ABSTRACT
When my mother was young her household was plagued by a poltergeist. I have always been intrigued by the story, not least hearing about how the phenomenon was nothing like “special effect” ghosts in films, but had a sonic presence rather than a visual presence. Indeed, paranormal happenings seemingly often involve noise, particularly of the infrasonic and ultrasonic variety. My mother’s poltergeist activity exhibited an early warning on each occasion through the family dog becoming frenzied in clear reaction to sounds outside the range of human hearing, before the onset of a spate of audible banging and scraping sounds. Sounds can be disturbing, and one might argue that films often have scarier and more disturbing sounds and music than their visuals.
