activity would begin with small displays before building to a crescendo and then eventually,
fading completely. Dr. Wrege made plans to visit the family and interview Ernie.
On the day of Dr. Wrege's arrival, the poltergeist made it clear it was not happy with the intrusion.
Before the doctor's arrival, Mabelle and her friend, Yetta, both witnessed an iron fly into
the room the two were sitting in. According to Yetta, the cord was stretched out stiff behind
the iron as if it too was being held aloft. Luckily the five pound iron missed both of
them. But the near misses wouldn't last. A large container of salt floated into the air
by itself and slammed into Ernie's back, and as the three re-entered the apartment later
a large bookcase fell over on its own. Even the tv fell over, forcing Mabelle to place
it facing the wall when not in use in hopes that it wouldn't break if it fell over again.
Over the course of the next two days Dr. Wrege, who was a trained engineer, carefully studied the
apartment looking for a natural explanation for the phenomenon and found nothing. Then,
near midnight on the second day there was a loud knocking on the front door, with a group of drunk
young men on the other side demanding to see “the boy with the flying objects”.
Dr. Wrege and Ernie remained silent, hoping the small group would lose interest and leave.
Then a rock flew through an open window and into the apartment. Dr. Wrege pulled Ernie
back into the kitchen and then went for the phone in order to call the police. However
as he reached for the phone, a glass fell off the table and smashed on the floor. Turning around,
Dr. Wrege saw Ernie standing near the counter and very visibly upset. Any suspicion that
Ernie had simply thrown the cup himself however was dispelled when a lamp fell
off the table in the living room with a loud thump fifteen feet away from the two.
Dr. Wrege contacted Ernie's uncle, William, to come over and then set himself to inspect the
lamp for any signs of wires or other trickery, but found none. After the uncle arrived,
the three set about to clean up the pieces of the shattered lamp when suddenly an ashtray
rose up into the air from an end table and flew past William, grazing his chin,
and into Mabelle's bedroom. Then, a pepper shaker struck William directly in the back.
The three now felt like they were under attack and prepared to leave the apartment.
Ernie left first as William turned off the kitchen and living room lights, when suddenly he yelled
out in pain. A salt shaker had crashed into the back of his head, and then picked up speed and
smashed against the wall next to him. Was it a warning? There was no time to tell,
as suddenly an ashtray on a bookshelf flew to the ground between William and Dr. Wrege. The three
fled the apartment and didn't return that night. A few days later, a reporter from the Newark
Star-Ledger and the assistant director of the Newark Housing Authority came to the apartment
to conduct a second investigation. The reporter and assistant director were both suspicious that
Ernie was behind the activity, but while at the apartment they watched a pill
bottle lift off a shelf and fly across the air to land inside Mabelle's room.
Ernie could not have been responsible, and the reporter would go on to document that Ernie was
in his room and would have had to “teleport” back and forth to throw the pill bottle.
Dr. Wrege was confident that Ernie was responsible though, but not in the sense that skeptics
believed he was. Instead, he believed that Ernie was the channel for the poltergeist activity,
and carried out an experiment to prove it. He sat Ernie down at the kitchen table and asked
him to pick an object to focus the psychokinetic activity on. Ernie chose a mustard jar. Twenty
minutes later with Ernie in the living room and Dr. Wrege and William in the kitchen, the mustard
jar suddenly floated up above the table and over the heads of the two before being hurled into
the wall. Incredibly, both men noted that he jar seemed to shatter before hitting the wall.
In September of 1961, Dr. William G. Roll, director of the Psychical Research Foundation
at Duke University and former World War II Dutch Resistance member, came to New York
for a three day Parapsychological Association Convention. On the last day of the convention,
Dr. Roll joined Dr. Wrege for a visit to the haunted apartment,
but upon arriving discovered that Ernie had been staying with his uncle for a few
weeks. While there, no strange activity had been reported at either location.
Now convinced that Ernie was in fact the focus of the activity. Dr. Roll asked for Mabelle to bring
Ernie back to the apartment so he could be directly observed. Dr. Roll would visit the
family multiple times in the coming weeks, and on one visit he rushed into the apartment after
hearing a commotion inside. Upon bursting in, he found Ernie sitting on the couch and
an ashtray still moving about on the floor as if it had been thrown. On a second visit,
money went missing from Mabelle's purse and Ernie was blamed for the theft,
despite it being extremely uncharacteristic of the very well behaved boy. Later, as Ernie was taking
the trash out, he discovered the missing money strewn about the hallway outside the apartment,
including a dollar bill ripped in half and two extra dollars than what had been taken.
It was almost as if the paranormal activity wanted Ernie to be blamed for its actions.
Mabelle's patience with the entire phenomenon was wearing her nerves thin, and she at last
had enough of the investigation. She told Dr. Roll and Ernie both to get out of the apartment,
and as Dr. Roll began to debate with her, a bottle smacked into the back of his head.
Ernie couldn't have been responsible, as Dr. Roll was facing him head on when the attack took place.
Ernie went to stay with his aunt and uncle, but eventually, the two couldn't afford to
keep him with them any longer. He was forced to return to his grandmother's apartment,
and when he did so too did the activity. However, it returned with a vengeance, as the tv,
the washing machine, refrigerator, and an entire kitchen cupboard fell over onto the floor. Poor
Ernie was terrified every day he had to live in that apartment, but had little other choice.
Mabelle's desperation grew to the point that she took Ernie to the police and begged them to
take him and put him somewhere safe. However, unless he broke the law there was nothing the
police could do. She then turned to various friends who all took Ernie in- but this time
the activity followed. After a rapid series of terrifying incidents, Ernie would be forced
to leave one home after another as the activity made its displeasure known with growing violence.
