The Bizarre & Frightening Case of the Rosenheim Poltergeist

nivek

As Above So Below
The Bizarre and Frightening Case of the Rosenheim Poltergeist
By Brent Swancer

One very persistent type of haunting in the world of the paranormal is that of the poltergeist. Coming from the German word for for “noisy ghost” or “noisy spirit,” it typically entails a wide variety of mischievous paranormal activity that can range from the annoying to the truly terrifying. They are most well known from the hit movie of the same name, but make no mistake about it, real poltergeist cases have been recorded for a very long time. One rather well-documented account of a poltergeist haunting comes to us from the area of Bavaria, in Germany, and it has served to stir speculation and debate to this day.

In the Autumn of 1967, the law offices of lawyer Sigmund Adam, located in the Bavarian town of Rosenheim, began to experience some rather odd phenomena. It started off rather innocuously enough. The lights would go out by themselves or be found swinging for no apparent reason, office equipment would turn on or off by itself, items would be found misplaced, and things would spill or leak of their own accord. In a busy law office this was probably mostly ignored or written off as those “that was odd” moments that we all have from time to time, but the phenomena would soon go beyond the ignorable as it grew steadily in intensity. Lights would be found with the bulbs missing, heavy furniture would be moved around, desk drawers would open and close suddenly on their own, and there would be heard banging noises from the walls that could not be explained. On several occasions lightbulbs suddenly exploded, with one particularly harrowing incident being a time when all of the light bulbs in the office spontaneously exploded at once, and then there was the weirdness with the phones.

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On numerous occasions several of the office phones would ring simultaneously, only to find that no one was on the other end of the line, and there would be times when calls would suddenly be cut short in the middle of important conversations, as if someone had hung the phone up. Additionally, the phone bill was also found to have a bill for a large number of outgoing calls to a speaking clock time service, which cost a substantial amount of money, yet everyone who worked there insisted they had never made such calls. Adam suspected that this was all a twisted prank, and so had the phone company disable the lines so that only he had the key to unlock them, yet the calls continued, and there would sometimes be logged up to 6 calls per minute to the time service, which was not only inexplicable, but also seemingly nearly impossible since these were the days of mechanical dial up phones and it would have been quite a feat to pull off manually, especially since this was a 9-digit Munich number. The phone company could find nothing wrong with the equipment or phones, no glitches were found, and even when Adam had all of the phones in the office physically replaced the weird phenomena went on unabated.

Things were just as bizarre with the constantly malfunctioning office equipment and other electrical disturbances. Electricians who were called in could not find any problems with the wiring, although they did find evidence of large power surges they could not explain and which had not affected any other nearby buildings, and which had nevertheless not blown any circuits or fuses to explain the anomalies. As the phenomena went on, in frustration Adam even tried turning off all the power and working off the generators, but this did little to help and changed nothing. As this strangeness continued, it all came to the attention of the German parapsychologist and head of the Institute of Paranormal Research, Hans Bender, who would arrive on the scene to do his own investigation.

Bender quickly set up monitoring equipment for the electrical systems, as well as cameras, and soon witnessed much of the claimed strange activity himself. He would claim that he had witnessed the lights going on and off, as well as more spectacular incidents such as a large filing cabinet moving across the floor and framed pictures rotating on their hooks. Some of this he claimed to have captured on film, and his monitoring equipment allegedly measured considerable surges in power whenever this paranormal phenomenon acted up. Bender also claimed that he had two physicists from the Max Planck Institute by the names of Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha come in to investigate, and that they had found evidence of “some unknown form of energy at work,” although it was not made clear exactly what this is supposed to be.

