The Herrmann Poltergeist
The Seaford Poltergeist Case
Country: America
The Herrmann family had no reason to expect anything unusual. They were, by all accounts, a typical middle-class American family:
The parents, James and Lucille Herrmann, their 12-year-old son James Jr., and their teenage daughter Lucille.
So, not the typical just moved in the wrong house case, their home was modest, their life peaceful.
It started the way strange things often do, small, unremarkable. A bottle tipped over in the bathroom. That’s all.
James Jr. had come home from school and noticed it sitting there, a bottle of holy water, oddly angled on the counter, cap off, its contents slowly seeping out. Maybe it was loose. Maybe it had just fallen.
The next day, it happened again. Different bottle. Different room.
Within a week, it wasn’t just holy water. Bleach. Starch. Shampoo. Screw caps that had been tight the night before were now rolling across the floor. The bottles themselves often remained upright, untouched … just empty.
He didn’t deal in ghosts. So he did what made sense: he called the police.
Two officers arrived, took a look around, and made a few polite jokes about kids playing tricks.
That changed when they saw it happen. A sugar bowl, sitting quietly on the kitchen counter, lifted slightly, then flung itself across the room. Moments later, a globe on the desk began to spin. There were no footprints. No wires. Just the low, tight silence of a house that had started to behave like it didn’t want anyone living in it. And then, in the basement, the bookcase fell. It didn’t lean. It didn’t slide. It slammed to the ground, face-first, as if shoved by something heavy and invisible. Books sprawled like wounded soldiers. There had been no one in the basement. The windows were closed. The floor wasn’t wet.
The cops didn’t have answers. They left with nervous glances and vague reassurances. One of them didn’t come back. Word spread, as it always does.
Reporters came next. Flashbulbs. Microphones. Local papers ran it as a novelty piece.
“Bottles Flying in Seaford Suburb!”
“House vs. Family.”
In the weeks that followed, things escalated. A porcelain figurine launched itself from the mantle and shattered against the wall. A phonograph jumped off a shelf. A heavy wooden chair in the dining room scraped six inches across the floor while the family sat and watched.
Every time, James Jr. was nearby. And every time, he swore he hadn’t touched a thing.
Investigators from Brookhaven Lab were brought in. One brought dowsing rods. Another brought magnetic field sensors. They found nothing. No high readings. No weird radio interference. Just a two-story house that didn’t follow the rules.
Then came the parapsychologists.
Dr. J. B. Rhine sent his people, William Roll and Gaither Pratt. They didn’t laugh. They didn’t blink. They sat in the house for hours, scribbling notes, whispering to each other, listening to creaks that didn’t match the wind.
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| Joseph Gaither Pratt (August 31, 1910 – November 3, 1979) |
Roll believed the boy was the center of the disturbance, not because he wanted to be, but because something inside him might be making it happen. They called it RSPK: Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis. Emotional stress, they said, can build up in some kids like static. Eventually, it discharges.
Now if you believed them, it meant the house wasn’t haunted.
It meant the boy was.
Skeptics, of course, had their say. Joe Nickell, a known debunker, would later point out how convenient it all was. The movement always happened when no one was looking too closely. The bottles could’ve been opened by hand. The figurines thrown. The bookcase? Maybe rigged, maybe not.
There was no proof. Just a frightened family, a swarm of media, and a quiet street that didn’t want the attention.
Then, without warning, it ended.
March 10th. A bleach bottle popped its cap and struck the bathroom wall with a dull, wet thud. That was the last incident. No one heard the house breathe again after that. The Herrmanns moved a few months later. The house was sold. The new owners never reported a thing. Life went on, as it always does, people forgot, the way people do.
But not everyone.
To this day, researchers still cite the Herrmann case as one of the most public and puzzling American poltergeist incidents on record. Others dismiss it as a clever hoax, inflated by newspaper deadlines and public hunger for something weird.
Whatever it was, it came and went like a cold front, sudden, unexplained, and never quite repeated.
But for one long winter month in Seaford, Long Island, the quiet house at 1648 Redwood Path became something else entirely.
Aftermath:
Unlike other hauntings that spiraled into lawsuits or media franchises, the Seaford case ended quietly.
No courtrooms, no claims, just a family that moved on, and a house that never stirred again.
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| The House |
The Eye Witness Accounts: What They Saw in Seaford
The early days of the Seaford disturbances were met with suspicion, even within the family.
At first, Mr. Herrmann thought his son might be behind the odd activity. That changed when he saw something himself.
He was standing in the bathroom doorway while James Jr. brushed his teeth. Bottles had been removed from the cabinet under the sink for cleaning and placed on the vanity top. Then, without warning, two of them moved, not just one, but both, at the same time, in different directions.
“At about 10:30 a.m. I was standing in the doorway of the bathroom. All of a sudden two bottles which had been placed on the top of the vanity table were seen to move. One moved straight ahead, slowly, while the second spun to the right for a 45° angle. The first one fell into the sink. The second one crashed to the floor. Both bottles moved at the same time.”
From that moment, his suspicion turned to concern.
The police began keeping a closer watch.
On February 9, Mrs. Herrmann again called the authorities. Patrolman J. Hughes responded. He was in the living room with the family when a sudden noise came from the bathroom. They found a bottle lying on its side, though Hughes swore it hadn’t been there minutes earlier.
