The Rosenheim Poltergeist (Spuk von Rosenheim)

Rosenheim, southern Bavaria. 1967. The law office of attorney Sigmund Adam was a place of files and telephones. Most accounts say the trouble began in the autumn. Some place it in summer, others in late November. It would draw electricians, telephone engineers, the police, physicists and a parapsychologist.

The lights went first. Fluorescent tubes mounted 2.5 m up on the ceiling kept going out. Tradesmen found them rotated 90 degrees in their holders. Fuses tripped. Light bulbs exploded, and heavy bangs cracked through the rooms.

Then the telephones. All four sets were said to ring at the same time, and calls broke off mid conversation. Over and over, with nobody at the dial, the phones called 0119, the speaking clock. One count gave 42 calls in 15 minutes. Adam filed a complaint against persons unknown, and Post Office technicians replaced the equipment and fitted a counter that logged every call.

Drawers slid out by themselves. Pictures and calendars fell or turned. A 175 kilogram cabinet moved twice, about 30 cm from the wall. Paul Brunner of Stadtwerke Rosenheim, the local power company, stood about a metre from a picture. "At that moment the picture turned very rapidly about 320 degrees anticlockwise, so that the hanging wire became tangled on the hook."

The Stadtwerke fitted sealed recorders. On 21 November 1967 they logged three full-scale deflections. The office was switched to an emergency power unit, but the disturbances reportedly continued. The criminal police taped witness statements. About 40 first-hand witnesses were documented in all.

On 1 December, Hans Bender's Freiburg institute took over. Bender wrote: "When this young girl walked through the gangways, the lamps behind her began to swing with increasing amplitude." His team set up an AMPEX video recorder.

From 6 to 8 December, Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics took oscilloscope measurements. They said they had eliminated every physical cause they could think of. The deflections, they concluded, were physically inexplicable. Bender centred it all on Annemarie Schaberl and called it spontaneous psychokinesis. In January 1968 she left the firm, and the phenomena reportedly stopped.

From 1969 the story turned. The Viennese magician Albin Neumann, known as Allan, and his co-authors reported nearly invisible nylon threads on the lamps and a rubber club behind a shelf that made the same knocks. Adam sought an injunction against their book. It was refused. In 1970 Die Zeit put the question in a headline: Ghosts or nylon?

The criminologist Herbert Schäfer said he watched Annemarie swing a lamp by hand through a gap in a door. Piet Hein Hoebens wrote that she "was caught in fraud by a policeman". Bender himself acknowledged at least one manipulation. His view was that vulnerable subjects fake phenomena when genuine ones stop coming. Joe Nickell and James Randi criticised him for calling cases genuine even after deception was found.

No full report of the investigation was ever published. Annemarie later said on television: "I'm a completely normal person. I have no powers." In 2017 Stadtwerke employee Erich Schartel still said he had "no explanation". The case lives on in books, a 1975 BBC episode of Leap in the Dark, and a long list of podcasts.