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As his investigation continued, Bender also ascertained that the phenomena only ever started and stopped at certain times of the day, namely during regular working hours. No one at the building after the office closed for the evening ever witnessed anything odd, and it also didn’t seem to happen on weekends. This was a curious detail, because it made Bender suspect that the activity could be focused on a person rather than the place, an idea that gained traction when he noticed that one employee in particular seemed to have strange things go on when she was around. It seems as though a 19-year-old secretary by the name of Annemarie Schneider, who had only very recently started working there, had always been present during the strange incidents, and Bender himself witnessed lights often flicker or sway when she walked into rooms. After interviewing the young woman and finding out about her personal trauma and woes with a broken marriage engagement and her deep dissatisfaction with her job, Bender became convinced that she was displaying a phenomenon known as “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis,” or RSPK, during which a person will unknowingly manifest their stress into outward bursts of subconscious psychokinesis, which is the ability to move objects with one’s mind. It was a suspicion that was supported by the curious detail that when she went out of town for a few days the phenomena stopped, only to start right back up again upon her return, and all of the paranormal activity in the office seems to have ceased permanently when Schneider finally quit her miserable job in January of 1968.

The idea that this woman might be the cause for the poltergeist phenomena witnessed at the office is not a new one. Cases like this are often allegedly found to orbit an individual or individuals within a location, usually troubled adolescents or someone who has some sort of deep seated stress or inner turmoil. The idea is that this pent up stress or frustration can trigger a latent psychokinetic ability and project outward to affect the material world, usually with the person responsible being totally unaware that they are doing it. This hypothesis is so entrenched in poltergeist lore that a good many paranormal investigators believe that most, if not all, poltergeist cases can be explained through this “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis,” so Bender’s presumption was not particularly bonkers or fringe by paranormal standards. However, the point has been made that it could also be explained through more mundane means, and it is quite possible that this case didn’t go down exactly as described by Bender.

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Annemarie Schneider

There have been a lot of skeptical arguments and numerous holes shot in the case of what is now known as “The Rosenheim Poltergeist.” For one there is actually very little in the way of concrete evidence provided by Bender, and although some video footage was taken of some weird things, none of the more spectacular claimed phenomena was recorded, making it all very circumstantial and nothing that could not be hoaxed through hidden wires or some other trickery, not necessarily by Bender, but also possibly by Schneider to get attention or take out her displeasure with her job, or even by the lawyer Adam himself to get publicity for his firm. There is also the fact that Bender has been accused of being so zealously married to the idea of paranormal phenomena at work that he has ignored other mundane possibilities and embraced the more anomalous ones, not vigorously examining the evidence and even exaggerating it all in the process, the whole of it ending up with an investigation that is, according to Dutch journalist and skeptic Piet Hein Hoebens, “incompatible with scientific inquiry.” There have even been accusations that Bender offered up fraudulent evidence such as the meter readings of the electrical activity and testimonies of witnesses in order to write a book on it all. Of course it could come down to a combination of all of these factors, with physicist John Taylor calling the Rosenheim Poltergeist case a “mixture of expectation, hallucination and trickery.”

Despite all of these skeptical arguments, there has never been any proof that Bender exaggerated or faked any of this, and indeed some of his reports are backed up by other witnesses and even police. Nor was Schneider ever caught faking anything, and there is nothing at all to show that anyone definitely carried out a hoax of any kind. Due to this, and the fact that it is an old case with no further information, it has been confined to discussion and debate, with no end in sight and no way of knowing what to really think. We are left to ask what was going on here? Was this ghosts, psychic energy projected from an individual, or merely a hoax or prank? We will probably never truly know the answer to these questions, and the case of the Rosenheim Poltergeist remains firmly in the realm of strange cases we will very likely never fully get to the bottom of.


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Perth escorts
This might be a good time to make a low-ball offer … provided you can afford to pay the taxes, keep up with the maintenance … and don’t put anything in front of the door to the tower.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
weirdness with the phones

Oh God. I love those. I've had thousands of service calls like that and have a few good war stories. I can think of two noisy poltergeists I've personally caught red handed making the phones do weird things. Those were the really clever and creative ones. You put in a call center - which I have done many many times - statistically there are people who will noodle around with the technology whatever the era. Even in 1967

:lol4:
 

Rick Hunter

Celestial
I remember reading in John Keel book about all the mischief people used to do with the telephone system. Called "Phone Phreaking", it was usually done as a means of getting free long distance service or eavesdropping (an excellent website about it: Exploding The Phone -- About). As I recall, he found that Indrid Cold and co. were also into Phreaking and could bypass the telephone company's safeguards no problem.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Well, I think I'll wager three bucks on a Kindle copy of that. Looks interesting, thanks.

