When you're home alone at night and hear a mysterious noise from above, it's much more likely to be mice in your attic than a poltergeist, which is a noisy ghost.
You've probably come across poltergeists in scary movies and books, and with any luck you won't encounter one in real life. Stories describe them as particularly disruptive ghosts, known for making noise and throwing things around. The roots of the word poltergeist make perfect sense: poltern means "create a disturbance" in German, and geist means "ghost."
