The Miami Poltergeist at Tropication Arts

Miami, Florida. December 1966. Tropication Arts was a wholesaler of Florida-themed novelties and souvenirs, owned by businessman Alvin Laubheim. Its warehouse shelves held beer mugs, drinking glasses, shot glasses and alligator ashtrays. That December, an unusual number of items began falling off the shelves and breaking in the aisles. Laubheim blamed carelessness by his two shipping clerks. One was the older Curt Hagemeyer. The other was a Cuban refugee named Julio Vasquez, aged 19 in most accounts.

January 12, 1967. Laubheim showed the clerks how to place glasses safely, at least eight inches from the shelf edge. As he walked away, a glass fell. Neither employee was closer than fifteen feet. Then it grew worse. A box of about a hundred back-scratchers "turned over and fell with a terrific clatter over on the other side of the room." Another crash followed, and "the whole box was lying upside down with all the glasses broken."

Saturday, January 14, 1967. Laubheim called the Miami police. Patrolman William Killin came. As he reached the entrance, he turned round. A glass fell to the floor and broke. Then two boxes under a shelving rack toppled over into the aisle. Two more patrolmen and a sergeant followed.

Others came to watch. Laubheim's partner Glen Lewis. An insurance agent, William Drucker. Sinclair Buntin, an Eastern Airlines pilot, saw an object "fall at an unnatural angle, about thirty degrees away from the shelf." Laubheim asked a friend, the professional magician Howard Brookes, to find the trick. Brookes arrived suspecting an employee. He found no trickery, and his own sleight of hand could not reproduce the effects.

The writer Susy Smith took notes for 24 days and recorded about 300 incidents. She alerted William G. Roll of the Psychical Research Foundation in Durham, North Carolina. Roll arrived on January 19. On January 23 there were 52 separate incidents. Roll was looking at Julio when an alligator ashtray crashed to the floor behind him. "The cowbell remained in place," he wrote, "so the ashtray either must have moved over or around it." One box moved 24 feet. A glass seemed to have "risen into the air at least two inches on its way to the floor."

With J. Gaither Pratt, Roll searched for threads and rigging. They found none. They ruled out dry ice and shelf vibration. They logged 224 incidents, and Roll personally witnessed 13. The events came only when Julio was nearby and were strongest when he seemed irritated. Psychological tests found "anger, rebellion, a feeling of not being part of the social environment." In the laboratory in Durham, Julio scored well above chance on dice tests. The dice machine broke four times.

A police sergeant told the press that Julio had confessed to using "threads and by perching the items at the edges of the shelves," with vibration from passing aircraft doing the rest. The next morning, in Laubheim's office, Julio told a detective he had never confessed. Roll noted that the officer "never examined the warehouse." No police reply to Roll's account has surfaced.

Roll's verdict was recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis. Unconscious PK, driven by repressed anger. He and Pratt published "The Miami disturbances" in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1971. The activity stopped after Julio left the company.

Julio's later years were turbulent. He served six months in jail for stealing a ring for his fiancée. In 1969 he was shot and seriously wounded trying to stop armed robbers at a gas station. After that, Roll wrote, "apparently both his psychical and his physical life settled down." The case became two chapters of Roll's book The Poltergeist. It stands beside the Rosenheim poltergeist, a German workplace case from the same year, also centred on a young employee.