This is all from the hip so it may not all be 100%.

Remember rotary dial phones ? Network addressing was done by interrupting the subscriber loop by specific numbers of short pulses, up to ten to represent a zero. Western Electric called them 500 type sets. I think it's 10 ppm. I've run across really old phones that won't work because they were designed to interrupt at a different rate. If you have a 'land line' or some facsimile you interrupt the subscriber loop commonly with a 600ms hookswitch flash to conference people in or take call waiting.

DTMF is Dual Tone Multi Frequency. A phone has a 3 x 4 keypad. The row and column have a specific frequency and touching a button will produce two tones specific to that key. Rather than interrupt the subscriber loop that's how network addressing was done. Phreaking is a human's ability to mimic that. Happens anyway sometimes. I remember old voice mail systems that needed software patches because something as simple as a chair with squeaky wheels might make the VM react as if it had been given a keypad command.

At one time there was a 1500 set that had only ten push buttons. The * and # showed up a bit later as 2500 sets. The special characters were because a non-Bell company figured out a way to carry payloads without the use of the famed AT&T Long Lines and special network addressing was added to accommodate that. They did it with microwaves. Remember MCI ? The military added 4 more buttons as a column on the right for A,B,C,D for the same reason. Network addressing.

Phreaking found a vulnerability in carrier pick codes. Remember all those annoying commercials that would tell you about savings by dialing 1010xxx ? I think AT&Ts is 10288. Sprint and MCI were 10222 and 10333 although I don't remember which.

Argle Bargle? Yeah. old phone stuff. Nobody cares about phones or any of that anymore. I worked on really big systems up until 5 years ago and the technology in use now has a few surprising anachronistic throwbacks, and the Public Switched Telephone Network is alive and well but it's really become a secondary IT function. An easy one because as technology progresses the applications become better and need less and less configuration and testing. I started in with Voice Over Internet Protocol systems over twenty years ago. Now it's just a pizza box that when installed will scurry off and do it's thing like a new kitten and a pan of sand.

I hear old phones and paranormal and it gets me fired up. Not sure how the German telephone system worked in 1967 but would be willing to bet it was perfectly in ordnung

Maybe I'll clip a butt set on my belt the rest of the day :)
 

nivek

As Above So Below
Oh God. I love those. I've had thousands of service calls like that and have a few good war stories. I can think of two noisy poltergeists I've personally caught red handed making the phones do weird things. Those were the really clever and creative ones. You put in a call center - which I have done many many times - statistically there are people who will noodle around with the technology whatever the era. Even in 1967

:lol4:

The first cellular phone I ever had was a flip phone and one day I got a call from a number I did not recognize, so I didn't answer the call...Later on that day I missed a call and looked at my phone call list and the earlier number I did not recognize had a strange date of when that call was made to my cell phone...The date for that call was October 11, 1976 lol...

...
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
My first cell was 1992 or so. A small bag with a corded handset and a suction cup antenna.

I can tell you professionally that was a plea for help, most likely from a princess with a strange hairdo, actually from 1976.

And you blew it :)

I assume she found help elsewhere ........
 

Rick Hunter

Celestial
Well, I think I'll wager three bucks on a Kindle copy of that. Looks interesting, thanks.

This is all from the hip so it may not all be 100%.

Remember rotary dial phones ? Network addressing was done by interrupting the subscriber loop by specific numbers of short pulses, up to ten to represent a zero. Western Electric called them 500 type sets. I think it's 10 ppm. I've run across really old phones that won't work because they were designed to interrupt at a different rate. If you have a 'land line' or some facsimile you interrupt the subscriber loop commonly with a 600ms hookswitch flash to conference people in or take call waiting.

