The Rosenheim poltergeist, 1967

OVERVIEW

The Spuk von Rosenheim is the name for a run of events in the autumn of 1967 in the law office of Sigmund Adam in Rosenheim, southern Bavaria. It drew international press attention and is counted by parapsychologists among the best-documented poltergeist cases; skeptics consider it exposed as a fraud.

HISTORY

Fluorescent tubes 2.5 m up went out, found turned 90 degrees in their holders; witnesses heard loud bangs; circuit breakers tripped; copier fluid sprayed across the room; and the office phones dialled the speaking-clock service up to 50 times a day while no one used them. The Rosenheim municipal works under Paul Brunner installed recording voltage and current meters. Then pictures began to turn on the walls, lamps swung and exploded, and drawers and a cabinet moved. About 40 people — police, technicians, physicists, psychologists, doctors, clients and staff — witnessed the events. From 1 December 1967 Hans Bender's Freiburg institute investigated; physicists Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha reported that 'some unknown form of energy is at work'. Everything happened only when a 19-year-old trainee, Annemarie S., was near; it stopped when she left the firm in January 1968. She denied having any supernatural abilities.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Bender called it spontaneous psychokinesis 'objectively recorded for the first time'. Critics answered that no full report was ever published (Piet Hein Hoebens, Kendrick Frazier), and that Bender left out that the trainee had been caught manipulating events by a policeman. The magician Albin Neumann ('Allan'), with Herbert Schiff and Gert Gunther Kramer, searched the office and reported nylon threads on a swinging lamp, a gas pipe and a 'jumping' wall plate, and a rubber cosh behind a cabinet that could make the knocking and the black wall marks (the housekeeper confirmed it; Adam said it was for self-defence) — published as Falsche Geister, echte Schwindler? (1969). Adam's injunction against the book was refused. The physicist John Taylor judged the chart recordings likely faked. The German article adds that the electrical effects could have come from an X-ray machine in the same building or deliberate short circuits, and that, contrary to Bender, nothing ever happened at the trainee's new workplace. Filed UNVETTED.

VISITING

A private office building in Rosenheim; the pin marks the location given for the case. Nothing to visit.