The Rosenheim Case 1967-68.
At the end of November, 1967, inexplicable events were reported in the German press to be taking place in a lawyer’s office in the Bavarian town of Rosenheim. Electric bulbs exploded, neon lights attached to a ceiling 2.5 metres high went out time and again. Electricians found them unscrewed from their sockets by about 90 degrees. Sharp bangs were reported, automatic fuses were said to have blown without cause, and developing fluid in photostatic copying machines spilled many times. The work of the lawyer’s office was severely impaired by telephone disturbances which had already been observed in the previous summer: the four telephones often rang simultaneously, conversations were cut short and the telephone bills rose to an unusual height.
The lawyer and his personnel suspected disturbances in the power supply as the cause of the strange occurrences. The maintenance department of the municipal power station and the post office authorities started a thorough investigation: monitoring equipment was introduced to measure fluctuations in the power supply and an automatic counter installed which registered number, time and length for every call made in the office. The monitoring instruments registered large deflections that sometimes appeared simultaneously with the abnormal phenomena and persisted even when – as a last trial to exclude undetectable causes in the general power system – an emergency power unit was installed to to ensure ‘undisturbed’ electric current in the lawyer’s office. The counter of the post office registered innumerable calls of the time announcement number (0119), often dialled six times a minute and this for weeks.
The Bavarian and the General Western German Television produced broadcasts about this unusual case by the end of November, 1967, which since then have become almost historic documents. They show the destructions in the lawyer’s office, the instalment of the monitoring equipment, the statements of the perplexed technicians, the plaints of the lawyer and the authoritarian affirmation of an official of the post office that this perfect organisation is always capable of detecting disturbances and that the 0119 calls must have been dialled in the office. The employees denied having done the calling.
The broadcast ended with the open question: Are the strange occurrences due to a technical defect or to mischief? But who could be interested in such continued practical jokes? This was the situation when, on December 1st, 1967, the Freiburg Institute began its investigation. We found that only during office hours did the unusual phenomena and deflections of the monitoring instruments occur. A first deflection was often registered at the very minute when Annemarie Sch., a 19 year old employee, crossed the threshold of the office in the morning. When this young girl walked through the gangways, the lamps behind her began to swing with increasing amplitude. If bulbs exploded, the fragments flew towards her. In addition, the number of phenomena decreased with increasing distance from Miss Sch. It became obvious that we were dealing with RSPK connected with Annemarie.
We had first to rule out the hypothesis of disturbances in the power supply. Two physicists, Dr F. Karger and Dipl. Phys. G. Zicha from the Max Planck Institute for Plasmaphysics in Munich, observed and examined the recorder deflections and systematically eliminated or checked every conceivable physical cause. They could definitely prove that the anomalous deflections were not caused by mains voltage rises. They came to the following conclusions:
- Although recorded with the facilities available to experimental physics, the phenomena defy explanation with the means available to theoretical physics.
- The phenomena seem to be the result of non-periodic, short duration forces.
- The phenomena (including the telephone incidents) do not seem to involve pure electrodynamic effects.
- Not only do simple events of an explosive type take place, but also complicated motions (e.g. recorder curves, moving pictures).
- The movements seem to be performed by intelligently controlled forces (e.g. the telephone incidents) that have a tendency to evade investigation.
The discovery of the PK nature of the occurrences led to an intensification of the events: paintings began to swing and to turn, drawers came out by themselves, documents were displaced, a 175 kilogram cabinet moved twice about 30 cm from the wall, etc. Annemarie Sch., getting more and more nervous, finally displayed hysterical contractions in her arms and legs. When she was sent on leave, nothing happened, and when she definitely left the office for a new position, no more disturbances occurred. But similar events, less obvious and kept secret, happened for some time in the new office where she was working.
