The Indianapolis Star from Indianapolis, Indiana • Page 95

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2. tfU THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR- 2F TT I Poltergeist I 1 i hi Tina, 14, reacts to telephone that appears to Photographer captured one of many unusual disturbances On Saturday morning. March 1 a gloomy, hazy day, all the lights in the house seemed to turn on at once. Curious, thought Joan Resch as she stood in the kitchen. Then the dials on the washing machine started to move too fast The wall clocks raced.

Upstairs, water fau cets turned on. No one. Joan insists, as up there Just the poltergeist. Scared, Joan huddled the foster children around her. At lOJO wi, John came home.

He. too, was baffled. "Nobody thought anything about no ghosts or nothin'. We thought it was all in some crazy power feed," he recalled. Two workers from the power company came by but found nothing wrong.

When they left, the oddities resumed. If John and Joan are to be believed, they saw a television and a radio working even after John yanked the cords out of the wall. John called an electrician, Bruce Claggett whom he knew from work. Claggett, 54. a regular churchgoer, remains shaken by what he saw that day in the Resch home.

Weeks later, he said he doesnt want to believe in the supernatural, but no longer feels he has a choice. "I'll tell you this," he said, "she's got some POWER." Claggett initially assumed something had gone haywire in the switchbox at the house. He didnt believe John's story about the TV and the radio. To Claggett's dismay, the lights kept coming on. He finally turned to Tina and Joan.

"OK, which one of you is trying to drive John psycho, playing games with him?" HEY PLEADED innocence. 1 Then Claggett heard the garbage disposal crank up. No one was near the switch. The kitchen light came on. He saw no culprit.

Claggett, flustered, decided to put tape over the light switches to solve the problem. It didn't. The lights kept switching on again. And the tape vanished. In the middle of this breakdown of normality, John and Joan had to leave the house tempo rarily.

leaving Claggett to deal with the poltergeist. Claggett didn't trust Tina. He made her stay by his side as he walked around the house, resolutely taping down the switches. But every time he made a trip around the house, he discovered more light switches that had been flicked on. Tina remained at his side.

The only other humans in the house were little foster children, all younger than 5. "I was beginning to doubt my sanity." Claggett said later in the month, "I know it wasnt Tina, because she was right with me. I dont believe in spirits or whatever, but I know there was some force in that house that was able to do something that I couldn't explain It was not a human being doing it After Claggett left, things got really hairy. The poltergeist took aim at any object that wasnt bolted to the ground. A crib leaped into the air.

Ptacemats flew. Chairs shifted around the table. An end table tumbled end over end through the living room. John Resch finally decided something supernatural was going on when a champagne glass came hurtling out of the dining room and smashed against the kitchen stove. VUAS IT TINA? No; he had been 'f watching her, on the other side of the room, stepping into the bathroom.

The dining room appeared vacant Resch felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. The family had no choice but to call the police. The dispatcher radioed that a 16 a disturbance was in progress. Two police searched the house, pulling out their guns at one point One, a believer in spirits, told Joan Resch, "If these things keep happening, you're probably going to need more help than the police department." When they put Tina to bed, the phenomena ceased. The next day, Sunday, the chaos began anew.

When the Resches' grandson, Aarin, showed up, he saw everything in the entire living room go berserk. Remembers Joan, "He saw this chair roll around the room and chase Tina, a dining room chair came through this door into the living room Candles were flying through the room. Pictures on the wall were rocking, and some of them fell." Little Aarin vowed never to come back. THE NEXT DAY. the Franklin 1 County Children's Service took the foster children away.

Joan Resch called various departments at Ohio State University seeking advice. She got the run-around. Exasperated, she called Mike Harden, a respected columnist Continued From Page 1 School at Princeton compares the psychic world to a vast, primordial swamp, ever shrouded in mist, where bizarre phenomenological creatures unex pectedly writhe out of the ooze just long enough to baffle and bedevil their witnesses QN MARCH 3, 1984. one of these creatures invaded the home of Tina Resch. A poltergeist.

