Now in Paris, in 1860, there was a particularly violent poltergeist in the Rue des Noyers - it smashed every window in the building, hurled all kinds of objects around the place (including many which the occupants had never seen before), and finally drove the unfortunate people out of the house. Rivail decided to try to find out what exactly had happened. His medium’s "control" (the spirit who acts as master of ceremonies), explained that the disturbances were the work of a mischievous spirit. And, at the request of the control (a spirit called Saint Louis), the poltergeist of the Rue des Noyers was summoned. He appeared to be in a bad temper and asked irritably, "Why do you call me? Do you want to have some stones thrown at you?" Rivail now asked the spirit, "Was there anyone in the Rue des Noyers who helped you play tricks on the inmates?" "Certainly," replied the spirit, "it had an excellent ‘instrument.’" It added, "For I am merry and like to amuse myself sometimes." Who was it? Rivail asked. "A maidservant."

"Was she unaware you were making use of her?"

"Oh yes, poor girl - she was the most frightened of them all."

Rivail asked how the spirit managed to throw various objects about the place and received the interesting answer. "I helped myself through the electric nature of the girl, joined to my own….we were able to transport the objects between us."

Rivail asked the spirit who it was. It replied that it had been dead about 50 years, and had been a rag-and-bone-man. People used to make fun of him because he drank too much and this was why he decided to play tricks on the inhabitants of the Rue des Noyers. He indignantly denied that he had done these things out of malice - it was merely his way of amusing himself.

This spirit seems to belong to a class described in The Spirits’ Book, "They are ignorant, mischievous, unreasonable, and addicted to mockery. They meddle with everything and reply to every questions without paying attention to the truth."

So, according to Kardec, poltergeists are mischievous spirits who draw their energy from certain "vulnerable" human beings.

Certainly some of the ghostly shape does not seem to be visible on the staircase. As in the case of the Mummler photographs, we may well be able to accept that the negative has not been retouched in any way. But let us ask ourselves what we were actually seeing as the ghost. If we are frank, it is merely a foggy swirl, the sort of effect that anyone could have created in just a couple of seconds using a dab of grease on a glass filter. If this was introduced surreptitiously, Captain Provand need never even have noticed.

One unavoidably suspicious element to Shira's account is his repeated emphasis on the 'ethereal' and 'transparent' character of what he alone claimed to be seeing - descriptions in marked contrast to the great majority of sightings of ghosts to be discussed later in this book. In these, the word 'ethereal' is rarely if ever used and the ghosts predominantly seem surprisingly solid and normal-looking to their observers, their apparitional quality only becoming evident when they disappear.