William G. Roll - Career

Career

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.)

Roll was invited by J. B. Rhine to join the Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University, where he worked from 1957-1964. In 1964 he became president of the Parapsychological Association. In 1958, he coined the term "recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis" (RSPK) in a research paper written with J. G. Pratt that dealt with their investigation of objects moving in a home in Seaford, Long Island, New York USA, that was centered around a 12-year old son of an affected family. It was Roll's first case.

In 1961, Roll became Project Director of the Psychical Research Foundation (PRF), an off-shoot of J. B. Rhine's Laboratory. After Rhine's retirement from Duke, the PRF left the Duke campus, but in 1969 it returned to Duke as a sponsored program of the School of Electrical Engineering. The connection between Duke and the Foundation ended in the late 1970s.

Roll received a Ph.D. in psychology from Lund University in 1989 for a thesis entitled, "This World or That: An Examination of Parapsychological Findings Suggestive of the Survival of Human Personality After Death".

In the 80s and 90s, Roll held various positions at University of West Georgia, including Professor of Psychology and Psychical Research, assistant professor, and instructor. In later years, Roll retired from teaching, though he taught a course in parapsychology at the University of West Georgia in 2007, and continued to write, speak at conferences, and conduct occasional investigations. He was awarded the Parapsychological Award for a Distinguished Career in Parapsychology in 1996 and the Dinsdale Memorial Award from the Society of Scientific Exploration in 2002.

Roll's most famous case was as the lead investigator on the 1984 "Columbus Poltergeist" case, in which remarkable color photos were taken by a veteran newspaper photographer for the Columbus Dispatch newspaper, Fred Shannon, which allegedly showed spontaneous telekinesis events in action occurring in the home of Columbus, Ohio teenager Tina Resch.

Roll's research and published writing concerning psychic phenomena focused on theorizing about and testing for scientific explanations, but some of his theories postulated concepts that extend beyond mainstream science.

Roll's last research, as presented to the American Psychological Association, claimed that the root cause of psychic phenomena is a combination of modern physics (i.e., quantum mechanics) and neuroscience. According to Roll all objects and individuals have "psi fields" around them which are the carriers of psi information.

Roll died at the age of 85, in a nursing home in Normal, Illinois. William G. Roll last resided in the state of Georgia, and is survived by his adult children (Lise, Leif, and Bill), and his wife Lydia.