Poltergeists usually haunt a per son, according to legend. Plumb the person and you may begin to under stand the poltergeist. And so: Who is Tina Resch? Somehow, the news media never managed to learn much more about Tina than that she caused sofas to lurch around. Which is why we went to Colum bus to find her She wasnt there. She had been whisked away to North Carolina by a poltergeist hunter who wanted to do tests.

Meantime. John and Joan Resch said wearily, they'd fill in the details THIS PARTICULAR "noisy spir 1 it." as poltergeists also are known, could scarcely have found a more American stage than the Resch home in a middle-class Co lumbus neighborhood. John a balding retiree with tattoos from a stint as a Navy baker and a paunch refers most questions to his wife. Joan. She has a kindly smile and a wavy perm, and talks in very precise, short sentences.

"I never even heard of telekinesis. I had never even watched things like (Steven Spielberg's mov ie) Poltergeist. said Joan. The couple has six children, two of them adopted. Tina, abandoned in a hospital at 10 months, is the youngest They also have cared for about 250 foster children since the early 1950s.

Tina has been troubled; two and a half years ago. she was pulled out of school by her parents. Neither the Resches nor the school board will say why. Since then, she has had a tutor And recently, Tina has been haunted by the mystery of her birth parents, a mystery Tina thinks she may never solve. MOISY SPIRITS always have chased girls like Tina.

Notebook ft have flown across lap that troubled Columbus teen thing kooky happen. Roll said. A few days earlier, a candle sailed from a table top to a spot underneath a desk. Tina was near, but not within arm's reach, he said. Tina Resch couldn't get outof bed.

She had broken her leg a week earlier riding an all terrain vehicle. She said hello in an edgy but friend ly voice. The phone rang and Tina snapped her head forward. "Sorry," Tina said sheepishly. "I'm still jumpy." In her hand, she absent-mindedly wagged a bottle of nail polish.

Tina said her power is real. "It's an energy that I create." she said, sounding as though she was quoting someone. "I'd never heard of this before now." She said she had watched Pol tergeist on cable television about 10 times. "Fascinating, but dumb." She's no magician, and resents the accusations of Randi, who never even talked to her. She can't wait for her parents to arrive and take her back to Columbus.

C'WIP! The interview was inter-A rupted when an unidentified object shot through the air and landed on the floor next to the interviewer. A brief investigation revealed the object to be a plastic hospital wrist band. Tina quickly apologized: She said she had been fidgeting with it. tugging and stretching, and it snapped off her wrist and went flying. The laws of physics, for the moment, remained intact.

Later in the day, Tina hobbled to the bathroom on crutches. She winced in pain. In the long hallway, James Carpenter, one of the psychotherapists who have seen Tina, said, "Tina is ingenuous on the one hand but kind of tricky on the She likes jokes and surprises and magic tricks. She likes to see people fooled in some way, it delights her." But, a hoaxer? He didn't know. TINA EASED her way back to her room.

It was raining outside. "For a while, I thought it was just a ghost," Tina said, "an invisible person moving things. But then Suddenly, there were two raps on the front door of the house. Almost simultaneously Saphoo reared up and barked and Tina snapped forward her head and belted out "YUUEEEEE!" a painful shriek. "Sorry," Tina said.

Settling in bed, Tina said she wanted to grow up to be a psychologist, to help out other kids who have psychic powers, and dont know how to deal with it She'll be on call when Bill Roll sets up a toll free hot line for kids plagued by poltergeists. And eventually, she'll be able to control her power, turn it off, turn it on. won't turn it back on until somebody really needs But the poltergeist might not cooperate. When Tina went back to Columbus, it made only a few brief appearances. After that the phones and candlesticks never left their tables, the eggs remained inanimate.

