On Haunted Childhoods, 80s Poltergeists, and the Rage of Female Adolescence

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As a child of the ‘80s, I consumed my fair share of poltergeist pop culture. Although I wasn’t a horror fan, I took a casual interest in the movies and books about fantastically troubled adolescent girls. Years later, while doing research for a supernatural novel, I found myself once again drawn in by the poltergeist phenomenon. Only this time it wasn’t the fictionalized stories that interested me, but the confounding real life accounts.

For any poltergeist case, the first question is always: What was the actual cause? Ghost or supernatural force? An adolescent’s emotional turbulence? A fake? As I spent more time with these cases, however, I became less interested in the cause than the experience of the people involved. The afflicted person became sympathetic and fascinating whether or not they were faking it.

For me, these stories are irresistibly unsettling, captivating in the way they speak to both the puzzling and painful possibilities of early adolescence—none more heartbreakingly so than the two eerily similar cases of Tina Resch and Marcia Goodin. 

Tina Resch and “The Force”

In 1984, when Tina was fourteen years old, strange things started to happen in her adopted family’s Columbus, Ohio, home. The list reads like a perfectly plotted supernatural mystery: Lights go on and off inexplicably. One of the other children in the house had a heart monitor, and its alarm started to sound spontaneously, terrifying Tina’s mother. The alarm continued to go off even when the device was unplugged. The family’s dryer and garbage disposal would turn on and off. An electrician friend who investigated was unable to find anything wrong with the home’s wiring or circuit breaker. But the problems clearly weren’t just electrical: Plates and wineglasses would fly from the table to the wall, shattering. The sofa would move suddenly. Lamps would fall to the floor. Objects like phones or deodorant bottles would fly off shelves or tables, hitting people—often hitting Tina herself. At one point, a paring knife flew off a shelf and nearly stabbed Tina in the back.

Tina seemed to be the focal point of the poltergeist activity. As the incidents became more violent, the Resches decided to have their foster children removed from the home for their safety. Unable to find help from her pastor and friends, Joan was at her wit’s end. So she called Mike Harden, a journalist for the Columbus Dispatch.

Mike Harden and photographer Fred Shannon spent a morning at the Resch house, and eventually got a shot of the telephone leaping over Tina’s lap. The arresting—and vaguely comical—photo is of Tina seated in a recliner in her family’s home. A telephone is midair, leaping over her, its cord taut above her lap. Her hands are pulled up in an awkward, defensive posture. She definitely looks taken off guard. The picture ran in the Dispatch and then in the national media.

At this point William Roll, a parapsychologist who had studied poltergeist phenomena for several decades, became involved. He stayed with the Resches for a few days, and after witnessing many disturbances in the home, became convinced that Tina’s poltergeist case was real and that Tina could not have staged them.  During the ensuing media circus, however, a cameraman captured a video of Tina stealthily knocking over a “possessed” lamp. The media soon lost interest, declaring the incident a hoax. Tina maintained that she’d done it to satisfy journalists who were growing bored waiting all day for the poltergeist to show itself—allowing them to go home and leave her family alone.

William Roll was still convinced that Tina’s case was genuine. As he got to know her, a more detailed picture of her troubled life emerged. At school, Tina couldn’t sit still, and was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. Other students teased her for being adopted, and teachers often scapegoated her. Things got so bad that her mother pulled her out of school and had her tutored at home. Her only outlets were a church youth group and Girl Scouts—but those outings were often denied her when she acted up at home. Her one close friend during this lonely time died tragically in a car accident in 1983. Her father, meanwhile, started hitting her as she rebelled and mouthed off in her teenage years. He very firmly did not believe in “the force,” thought Tina was faking it somehow, and punished her for it regularly. When she was twelve, one of the older Resch sons had sexually abused her.

William Roll didn’t learn this all at once. After his initial visit, he invited her to his home and university in North Carolina for a few days for testing. She ended up visiting him a few times—a welcome respite from her difficult life in Ohio. Roll had long studied the theory that poltergeist energy was the result of “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis”—RSPK—the unconscious movement of objects produced by an energy from the subject’s mind—that is, without the aid of a ghost.

