The Nicklheim Case of 1968-69.
Our most recent case occurred in Nicklheim, a small Bavarian village ten miles distant from Rosenheim. Over a period of four months a small family, comprised of a working-man, his wife and 13-year-old daughter Brigitte, living in a small house, were disturbed by poltergeist phenomena. In an almost classical way, the phenomena began at the end of November, 1968, with knocks on the windows and doors, and with stones being thrown against the exterior of the house and later penetrating into the interior of the house, even when the rooms were closed. Later, the stones usually disappeared. When we entered the investigation, we procured a steel box in which the stones – then numbered – were locked along with other objects were displaced.
These disturbances were corroborated by numerous witnesses. Toilet articles, dolls, and knickknacks began to fly, sometimes around the corners of the rooms, or they were put somewhere in a more or less humorous way. Eggs cracked in the hats of visitors, and their coats were shredded. Linen appeared from the closets, dolls were undressed and found in sexual positions, shoes were filled with water.
We concentrated our investigation on the phenomena connected with tele-apportation and the appearance of objects from closed spaces. I would like to cite some instances: At the very moment that a priest blessed the house, a stone fell from the ceiling and came to rest on a board without any bouncing, almost as it if were fastened to a magnet. The priest picked it up and it gave the sensation of being warm. This occurred in the kitchen and all the doors and windows had been closed. A cufflink appeared from a closed glass cupboard and was only seen when it fell into an opposite corner of the kitchen.
Lawyer Adam, the one involved in the Rosenheim Case, checked reports of the family in an experiment. They had told him that objects which disappeared were later seen falling outside the house. He put bottles containing perfume and tablets on the kitchen table, asked the inhabitants of the house to go outside, closed all the windows and doors, and then left himself. After a short time, the perfume bottle appeared in the air outside the house, and a bit later on, the bottle of tablets appeared in the air at the height of the roof and fell to the ground in a zigzag manner. Lawyer Adam telephoned me immediately and we tape recorded his report.
This encouraged us to try for objective documentation. We placed the most frequently moved knickknacks in the glass cupboard and did all we could possibly think of to motivate the family to cause poltergeist activity. To get them out, we controlled the cupboard by an electronic camera and an Ampex videotape recorder, but nothing happened during the two hour period that we recorded. Since we had to leave that day, we arranged with some collaborators and the criminal police to seal the glass cupboard the next morning. Our collaborators did this, but the expert in such matters from the police was prevented from participating.
Some days later, Brigitte’s mother reported that one of the knickknacks had appeared from the cupboard. When she opened the kitchen door upon her return from the village, she heard a noise and discovered that a lampshade, which we had slightly damaged during our investigations, had fallen to the floor, and with it one of the knickknacks which had been enclosed in the cupboard. She called me and I immediately phoned Dr. Karger, the Munich physicist, and asked him to control the sealing of the cupboard. Later he discovered that one of the glass panes could be moved an inch in a certain way but it was difficult to discover how. Thus, our objective proof was spoiled, but I would like to point out that I never found the slightest indication of false testimony by Brigitte’s mother.
My own personal observations also made this penetration of matter through matter effect more and more probable: I once had the whole family in the kitchen under control. My coat hung in a little wardrobe adjacent to the kitchen. The tape recorder was running. At that instant, Brigitte heard a cat mewing outside the front door. Her mother went to let it in. She then rushed back into the kitchen and said, “Your coat is outside the house, carefully laid on the snow beside the staircase.” It was very cold and the outer door had been closed at all times. We checked the time, and according to the tape recording, the mother had been out of the kitchen exactly eight and a half seconds. We further checked the time needed to rush from the kitchen to the wardrobe, take the coat, carry it down the staircase and lay it on the snow. The most efficient test person after several trials achieved it in twenty-one seconds. Thus, this seems to indicate that my coat was transported or tele-apported.
This and other events of that nature encouraged us to endeavour to document the phenomena. We constructed a box with an open front. The knickknacks were placed inside and were controlled by light responsive photoelectric switches acting on a release which triggered two photo and one film camera, which controlled the box and the whole room. Furthermore, the open front of the box was controlled by a dark responding, photoelectric “light” curtain similar to the the protective device used by jewellers in their shop windows. It could, in addition, be closed by a sealed glass pane. Penetration of the light curtain by a knickknack would have been recorded on this device by lights. The green one was on when all was undisturbed but if anything had happened, the red light would have gone on.
Because of financial difficulties, we could not install a high frequency camera yielding up to 10,000 shots per second. It would have been the ideal instrument to control the probable trajectory of objects appearing from the box, since according to witnesses’ reports, a certain period of time usually elapsed before the objects became visible on their trajectories.
Even though the family had been highly motivated to produce results, invariably little happened. Only once when we were all outside the house we noticed that the lamps had suddenly been turned on. We rushed back into the room which contained the box and found a little Beatle figurine fallen over in the box. The photoelectric light curtain had not responded and we had photographed the box before. The automatically triggered photos and films did not give any indication of a possible disturbance, such as a cat jumping on the box, which would have jarred the figurine. For days, this same figurine had stood firmly in the box in spite of any vibrations caused by the family members and visitors in the room. This strange event might have suggested some initial PK endeavours to displace the figurine. The photoelectric light curtain switched to the red light three times but there was no indication how this happened.
When increasing numbers of visitors eager to see the strange phenomena came to the house, Brigitte and her inseparable girlfriend, Heidi, who might have been a cooperative PK agent, began to cheat. They were very skillful about it, and I had to introduce a criminalistic expert presented as a scientific collaborator to get objective proof of this trickery. We got it when fingerprints were found on a prepared dish which the poltergeist was alleged to have thrown out the window.
This case, which has not yet been fully evaluated, presented an extraordinary accumulation of “oddities” or events which can by no means be understood in the framework of known physical laws. For the Freiburg team, it is a challenge for the technical perfection of the methods of objective documentation, and we do hope that one day we will procure conclusive documents for this most mysterious and unsettling aspect of poltergeist cases, that is, tele-apportation or penetration of matter through matter.
From “New Developments in Poltergeist Research” by Hans Bender, in the Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association, no. 6, 1969.