He'd checked the room himself just after the previous incident, and everything had been cleaned. The new event seemed to happen in a span of minutes.
“I can swear to that!”
When asked whether someone could’ve turned the bottle over after his check, Hughes admitted it was possible, but he had no explanation for the sound they had all heard.
On February 11, detective Joseph Tozzi of the Nassau County Police was assigned to full-time duty on the case. He conducted a thorough investigation, including interviews with family members, visitors, and outside observers. What he compiled was unusual, not just because of the nature of the events, but because of the number of credible witnesses.
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| Detective Joseph Tozzi |
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| Detective Joseph Tozzi being interviewed on television |
One of those was Marie Murtha, a visiting cousin. On February 15, she was sitting in the living room with the two children when she witnessed a strange motion.
A figurine, she said, began to “wiggle.” Then it suddenly flew, not dropped, not tipped, but launched, about two feet toward the television. It struck near the screen with such force that she was surprised it didn’t break.
She told Tozzi that neither she nor the children were anywhere near the figurine.
The week that followed was even more active.
On February 20, multiple events occurred within minutes of each other, and all were witnessed.
At 9:45 p.m., Mrs. Herrmann was on the phone in the dining room. James was next to her, and Lucille was in her bedroom. There was a bottle of ink on the table. Then, a loud pop.
“A very loud pop was heard and the ink bottle lost its screw top and the bottle left the table in a northeasterly direction. The bottle landed in the living room and the ink spilled on the chair, floor and on the wallpaper on the north side of the front door.”
Mrs. Herrmann immediately called Detective Tozzi, who had just left the house minutes earlier. She gathered the children into the hallway to wait for him.
Then it happened again.
At 9:50 p.m., just five minutes after the ink incident, while the children and Mrs. Herrmann stood together outside the bathroom, loud crash came from the living room.
They rushed in.
“All three of them went into the room and found the male figurine had again left the end table and had again flown through the air for about 10 feet and again hit the desk about six inches to the east of where it had hit the first time. On this occurrence the only noise heard was when the figurine hit the desk and at this time it broke into many pieces and fell to the floor. At this time the only appliance running was the oil burner and no one was again in the room.”
Each of them later confirmed their exact positions during the event.
“The three were standing in the end of the hall near the bathroom out of sight of the contents of the living room when the loud crash sounded. Mrs. Herrmann was standing with her back to the linen closet and James and Lucille were standing in front of the bathroom door. They were all facing one another.”
As the days went on, outsiders were invited to observe.
Dave Kahn, a journalist from Newsday, stayed overnight in the house on February 23, 24, and 25. He witnessed several disturbances: the sound of a dresser tipping over, which smashed a bottle of hair tonic he had placed there; the noise of a lamp being knocked over in Mrs. Herrmann’s room, heard not just by him, but by an investigator and police sergeant B. McConnell.
Even reporters from abroad arrived.
John Gold, of the London Evening News, visited on March 4. He both saw and heard disturbances, and crucially, at times when the entire family was in different rooms.
A physicist, Robert E. Zider, present on February 24, heard the sound of James Jr.'s bookcase being turned upside down. Later, while still in the house, he witnessed a picture fall off the boy’s wall.
And those weren’t isolated events.
Friends and visitors who came to support the Herrmann family also saw things they couldn’t explain, bottles tipping, objects shifting, noises from empty rooms.
The witness list grew. But what didn’t grow was a clear explanation.
Not one person saw anyone tampering with the objects. Most were either in full view of the room, or standing in groups elsewhere, with the house’s strange sounds and movements erupting from empty spaces.
And yet, the house kept insisting: something was happening.
References and Literature:
Core Reference: SPR Encyclopedia – Society for Psychical Research
- Detailed police and witness accounts including Mr. Herrmann’s observation of two bottles moving simultaneously.
- Testimonies from Patrolman J. Hughes and visiting cousin Marie Murtha about moving and flying objects.
- Descriptions of dramatic incidents like flying figurines and flying ink bottles with eyewitness corroboration.
- Media and expert involvement documented, including physicist Robert E. Zider.
Media Coverage: TIME Magazine (1958)
- Contemporary news account reporting popping bottles, flying objects, and overturned furniture.
- Coverage of scientific attempts to explain the phenomena and involvement of parapsychologists.
- Reports of family desperation, including requests for an exorcism.
Investigative Commentary: J. G. Pratt
Defense against hoax theories, including covert fingerprint tests and observations of the family’s sincerity.
Emphasizes the difficulty of fabricating events in front of police and media repeatedly.
Source: https://www.survivalafterdeath.info/articles/pratt/seaford.htm
Case Summary & Literature: Occult-World
Overview of 67 disturbances with references to scholarly sources and books covering the case.
Points to the primary research articles by Pratt and Roll and Roll’s book The Poltergeist.
Source: https://occult-world.com/seaford-poltergeist
Scholarly Context: William G. Roll & Skeptical Views
Roll coined the term Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK), citing this case.
Skeptics like Joe Nickell later proposed simpler explanations involving adolescent mischief.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_G._Roll
Recommended Books and Articles
- Pratt, J. G., & Roll, W. G. (1958). The Seaford Disturbances. Journal of Parapsychology, 22, 79–124.Roll, W. G. (1972).
- The Poltergeist. Garden City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday.
- Nickell, Joe. (2012). The Science of Ghosts: Searching for Spirits of the Dead. Prometheus Books.
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