Riddle for the scientists.
Weird happenings in humble home.
Girl makes furniture and food fly.
Thousands of people have visited the humble home of a servant at Dietersheim, in Bavaria, because of the reports of weird happenings in the presence of the servant’s nine-years-old daughter, Marie Paetsch. Sometimes when Marie goes into the house, says a Central News correspondent, clothes, crockery, potatoes, bread, and apples suddenly fly through the air, and chairs, tables, and even the heavy bed used by mother and daughter, move, and force has to be used to put them back.
These manifestations, which occur by night as well as by day, attracted wide attention because a well-known physician, Dr Schnitztein, living in the neighbouring town of Neustadt-on-Aisch, investigated them, and, having found them genuine, interested other scientists in Nuremberg and Munich. They all made repeated visits to the servant’s home, and saw the strange happenings, while Marie was seated on her mother’s lap, with the parent’s arms folded over the child’s body.
When the little girl was released and I walked into the garden everything was normal indoors, but when the wise men followed the girl outside clods, stones, and pieces of wood rose around them and then dropped to the ground.
Dr Schnitztein says the scientists are unable to solve the riddle, but all are agreed that any deception in impossible. They are convinced that these manifestations work through Marie, because they never occur in her absence. Both mother and child appear to be quite normal in body and mind, and, except for Marie’s exceptional beauty, are not in any way different from people of their class in life.
Dundee Evening Telegraph, 21st January 1921
Girl and “Haunted House.”
A strange libel case was heard by the Munich Court (states the “Daily Express” Berlin correspondent). Two doctors were accused of publishing a libellous pamphlet against a nine-year-old peasant girl. The village of Dietersheim was terrified last winter by potatoes, shoes, and sausages flying about the houses.
The two doctors investigated the matter, and declared that the girl Martia Seelsch caused the trouble. Spiritualists maintained that the girl possessed supernatural faculties, which enabled her to move objects without touching them, but experts who attended the Munich Court did not succeed in explaining the mystery. The doctors were acquitted.
Belfast Telegraph, 23rd September 1921.