The Vachendorf Case of 1948.
In Vachendorf, a small mountain village in Bavaria, an old German couple, refugees from Bohemia, were poorly lodged with their 14-year-old daughter [sic] in one room of an old mansion occupied by many other refugees. I investigated the case sometime after the phenomena had stopped but the old woman had carefully kept a diary in which she had noted the strange occurrences which had terrified the little family for weeks.
According to the diary, the first occurrences were observed when the family played cards in the evening. Many cards disappeared and were later found under the bed covered by a pair of shoes. During the night, the two adjacent beds in which the couple and the girl slept were bombarded for hours by stones, coal, pieces of wood, litter and working tools, but no one was seriously hit. When they tried to turn on the light, they found the lightbulb unscrewed. The door of the room had been mysteriously locked and the key was found in the morning attached to the hands of a wall-clock. They had to call for help and neighbours finally broke down the door.
When questioned by us, the old woman was still deeply impressed by her experience with the phenomena. She told me that in the morning she had collected the working tools scattered throughout the room, put them into the toolbox, sat on the toolbox and said, “Now you will stay here.” While she was still sitting on the box, she said that the tools were once again scattered one by one around the room. My collaborator had photographed her while she was giving this report and her expression seems to reflect her consternation and flabbergasted state. For the first time the apparently trustworthy testimony of a witness confronted me with the problem of penetration of matter through matter, or the sudden appearance of objects from an enclosed space. Further instances of penetration of matter through matter were also reported: When the old man was sitting on a stool in front of a closed glass cupboard, a wooden shoe was reported to have come out of the cupboard and slightly hurt his forehead. Also, the woman suddenly saw linen from the attic appear in the air and fall to the floor.
During the time of the phenomena, the occurrences ceased whenever the girl was away from the house for some time. Moreover, we got good evidence that similar phenomena occurred at the location where she was on holiday.
In this case, we applied for the first time the methodological trick of a photographic reproduction of the alleged phenomena in order to check how various eyewitness reports differed. The level of evidence which can be reached in such investigations post factum is analogous to the level of evidence presented during a trial. Sceptics who despise such case material and who devalue testimonies of witnesses as purely subjective statements ought consequently to resign themselves from every form of jurisdiction depending upon testimonies. Some hint to the authenticity of the alleged phenomena may be the patterns in which they were said to occur. Thus, “all of a sudden the linen appeared in the air,” or “no one was seriously hit when the beds were bombarded,” or “when the girl was away, things suddenly stopped.”
From “New Developments in Poltergeist Research” by Hans Bender, in the Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association, no. 6, 1969.