W. G. Roll

William G. Roll (July 3, 1926 – January 9, 2012) was an American psychologist and parapsychologist on the faculty of the Psychology Department of the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, Georgia. Roll is most notable for his belief in poltergeist activity. He coined the term "recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis" (RSPK) to explain poltergeist cases. However, RSPK was never accepted by mainstream science and skeptics have described Roll as a credulous investigator.

Roll was born in 1926 in Bremen, Germany where his father was American Vice-consul. At the age of 3, after his parents divorced, he moved to Denmark with his mother Gudrun Agerholm Roll. According to Roll whilst he was in his childhood in Denmark he began having out-of-body experiences at night. His mother died in 1942 and in 1946 he went to America with his father, who had come to Denmark with the American Allied forces. During the last year of the war, Roll participated in the Danish resistance movement against the Germans.

Roll enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley in 1947 where he received his BA majoring in philosophy and psychology. A year after graduating he went on to Oxford University where he did parapsychology research for eight years. During this period, he was president of the Oxford University Society for Psychical Research. At Oxford, he wrote his thesis which earned him his M. Litt. degree, "Theory and Experiment in Psychical Research". His thesis was later published in the United States by Arno Press.

Sometimes credited as William Roll, or informally, Bill Roll, he was a parapsychologist since the 1950s and authored or coauthored many investigation research papers, articles, and four books: The Poltergeist (1972), Theory and Experiment in Psychical Research (1975), Psychic Connections (1995, with co-author Lois Duncan), and Unleashed: Of Poltergeists and Murder: The Curious Story of Tina Resch (2004, with co-author Valerie Storey). He is also notable for making several appearances in the television show Unsolved Mysteries, among them an episode discussing disturbances on the RMS Queen Mary. (In this episode he was mistakenly credited as being Danish-born.)

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