The Rosenheim Poltergeist

The people who showed up were not psychics with pendulums. The Bundespost engineers who ran the phone revision agreed, unanimously, that the disturbances were not explicable. When Adam next suspected the municipal power grid, the utility got involved too — and the state monopoly, trying to disprove a haunting, kept documenting one instead.

On December 1, 1967, Hans Bender — founder of the Institut für Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg — arrived with two colleagues. By then television and newspapers had already carried the story. Bender confirmed what the technicians before him had reported: the phenomena appeared only during office hours, and with particular force when the two young secretaries — 19-year-old Annemarie Schaberl and 17-year-old Gustel H. — were in the room. Bender pulled in the heavy equipment. Dr. Friedbert Karger and physicist Gerhard Zicha from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Munich-Garching ran oscillographic measurements from December 6 to 8.

Karger and Zicha did the thing skeptics always demand. They tested, systematically, for:

• network voltage changes
• capacitor discharges
• electrostatic charge and external static magnetic fields
• infrasound and ultrasound
• vibrations and loose contacts in the amplifier electronics
• external mechanisms and possible manual manipulation

Their written conclusion, later published alongside Bender's report: deflections appeared on the recorder even after they had systematically eliminated or controlled every physical cause they could conceive of, and had thoroughly verified their instruments were functioning correctly. Bender, for his part, wrote that after a thorough investigation — one the criminal police took part in, since Adam had filed his complaint — fraud appeared to be excluded, and that "hysterical manipulations" could not be squared with the mass of witness testimony either. That, in Bender's framing, left room for a third hypothesis.

This is the part that lifts Rosenheim above the usual creak-on-the-stairs report. There is paper. Sealed voltage and current recorders, installed by the municipal utility's audit department under audit assistant Paul Brunner starting November 16, logged multiple full-scale deflections — spikes reaching around 50 amps. On November 21 the recorders caught three full deflections; a bulb exploded in the anteroom the same day, then six more deflections followed with nothing visible happening. On November 30, the office lamps began swinging back and forth. The utility's auditors watched that too.

Erich Schartel of the utility's revision team remembered something specific fifty years later, in a 2017 interview:

The ink needles in the current and voltage meters were so wafer-thin that they should not have been able to exert any pressure on the paper at all. But in the recordings at the office they tore through the paper effortlessly.

The physical events escalated through December and into January. A painting on the wall was filmed rotating up to 320° — captured on video by Adam's son in the presence of a utility technician, after the same event had eluded the TV cameras. Lamp-swinging and the loud reports were recorded on an Ampex system. During Annemarie's forced leave from January 5 to 17, in front of physics professor P. Büchel, drawers opened by themselves, pictures and calendars fell from walls, and a filing cabinet weighing three-and-a-half Zentner — roughly 175 kg — reportedly shifted about 30 cm from the wall. In total, around 40 people witnessed events in that office: technicians, physicists, psychologists, and police officers among them.

Bender's read was human-centered from early on. He called Annemarie Schaberl "a typical poltergeist" — 19, frustrated with her job, distressed over a broken engagement — and argued her emotional unhappiness was "converted into psychokinesis." The measuring instruments, he noted, deflected only when the office was occupied and working, and the disturbances intensified when she was present and followed her through the building.

The timeline fits the theory almost too neatly. Schaberl was placed on leave from January 5 to 17 — she pushed to keep coming in anyway, out of loyalty to a boss being savaged in the local press — and it was during those two weeks that the phenomena hit their peak before ending entirely. She also began suffering physically: she and Gustel H. complained of intense ear pressure and skin flushing, and Annemarie showed temporary "hysterical contractures of the arms and legs." When she left the firm for good in January 1968, the disturbances in the office stopped.

Bender noted brief further activity at her family home and possibly at a second law office where she tried to finish her apprenticeship. Taken to the IGPP in Freiburg for testing, she reportedly produced "successful" telepathy results but no psychokinetic effects — and no detailed data was ever published.

Schaberl's own account, given in a later television interview, has never changed: "I am a completely normal person. I have no powers. It must have been something else."

Rosenheim has never escaped the debunk, and the debunk is not weak. In April 1970, Die Zeit reported on the book Falsche Geister, echte Schwindler? ("False spirits, real swindlers?"), whose authors — including the Viennese magician Albin Neumann, working as "Allan," with two assistants — said they visited Adam's office and found nylon threads attached to overhead lights and wall fixtures that moved when pulled. They also reported a rubber truncheon behind a cabinet, allegedly used to make the banging sounds, and traced the electrical phenomena to an X-ray machine elsewhere in the building and to deliberate short circuits. Their verdict: "the public had been tricked by tricks." Adam sought a legal injunction to block the book. It was not granted, and further hearings were set for the District Court of Traunstein.

The sharpest critique came from Dutch skeptic Piet Hein Hoebens, who flagged two omissions in Bender's published account:

• Bender never mentioned that Annemarie was caught in fraud by a policeman.
• The painting's rotation was reported as "120 degrees" on the Ampex film — 200° less than Bender's first report claimed.

Hoebens's structural point is the one that lingers: no full report of the investigations was ever published, so nobody can independently check how well the parapsychologists excluded naturalistic explanations. He also judged Bender's stated belief in the paranormal "incompatible with scientific inquiry." Physicist John Taylor examined the chart-recorder evidence and concluded the deflections were likely produced mechanically: the record was "in the form of a loop," the paper was torn, the needle pressed down with force, and nobody actually watched a deflection being made in the act. "But a human hand seems most likely," he wrote. His overall verdict — "a mixture of expectation, hallucination and trickery."

Here's what the easy debunk has to swallow. The Bundespost had every commercial reason to find a mundane cause and clear the bill — a faulty line, a person abusing the phones — and its own independent monitoring gear instead confirmed calls registering that the rotary phones could not have made.

Karger and Zicha addressed the fraud suspicion head-on in their published report. Yes, they wrote, it was odd that a deflection was rarely seen in the act — usually the curve was already there a few seconds later. But during the deflections they did personally witness, they stood half a meter from the recorder while everyone else was several meters away; they guarded against psychological misdirection; a mechanical lock prevented the recorder being influenced by thin threads from outside; and the recorder sat behind a viewing glass. Under those conditions, they stated, trickery was excluded with certainty. Their formal conclusions ran to five points, and the last is the one that unsettles: the movements seemed to come from intelligently controlled forces that appeared to have a tendency to evade investigation.

Set against that: a caught act of fraud, nylon threads in the room, a rubber truncheon behind a cabinet, a rotation figure that shrank by 200° between Bender's first report and the film, and no full report to audit. Both piles of evidence are real. Neither erases the other.

To dismiss Rosenheim entirely, you have to argue a teenage typist outwitted the German telephone authority's own equipment and two plasma physicists, simultaneously, for weeks, without being caught in the act. Not impossible. Just a large claim of its own. The phenomena stopped exactly when Schaberl left — which is what a human-centered theory predicts — yet nobody ever showed how the human did it under the controls that were running. The precise, documented question survives everything: what dialed the speaking clock dozens of times in fifteen minutes on a phone that could not dial that fast, and why is it still on the bill?

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