The house was no longer besieged by newspeople, the letters slowed to a trickle. AS HE HAS throughout time, the poltergeist had gone back to the murky depths of his bog not to die, of course (for, as long as there are young girls and old believers Jto scare, he will not die), but to wait "I wish," Tina had told us (n North Carolina, "that people would believe this could happen." And just as she launched into a tale of how several kitchen knives had once jumped out of a drawer and beelined for her head, and how she had to duck out of the way at the last second, her narrative wis interrupted by a sharp smackirjg sound. Roll Somethirig bounced off a table next to the bed. It settled on the floor nail polish, a bottle of nail polish. Incredibfe? Naw.

Tina just threw it by accident while nervously juggling it in her hand. "Sorry," Tina said, smiling. Not only is Tina's case a hoax. Randi later declared, it is a very, very bad hoax. Randi thinks that the only thing phenomenal about the Tina Resch case is the ease in which the news media gulped down the story.

"It's unusual in that the evidence is extremely bad," he said in a telephone interview. UIS EXPLANATION is. in es sence, that Tina threw objects when no one was looking. Not to say that Harden lied. Or that anyone lied, necessarily.

Just that most human beings aren't very good witnesses. Look back at the testimony, say the skeptics. Flimsy. Inconclusive. Certainly not strong enough to justify feeding the laws of physics to the sharks.

What about those people who saw stuff fly? They were usually looking the other way. How could Tina have moved the objects? She was within arm's reach most of the time. Didn't Shannon's picture document the phenomenon? No, Tina threw the phone. But if Tina threw it why didn't Shannon or Harden blow the whistle? They weren't attentive. And the parents' testimony? Hol lywood pays big bucks for such "true stories." RUT WHAT ABOUT Claggett's AJ light switches, or Hadwal's slid-ing chairs and salt shaker, or Ms.

Zinn's flying phone and her bookshelf? Well look, dammit ghosts aren't real, awright already? And finally, if Tina was cheating, why didn't anyone catch her? Well, they did. It happened the night of the press conference. After the 6 o'clock news broadcast, Hadwal's TV crew stayed in the house. Someone left a camera running, unknown to Tina. Twice, when no one was looking, a lamp moved next to Tina, and she jumped back.

Hadwal, realizing his video-tape was running, thought he had caught the poltergeist in action. But when he later reviewed the tape prior to the 11 o'clock news, he saw Tina look around to see if she was being observed and then hook the lampshade with her fingers and pull it over. And she feigned surprise. An actress. A magician.

When Hadwal went on at 11, he told his viewers that Tina had been caught cheating but that he still had seen events that sleight of hand couldn't explain. Tina admitted her prank the next day, saying she had gotten sick of reporters. She said she knocked over the lamp to satisfy the TV crew, so it would leave. The excuse seemed reasonable enough. THE RESCH family's credibility again came into question when they refused to let Randi and his colleagues, two university professors, into the house.

Joan Resch said the trio couldn't enter because Roll and one of his aides were in the midst of a study. There Was a "controlled environment" in the home that couldn't be disturbed. She also barred a claims adjuster from an insurance agency. Thus the representatives of CSICOP never watched Tina at work. Nor were some key witnesses, such as Claggett or Tina herself, interviewed by the skeptics.

Para-psychologists charge that the ghostbusters have their own anti-religious ax to grind. 1 Indeed, Randi is not hesitant to extend his skepticism over religion in general: "We are raised as a species to believe in things that have no hard evidence to support them, they're based on anecdotal stories and emotional needs, and that sums up as religion "YII1EEEE---'' A shriek rang A out in Roll's house in Durham, N.C. It came from Tina's room. Roll excused himself and walked down the hall. Muffled voices seeped from Tina's bedroom.

Roll emerged, but a few minutes later another shriek, louder, echoed through the house. Roll dashed off. When he returned, he said nothing. Later, he allowed, "She's very impatient to get home." She had been in Durham for three weeks, undergoing tests, when we showed up. Only once did some for the local afternoon paper, the Columbus Dispatch.