In Roll’s Unleashed: Of Poltergeists and Murder: The Curious Story of Tina Resch, he suggested that anomalies of Tina’s brain caused her poltergeist activity—connected vaguely, he thought, to a mild form of Tourette’s that a neurologist’s test indicated she might have. He also performed a detailed study of the way objects moved around her. They all moved in ways that inconvenienced her parents, hurt her, or gained her admiration and affection (such as when an older brother invited his friends over to witness a show of “the force.”) He concluded, “The movement of the objects reflected three emotions: anger at her parents for not loving her enough, self-aspersion because she wasn’t good enough to be loved, and the hope that someone would come to rescue and love her.”

It is notable that that pattern of object movement could apply just as easily to a person faking a poltergeist as one experiencing a subconscious telekinetic energy. Either way, Tina was a conflicted kid who needed more love and attention.  William Roll was, in a sense, the kind of unconditionally loving parental figure she hadn’t found in her home life in Ohio. For many years after their initial encounter—through her suicide attempt, her parents’ efforts to put her back into foster care when she was sixteen, two abusive relationships with men, and the birth of a daughter—Roll tried to understand and support her when he could. He signed her up for parenting classes, and occasionally paid her rent when she was strapped.

In the end, though, it wasn’t enough. In April 1992, Tina’s three-year-old daughter died under mysterious and disturbing circumstances. Tina wasn’t present at the time of her Amber’s death. Her boyfriend, David Herrin, was babysitting and reported that he couldn’t wake her up. The autopsy indicated a pattern of beatings.

In days leading up to the death, Tina noticed that Amber had minor injuries after being in David’s care, but accepted Herrin’s claim that they were from tumbles down the front steps of his home. Tina hadn’t taken Amber to the hospital for fear of losing custody to Family Services. Her court-appointed lawyer didn’t think she would survive a trial that would include photos of Amber’s badly bruised body. She pled guilty in a plea bargain, fearing that otherwise she would face the electric chair. David Herrin—who admitted to police that he sexually abused the child—also went to prison after a separate trial. He was released in 2011, while Tina remains in prison.

Roll maintained Tina’s innocence in Unleashed, and felt she’d been poorly advised by her lawyer. According to him, she didn’t understand what her plea meant, and was under the false impression she’d have access to a college education and be released in a few years. Roll championed her cause and the genuineness of her RPK abilities until his death in 2012. 

Marcia Goodin and the foul-mouthed cat

For Marcia Goodin’s family it all started with mysterious banging noises at their home in Bridgeport, CT. The unsettling activity intensified over several weeks. Furniture started moving overnight. A table appeared to flip itself over. A television set fell on Marcia’s mother’s foot.

The house was checked for gas and electrical problems, to no avail. The family called in the police, and multiple officers witnessed events they couldn’t explain: a refrigerator rising six feet into the air, a television rising and rotating in the air, objects flying off the shelves and walls, and ten-year-old Marcia being lifted and thrown from her chair. Three officers wrote about these incidences in a 1974 police report.

As word spread, a crowd gathered outside the home, and things became weirder yet. Police officers claimed that the family cat had talked, made otherworldly moans, and hurled ethnic insults. Someone claimed to have heard voices from the decorative flamingos in the Goodins’ yard.

One can’t help but think that the release of The Exorcist a year earlier flavored these accounts. Edward and Lorraine Warren—an eager husband and wife paranormal investigation team who would later become well known for their involvement in the Amityville Horror case—inspected the house with a priest and seminary student. Edward Warren called in the press, as was his habit. Lorraine, a self-proclaimed clairvoyant, developed an inexplicable burn on her arm while in the house. And the crowd outside continued to gather.

The fever broke, however, when a police officer claimed to have seen Marcia—by most accounts a shy but good-natured child—furtively kicking over a television set. This led to a confession by Marcia that she had staged some, but not all, of the drama in her home. She admitted responsibility for the talking cat and knocking pictures and a crucifix to the floor. When pressed, according to The World’s Most Haunted House by William C. Hall, she said, “I wanted to see if the demon would do anything.”

