The Bremen-Freiburg Case of 1965-66.
The Freiburg team became personal witnesses to poltergeist phenomena in 1965 in the course of the Bremen Case. The case is known here in the U.S.A. as a result of a television film made by BBC and entitled, “The Baffling World of ESP.” My collaborators, Dr. Mischo, Dr. Timm, and Mr. Geir Vilhjalmsson reported on their personal observations at the Eleventh Convention of the PA in Freiburg. Please bear with me as I repeat the case.
At the end of June, 1965, German newspapers reported inexplicable destruction in the china section of a store in Bremen. Cups, dishes, glasses and vases were said to literally jump from the shelves. A thorough investigation by the police and all kinds of experts did not produce the slightest hint of the cause of these exceptional happenings. It was only when a 15-year-old apprentice, Heiner Sch., was sent home that the turmoil stopped. A Bremen citizen, experienced in parapsychology and suspecting a poltergeist phenomenon, had given the advice to dismiss the boy. I was brought into the case two days after his dismissal. The china section of the store was still covered with broken porcelaine.
Reports of witnesses were tape recorded, crucial situations were reconstructed and photographed, and the psychological background analysed. It became apparent that there could be no doubt of the psychokinetic nature of the phenomena which seemed to have been motivated by an extreme feeling of uneasiness on the part of the boy, who was highly frustrated. Heiner was observed for some weeks in the youth department of a psychiatric clinic to which he had been referred. Events similar to those in Bremen happened there and flabbergasted the psychiatrists and the psychologists.
I finally took him to foster parents in Freiburg where he began to work as an apprentice in the workshop of an electrician. In March, 1966, cables had to be installed in the basement of a new school. A great number of hooks were to be fastened in the concrete walls. Two eight-millimetre holes were drilled into the wall and the hook was then fixed by means of two screws and two plastic plugs. The foreman observed that almost immediately after the hooks had been fixed, the screws became loose so that the hooks, which previously had been tight enough to support pullups, could easily be moved and even removed from the wall. The following day, seven hooks came out of the wall with their plugs and one of them is reported to have followed Heiner in a turn when the boy walked through the passageway.
We subsequently arranged for an experiment in the presence of the staff of the Freiburg Institute and several workers. We fixed two hooks in the concrete walls and assured ourselves that they were tight. Then we put the boy at a distance of about one metre from the wall and closely observed the screws. Within two minutes, they became loose. None of us had seen them coming out. We got flashbulb photographs and tape records. Two days after this successful experiment, we tried to get a filmed documentation but the hooks did not become loose. We were glad not to have tried to film the phenomena the first time as light seems to disturb them.
The following month, however, new phenomena occurred. Neon lights burst in the presence of the boy. Objects were dislocated and electrical material was destroyed. Finally, the boy was dismissed by the electrician and the case was closed. I had to drop the case as both parents regarded me as an accomplice of the devil.
Because of the many occurrences in different spots, the great number of witnesses belonging to socially very different groups, and our own observations, the documentation of the external facts in this case reached a high level of evidence. Also, the analysis of the internal facts became particularly important, for it was the first time in our poltergeist research that repeated psychodiagnostic examinations and interviews of the agent enabled us to foretell that very probably the inner tension of the boy would lead to an imminent psychokinetic explosion which then occurred.
However, laboratory experiments with the agent involving dice throwing and trying to influence the balance on a pair of scales were unsuccessful. But Heiner showed an extraordinarily high score in ESP, both in GESP and in clairvoyant situations, and he yielded astronomically high critical ratios. These results have been published in the Zeitschrift fur Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie. It must be said that when at the end of an RSPK period the occurrences began to wane, Heiner sometimes began to cheat.
From “New Developments in Poltergeist Research” by Hans Bender, in the Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association, no. 6, 1969.
‘Ghost’ was on tape.
A shop assistant who made world headlines 13 years ago in a famous ghost case has admitted that he faked manifestations of a spirit world by using a tape recorder. Heinrich Scholz, then a 14-year-old apprentice in a West German grocery shop, was acclaimed as a medium with accounts of how crockery smashed mysteriously to the ground when he was at work in the shop above. But now Scholz has revealed all to Bremen police, according to the city police chief. He hated his work and the discipline, so one day he made a tape recording as he smashed china in the cellar. He hid the machine there and returned upstairs to the shop. When the sounds of breaking china sent the shopowners scurrying down to the cellar, Scholz was busy at work on the floor above.
Wolverhampton Express and Star, 3rd May 1978.
This makes no sense – why didn’t they come running when he smashed the crockery in the first place? Maybe he loved work so much he came in really early. I can’t find any world headlines yet.