Harden had written a story the previous October about the Resches' work in foster care. Harden. 37, who insists he does not believe in the supernatural, saw a mug of coffee spill onto Tina's lap and magazines fall off a table. He called the office; soon Shannon arrived and photographed the flying phone. Harden vouches for the photo.

He said he was staring right at Tina when the phone, to her left went flying across her lap. He didn't see the phone until it was in midair. Harden convinced the Resches to hold a press conference. Pushy, misinformed, the reporters and TV crews jammed the house and needled Tina with question after question. A FTERWARD.

at least four jour-nalists insisted they had seen things they couldn't explain. Bill Wolfson, a reporter for Cleveland television station WKYC, saw a telephone strike Tina's wrist, and a Styrofoam cup sail across a dining room table into a wall. Drew Hadwal, a reporter for WTVN TV in Columbus, remembers seeing a salt shaker slide across the floor, hit the baseboard and "defying gravity" ride four or five feet up the wall. Tina, he said, was on the other side, of the kitchen. And as Tina stood by the sink, three chairs around the kitchen table sud denly shifted in three different directions, Hadwal said.

But the poltergeist who was stomping around Tina Resch's home ran headlong into William Roll. No one in America knows more about poltergeists. He even wrote a book, The Poltergeist. And the first thing William Roll said was that the poltergeist in the Resch home wasn't really there. It was just Tina's mind at work, he said.

Poltergeists, said this man who had been studying them for 26 years, are the product of Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK), a paranormal phenomenon in which a person involuntarily causes objects to fly around. RSPK, Roll said, often is associated with adolescents, like Tina, who are under 'stress. POLL HIMSELF saw a tape re Acorder and a pair of pliers sail through the air in a bedroom when Tina was near, he said. His experience convinced him that Tina needed more tests, so he took her to his home in Durham, N.C., for testing at his laboratory, the Psychical Research Foundation. "In my opinion this is an apparent case of RSPK," Roll announced in Durham after the tests.

"There are occurrences that I could not explain in terms of trickery." And, in what may be the most compelling testimony in the case, Rebecca a 35 year-old clinical psychologist in Chapel Hill, said she witnessed at least five events that indicate Tina has both psychokinet-ic powers and extrasensory perception. Ms. Zinn was leaving her office with Tina at her side when, about eight feet behind them, a phone flew off the desk and hit the wall. She saw doors move when there was no wind. And at one point Tina standing with her back to a bookcase she never had seen before, started rapidly reciting the titles of the books on the shelf.

She names 10 or 12 titles before stopping. SAW IT myself," Ms. Zinn said 1 emphatically. "It is real." Real? Not so fast. Science says it is not real.

There have been about 500 reports of poltergeists over the centuries. Roll says Tina's is one of the two most compelling he's encountered. The other was in 1968 in Miami, when boxes started falling in a warehouse whenever a 19 year-old stockman was near. Within days after the appearance of the poltergeist, a trio of ghostbusters arrived in Columbus, professional debunkers affiliated with the Committee for the Scientif ic Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). At their helm was a man in a black cape, James Randi, a magician known professionally as The Amazing Randi.

married couples. The national average is 60 percent. Also, the percentage of Indiana households with children is high in comparison to the rest of the nation. "These patterns have important political consequences in a time when there maybe less difference in voting habits between union members and non-union members than between married and single persons," the Almanac says. "The swing against Ronald Reagan's Republicans in 1982 was most accentuated among unmarried people, especially women; Indiana has relatively few of them (unmarried people).

The swing against the Republicans was less noticeable, despite the economic bad times, among married blue collar workers." A NOTHER FACTOR is that the traditional "ethnic group" politics practiced by Democrats in the past hasn't been possible in Indiana on any large scale. George W. Geib, a Butler University history professor who is active in Republican Party politics, points out that Indiana doesnt have an overriding ethnic character like some states. "What's unique about this state? It has tended, over the years, to have a smaller proportion of foreign born immigrants than other states. Virtually every ethnic group is represented here, but usually in much smaller numbers.