Marcia’s horrified parents vowed to get her psychiatric help. But the police officers who witnessed the levitating refrigerator and other heavy objects pointed out that Marcia could never have pulled it off herself. They knew what they’d seen and the police superintendent’s declaration of a hoax—intended to clear the street of the growing crowd—made them look stupid.

A closer look at Marcia reveals some similarities between her emotional situation and Tina Resch’s. She was adopted at age four by extremely overprotective parents—who had lost their only biological son years earlier. An only child, Marcia was isolated in her parents’ tiny home and rarely allowed to play with other children. At school, she was bullied for her native American heritage. The kids called her “Ape,” and another child beat her so badly she required medical attention and wore a soft back brace while she healed. Her parents pulled her out of school, but weeks later the house’s troubles began.

Whatever were the results of Marcia’s psychiatric examinations, her family understandably kept it to themselves. Information about her adult life is scarce. She is reported to have left Connecticut for Canada in her late teens or early twenties in search of her birth parents. She changed the spelling of her name to Marsha Godin. She had no record of employment, and her neighbors knew little about her except that she had suffered from MS, epilepsy, and likely drug addiction issues. At age 51, she died in Ohio in 2015. A coroner’s investigator sought media help in his attempt to find next of kin to claim her remains, and eventually was sent information about Marcia Goodin. Remaining family members knew little about her. Neither of her parents’ obituaries (in 1993 and 1997) mentioned her.

Ghosts, Naughty Girls & Puberty

Paranormal enthusiasts have long pointed out a common pattern in poltergeist activity—that it seems to occur in situations where there’s a lot of pent-up negative adolescent energy. Although they came from very different families, the similarities between the two girls’ isolation and emotional turmoil certainly support this theory. But how this might lead to poltergeist activity is a subject of debate. Some believe that poltergeists are intelligent entities attracted to the negative energy of an unhappy adolescent. Some parapsychologists identify the onset of puberty as the cause. Guy Playfair, who wrote a book about the famous Enfield haunting, suggested that it involves the secretion of a type of “creative energy,” along with sexual hormones. Poltergeists take advantage, using that creative energy to wreak havoc. Others, like William Roll, claim that the disruptive energy comes from the subject herself.

And then there’s the “naughty little girl” theory proposed by psychical researcher Frank Podmore in the late nineteenth century. In short, the theory suggests that where there’s poltergeist activity, there’s usually a girl in the household faking it for adult attention.

And that’s what compels me so much about these stories. The question of whether they are real or fake has never been the primary draw for me. Rather it is the emotional power—and simultaneous feeling of pure powerlessness—of being a lonely young girl in need of love and attention that is the source of my fascination.

Regardless of whether they were colossal fakers, I feel drawn to these girls’ stories because their suffering is so clear—and because I believe the line between real and fake is fuzzy when it comes to adolescent emotions. I know that I and many female friends wasted a lot of time as teenagers fretting over which of our emotions were genuine. And God forbid one got labelled a drama queen.

 The question of real or fake for these girls reminds me of the way many regard a teenage suicide attempt. She didn’t really want to die; she was just looking for attention. As if nothing but an outright intention to die is worthy of our attention. As if the willingness to make shallow wrist cuts or take a handful of aspirin isn’t real, or isn’t enough. Adolescent female pain is easily dismissed when it fails to be extreme enough or ceases to be wildly entertaining.

 And Tina and Marcia were dismissed under similar circumstances—Tina when she knocked over the lamp, Marcia when she kicked the television. But whether Tina Resch’s or—even unlikelier—Marcia Goodin’s cases were hoaxed is perhaps not the point. Both girls had clearly suffered in ways beyond their years and understandably perhaps beyond their ability to express it in conventional ways. Both girls were in stifling situations that didn’t allow them to express anger or emotional need. Perhaps this generated a powerful, psychokinetic event, or perhaps it became a motive to put on a passive-aggressive phony poltergeist show. Either way, neither girl ultimately gained much from her poltergeists, real or imagined.

The girls were real, and their pain was real. For me, as a writer of books about haunted girls, the other questions fall away.

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