The Newark Housing Authority had had enough at this point,
and working with the New Jersey Board of Child Welfare, decided that
Ernie would be removed from Mabelle's custody and placed in a group home.
Dr. Roll knew that poltergeist activity tended to end very abruptly after reaching a crescendo,
and feared losing an opportunity to study a once-in-a-lifetime case in his own backyard. A
month after Ernie's departure from the apartment, Dr. Roll, along with Dr. Wrege and experts at NYU,
examined Ernie and invited him to the Parapsychology Laboratory at
Duke University for observation. Because it was clear that the activity intensified when
Ernie was in the presence of his grandmother, they invited Mabelle
as well. Now the activity could be studied under controlled laboratory conditions.
But the entity behind the activity was very angry at this turn of events.
Dr. Roll got the two a room at the Jack Tar Hotel, however as soon as Dr. Roll got home
he received messages from Mabelle that he needed to return immediately to the hotel. Upon arrival,
he discovered Ernie on the floor with his arms wrapped around the television. The two reported
an ashtray falling off a table and a glass smashing while Ernie was inside the bathroom,
where Ernie saw toothpaste float from the shelf and get hurled into the bathtub. Back in the room,
Mabelle had put a lamp on the floor only to have it flip over while a phone next to
her also fell to the floor. Fearing that the expensive television would be next,
Ernie ran to it and held on to it for dear life.
Laboratory observations of Ernie began on December 18th. First,
Ernie's brain waves were recorded with a neurologist at first concluding that
all activity fell within a normal range. However, odd spikes of activity that the
doctor couldn't explain began to appear on the results, confusing the staff.
Dr. John Altrocchi, professor of medical psychology, interviewed Ernie alongside
several graduate students. Dr. Altrocchi became fascinated with Ernie, remarking that Ernie was
the only person he had ever encountered who had no discrepancy between the self and ideal self.
In other words, Ernie didn't have an idealized version of himself that he wanted to present
to the world, which lended credibility to the fact that Ernie wasn't hoaxing the phenomenon.
Further psychological evaluation revealed that Ernie was actively suppressing his emotions-
both positive and negative. Ernie admitted to feeling extreme waves of anger and even hatred
towards the children who made fun of him, and the psychologists theorized that perhaps
Ernie had bottled up his emotions out of fear that if he let them out, he might do something as
drastic as his mother had done when she murdered his father. However, Ernie was also a deeply
lonely boy who craved normalcy and a love that he simply couldn't, and wasn't willing to, receive.
All this supported the theory by the paranormal experts that the poltergeist activity could be
linked directly to Ernie's mental state. But it was up to them to determine if
the haunting was real or not, and they would soon make a shocking discovery.
Ernie and his grandmother were placed inside a room with a one-way mirror, observed without their
knowledge. After waiting a short while, Mabelle was asked to leave the room. During her absence,
Ernie quickly snatched up two measuring tapes from the table in front of him and hid them
inside his shirt. When Mabelle returned, she was immediately called back out again. As soon as her
back was turned, Ernie threw the two tapes at her. When confronted, Ernie denied throwing the tapes.
But even though Ernie had been caught red-handed throwing the tapes, all was not as it seemed.
Some of the activity recorded by reporters, Dr. Wrege, and housing
authority investigators was beyond the capability of Ernie to have hoaxed,
so the doctors continued their investigation with a barrage of psychological tests. Eventually,
they ran a polygraph test on Ernie to test his truthfulness, and he successfully passed
a series of control questions. However, when asked about the tapes thrown at his grandmother,
Ernie insisted that he had not thrown the tapes- and the polygraph showed no sign of deception!
The doctors were confused. In their analysis of Ernie they had deduced that he was slightly
below average in terms of intelligence for a child of his age- so how had he outwitted the
professors and faked a polygraph? A theory quickly emerged- Ernie was entering states of complete
dissociation. In other words, he wasn't lying, Ernie hadn't been the one to throw the tapes
because he wasn't consciously aware of doing so. But that left the question... who was responsible?
In further psychological interviews, Ernie opened up about his father,
describing him as a very abusive man who often beat him and his mother. However, other times
Ernie genuinely showed love for his dead father. Then, when asked about his murder,
the boy simply remarked that he was relieved it hadn't been his father who had killed his mother.
The team came to the conclusion that the poltergeist activity was directly related
to the family turmoil and Ernie's inner psychological trauma. With the discovery
of Ernie's dissociative states, it was now feared that the poltergeist force behind
the activity was not just acting around Ernie, but directly influencing him against his will.
The doctors came to a final conclusion: the only way to help Ernie was to separate him from his
grandmother permanently. Ernie was thus sent back to a foster group home and then a farm for foster
children. Eventually he was returned to his aunt and uncle, who despite the financial hardship,
chose to keep Ernie with them in order to provide him with some stability.
The activity continued at his aunt and uncle's home, but with far less severity. Eventually,
by the time that Ernie turned 18 and joined the Marine Corps, the activity had died down
completely. Or so it seemed. As Ernie grew into adulthood, he married, and years later his wife
claimed to witness an occasional glass or other item falling to the floor from time to time.
However, one incident remained burned in her memory.
She woke up in the middle of the night and rolled over to see the figure of a large man
sitting on their windowsill before disappearing a moment later. Waking Ernie up in a panic,
she told him what she'd seen. Ernie however responded as if he was completely familiar
with what she had just seen, remarking only with, “Just go back to sleep. Don't worry about it.”
Now go check out The True Story Of The Enfield Poltergiest, or click this other video instead!