"Indiana, really, is one of the more diverse states in the country." Most of Indiana's settlers moved here from other regions of the United States not from overseas, says Geib. The Almanac of American Politics confirms that observation. "Ethnically, Indiana remains mostly the product of the first wave of American immigration, of people whose ancestors came over (to America) between 1640 and 1720 and moved overland down from New England, up from Kentucky and Virginia to these plains," the Almanac says. "0 O. TODAY, the basic political geography of the state remains much the same as it was just after the Civil War.

South of the old National Road, or U.S. 40, people speak with something like a southern drawl and tend to vote Democratic. North of the National Road, people speak with midwestern hard Rs and flat As and vote heavily Republican." And, indeed, if you look at returns for the last three gubernatorial elections, Democratic strength is concentrated in a "horseshoe" of counties in southern Indiana. That "horseshoe" starts roughly in Franklin County and then follows the Ohio River across the southern end of the state and up the Wabash River to about Vermillion County. The only "sure" northern county is Lake which basically is an extension of the Chicago metropolitan area.

The rest of the state, almost invariably, goes Republican. And that's been frustrating for the Demo crats, says Schreiber. "Those areas that are Democratic, having had a less than totally successful experience in statewide and national politics, have tended, then, to direct their energies inward. Rather than attempting to expand their power geographically, they've attempted to maximize it locally." So, while that may spell success in capturing mayors' offices and other local posts, it hasn't helped much in statewide races. And it's a syndrome that will have to end if the Democrats want to capture the governor's office or any other significant state office in 1984 or any other year.

Continued From Page 1 ocrats actually appeared at the polls. They just didn't bother to cast votes in that particular race. And Democrats, although unable to win in most statewide races, have retained at least half the Indiana Congressional delegation since nine Democrats won in 1974. And. Democrats sit in a majority of the state's 115 mavoral offices.

EMOCRATS also control almost half of the state's 92 county recorder offices, showing that in fairly low visibility contests, Democrats can win in many counties. However, when the power of the Republican state organization is applied, the Republican candidate wipes them out. In 1980, Gov. Robert D. Orr won all but 17 counties.

Perhaps Democrats are lucky that the Republican machine may be too big to really have the same control at the local level that it exerts at the state level. Dellinger and Schreiber observe that the bat tie in Indiana elections is for the "independent" voter. And the Republican party organization has done a better job getting that independent voter to the polls to vote for its candidates. Experts say the GOP's success tends to build on itself, extending the Republican tradition. HERE WILL, for example, be first time voters for governor this year who have never experienced a Democratic governor in their lifetime.

And the Republican control of government is convincing Hoosier teens to consider themselves Republicans at twice the rate that teens nationwide have been declaring themselves Republican. Another factor favoring the GOP in Indiana, many experts say, is that most Hoosiers basically are conservative in their political beliefs. "I think Indiana is conservative to moderate," says Dellinger. "If I were to put into words what I think Indiana's philosophy is Republican or Democrat mainstream I would say their philosophy is that the federal government should not do for the states what the states can do for themselves." Results of the April "Indiana Poll" reinforce that perception. About 23 percent of the respondents said they consider themselves conservative, while 14 percent said they are liberal and 28 percent said they are moderate.

Thirty three percent said they don't classify themselves with such labels. Deliinger contends the reason for those attitudes has to do with Indiana's past "I think it's probably a little bit of our rural background, and I think the independence of that rural background has carried over although the state is not predominantly rural now," he says. A ND THERE ARE other significant cultural patterns in Indiana that tend to favor the Republicans. The Political Almanac says the percentage of married people in Indiana's population is crucial. "Nowhere in Indiana will you find large neighborhoods or political constituencies made up of young singles, much less gays.

The divorce rate is lower than the American average, the percentage of households occupied by families and mar ried people is higher." S. Census data from 1980 shows that 64 percent of Indiana's households are occupied by.