While watching Çetin, one officer suddenly had sand thrown in her face. Then the other officer got sand thrown in his face, even though Çetin was standing before him with his hands in his pockets. Later on, the two officers were driving Çetin to the home of his step-sister when the female officer experienced sand falling on her head while in the car. She suspected that Çetin might have thrown it from the back seat, but when she got out of the car to let Çetin out, she again felt sand fall on her head, even though Çetin was still in the back seat with the car door still closed and all of the windows rolled up. Some of the poltergeist events were noted to take place after a hoja (an Islamic priest), who the family had asked to perform an exorcistic-type ritual, had left the home. In one event, a glass water bottle flew into the hallway and broke against the bathroom door.

At the time, Çetin was seated on the living room couch between a neighbor and a friend of his father’s. Neither reported seeing Çetin throw the bottle, and no one had been near the table that the bottle had been standing on. Furthermore, it was noticed that, even if Çetin did somehow manage to grab the bottle and throw it unnoticed, it would have taken a skilled throw by him to make it land where it did; the trajectory of the bottle from Çetin’s place on the couch to the bathroom door included a sharp curve around a doorpost that was between the living room and the hallway. Soon after the events began, the family asked the Parapsychology Institute in Utrecht for help. Although the Utrecht investigators were unable to directly witness the events themselves (the events ended ten days after they began, and the investigators were only able to be present on four of those days), they were able to do some simple tests with Çetin and one of his step-sisters, which seemed to offer insight into the psychokinetic aspect of the poltergeist. We’ll look at this in Section 6.