The Rosenheim case involved about forty first-hand witnesses who were thoroughly interrogated, among them technicians, the criminal police (lawyer Adam had placed an accusation against he unknown), physicians, journalists, clients of the office whose testimonies could be compared with our own observations. The final result of the investigation was broadcast by Western German Television. The controlled publicity of the case, the shift from a misleading technical interpretation to the PK evidence which could be followed up by millions of spectators led to the breakthrough in public opinion [of what poltergeists might be].
From ‘Modern Poltergeist Research – a plea for an unprejudiced approach’, by Hans Bender. Chapter six in ‘New Directions in Parapsychology’, edited by J. Beloff (1974).
… When I perceived that these experiences were increasingly affecting her health, I insisted that she be dismissed and sent to another law office. In this case I would have liked to try hypnosis with a view towards provoking the phenomena in question by post-hypnotic suggestion and then recording the resulting phenomena by means of an Ampex video recorder, but the girl’s parents did not consent. If I had been allowed to use hypnosis to provoke the phenomena, I then later could have used it for therapeutic purposes in trying to rid the girl of the causes for these phenomena.
An analysis of the distribution of the events in space in relation to the position of the agent showed an attenuation effect comparable to the results of Roll and Artley. In this case, the hypothetical psi energy seemed to behave in an analogous way to physical laws and no occurrences could be observed which belonged to the category of Tizane’s “Oddities.” The influence was mechanical without an apparent cause.
In the laboratory situation we did not get PK results, but Annemarie proved to be a high scorer in distant ESP card experiments; however, she only had positive results when she was emotionally affected in the course of the therapeutic interview concerning her conflicting situation.
In this case, the importance of the social field was particularly obvious: A considerable number of phenomena seemed to be related to the lawyer who for Annemarie was a transference person, and the enhancement of the events in frequency and intensity correlated with the enthusiastic interest of the lawyer in the unexplainable, who formerly was the first to come up with the electrical disturbance hypothesis. In further cases, we plan to apply sociometric methods to analyse the social field.
One additional note to the case. New occurrences recently happened in a bowling alley which Annemarie and her fiance, a technician and amateur bowler, visited. The electronic system controlling the pins had been disturbed and PK seems to have affected it. Consequently, Annemarie’s fiance broke off the engagement and the poor girl once again had to face an avalanche of press interviews.
From “New Developments in Poltergeist Research” by Hans Bender, in the Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association, no. 6, 1969.
The ghost that blew a fuse over television.
Bristol BBC producer Anne Owen does not believe in ghosts, but she is convinced an electronic poltergeist is playing supernatural tricks with a programme she is compiling. Anne’s weird experiences began on a filming trip to Rosenheim, in Bavaria, where she was researching the activities of the electronic poltergeist. “I am working on a new series called Leap In The Dark, which deals with telepathy and extra-sensory perception,” Mrs Owen told me from her home in West Dene, Coombe Dingle, Bristol, last night. “In Rosenheim we investigated the story of the first electronic poltergeist in history.”
Mrs Owen said that whenever a young girl called Anne-Marie was at work in a lawyer’s office, the electricity supply went completely haywire. “Strip-lighting tubes jumped out of their sockets, electronic copying machines cut themselves off, and fuses leaped out of fuse boxes,” she said. Then the lawyer found his telephone bill had suddenly risen astronomically to four times its usual amount. It was discovered the telephone was constantly dialling the speaking clock of its own accord, three times faster than it could be dialled by a human.”
“When we got back to Bristol with the film, we took it into the dubbing room, and all the lights went out,” Mrs Owen told me. “They came on again when we left with the film. When we took it to the cutting room for editing, all the sound on the equipment packed up.”
Mrs Owen finally decided the whole exercise was getting creepy when she was recording a studio interview in Bristol with Professor Hans Bender, of Freiburg, in Germany. “Sue Storey, a producer’s assistant, was timing the interview with a stop watch,” she told me. “In two hours, three stop watches went wrong, and had to be replaced. This is absolutely unheard of. I think the poltergeist is taking a dim view of television,” she said.
Western Daily Press, 11th September 1975.