Sometimes credited as William Roll, or informally, Bill Roll, he was a parapsychologist since the 1950s and authored or coauthored many research papers and articles, as well as 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).

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 on a 12-year-old son of an affected family.

[5] Roll received a PhD 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 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.

In 1958, Roll investigated the case with the parapsychologist Joseph Gaither Pratt and suggested that although some of the phenomena may have been pranks from Hermann's twelve-year-old son James Jr, some of the events were the result of "recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis" (RSPK).

Roll is notable for endorsing Tina Resch a central figure in a series of incidents that came to be called the Columbus poltergeist case, who he spent a week investigating.

Magician and skeptical investigator Bob Couttie has written: Resch was detected utilizing trickery by James Randi, but Roll had endorsed her phenomena as genuine.

[7] Henry Gordon has stated that parapsychologists such as Roll and Nandor Fodor took a speculative approach to the poltergeist subject, ignoring the rational explanation of deception in favor of a belief in the paranormal.