DTMF is Dual Tone Multi Frequency. A phone has a 3 x 4 keypad. The row and column have a specific frequency and touching a button will produce two tones specific to that key. Rather than interrupt the subscriber loop that's how network addressing was done. Phreaking is a human's ability to mimic that. Happens anyway sometimes. I remember old voice mail systems that needed software patches because something as simple as a chair with squeaky wheels might make the VM react as if it had been given a keypad command.

At one time there was a 1500 set that had only ten push buttons. The * and # showed up a bit later as 2500 sets. The special characters were because a non-Bell company figured out a way to carry payloads without the use of the famed AT&T Long Lines and special network addressing was added to accommodate that. They did it with microwaves. Remember MCI ? The military added 4 more buttons as a column on the right for A,B,C,D for the same reason. Network addressing.

Phreaking found a vulnerability in carrier pick codes. Remember all those annoying commercials that would tell you about savings by dialing 1010xxx ? I think AT&Ts is 10288. Sprint and MCI were 10222 and 10333 although I don't remember which.

Argle Bargle? Yeah. old phone stuff. Nobody cares about phones or any of that anymore. I worked on really big systems up until 5 years ago and the technology in use now has a few surprising anachronistic throwbacks, and the Public Switched Telephone Network is alive and well but it's really become a secondary IT function. An easy one because as technology progresses the applications become better and need less and less configuration and testing. I started in with Voice Over Internet Protocol systems over twenty years ago. Now it's just a pizza box that when installed will scurry off and do it's thing like a new kitten and a pan of sand.

I hear old phones and paranormal and it gets me fired up. Not sure how the German telephone system worked in 1967 but would be willing to bet it was perfectly in ordnung

Maybe I'll clip a butt set on my belt the rest of the day :)

That's awesome, I love old industrial machinery and infrastructure. I've been collecting glass and ceramic telegraph/telephone/electric insulators since I was a kid, currently have a few hundred of them. Currently resisting the urge to collect old AC transformers as the insulators already take up alot of room. There are quite a few microwave towers still equipped with horns around here that have been repurposed as cell towers, I'm really glad that they haven't been scrapped.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
My first cell was 1992 or so. A small bag with a corded handset and a suction cup antenna.

I can tell you professionally that was a plea for help, most likely from a princess with a strange hairdo, actually from 1976.

And you blew it :)

I assume she found help elsewhere ........

My first cell phone was around 2001, I did not want one even after getting that first one, I didn't want to be tethered to a cell phone but got it out of convenience reluctantly...I had a similar stance with laptops...I did not want one, I disliked the early models of laptops, I was a desktop only computer user...One day a deal came along for a Toshiba laptop from a neighbor and I got my first laptop around 2008, reluctantly lol...It lasted about 8 years before dying from a hardware failure and wasn't worth fixing...So that following Christmas a friend bought me a new Toshiba laptop which I still use to this day...

...
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
This isn't the first German case involving phone weirdness I've heard. I wonder if there are several cases or if they've become a blend over the years. A not uncommon thing with Fortean reports.

I got called out to some utility company office in CT years ago for a down system. Didn't normally go there and used the only backup I could find to restore the voice mail system. Worked fine. I was leaving as the office was just opening in the morning and one of the admin assistants was ashen faced and upset.

Seems it was a very old backup indeed and she had new messages from some employee who had died. I could breathe life back into the old system, but doing that to Mr.Haversham personally or whoever it was, was beyond my responsibility under contract.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
My first cell phone was around 2001, I did not want one even after getting that first one, I didn't want to be tethered to a cell phone but got it out of convenience reluctantly...I had a similar stance with laptops...I did not want one, I disliked the early models of laptops, I was a desktop only computer user...One day a deal came along for a Toshiba laptop from a neighbor and I got my first laptop around 2008, reluctantly lol...It lasted about 8 years before dying from a hardware failure and wasn't worth fixing...So that following Christmas a friend bought me a new Toshiba laptop which I still use to this day...

...

Laptops are a bit dated. I still use one occasionally and they still have plenty of utility. Lately I've seen people carrying all sorts of ruggedized big tablet things with straps, weird holsters, what have you. Meh.
 
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