ROSENHEIM

Opening

In the autumn of 1967, the law office of attorney Sigmund Adam in Rosenheim, Bavaria, started misbehaving. Light fixtures swung and exploded, fluorescent tubes unscrewed themselves, heavy furniture shifted, copier fluid leaked, and the office telephone kept dialling the speaking clock, running up bills for calls no one admitted making.

The German parapsychologist Hans Bender led the investigation and brought in physicists, post office technicians and the power utility to put instruments on the office. In his account, everything centred on one person: Annemarie Schaberl, a 19-year-old secretary. The physicists did record readings they could not explain. The harder question is whether the man who made the case famous was a reliable judge of what caused them.

Timeline

Autumn 1967The disturbances begin at Adam's office. According to Bender, they happen only during business hours and only when Schaberl is present.

1 December 1967Bender, director of the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, arrives in Rosenheim to begin a formal investigation.

After his arrivalInvestigators report that lamps begin swinging behind Schaberl when she walks into a room, and that some bulbs explode and send fragments toward her. Two physicists, Friedbert Karger of the Max Planck Institute and Gerhard Zicha, connect an ammeter to an oscillograph and work through the conventional explanations for the electrical faults.

Same investigationThe meter's needle jumps at the moment of each reported event, with no matching change in the actual current. The result holds even when the meter runs from an independent battery instead of the building's supply.

Same periodThe power utility confirms large, unexplained surges in the office's electrical system. Post office technicians look into the telephone. Their equipment logs confirm the repeated calls to the speaking clock, and the charges on the firm's account were real.

Throughout. Bender films the disturbances. Police and the phone and power specialists each document different parts of the case, which gives it a record wider than Bender's institute alone.

Early 1968Schaberl leaves the firm and the disturbances stop. Both sides cite this. Supporters say it confirms she was the source. Skeptics say it fits a hoax just as well, since a prankster who has left has no reason to keep going.

1969 to 1970Critics propose that Schaberl could have produced several effects by concealed means, including nylon threads to move the hanging lights, and fault the investigators for not ruling this out more rigorously. A 1969 book by the Viennese magician Allan (Albin Neumann), Herbert Schiff and Gert Günther Kramer says the authors found threads attached to lights and wall plates.

1977Journalists at Der Spiegel find that no copy of Bender's claimed medical dissertation can be located and that he cannot produce a promotion certificate. A district attorney opens proceedings on suspicion that he had used an academic title he had not earned in the way he represented.

1978In a separate case, detective director Herbert Schäfer of the Bremen State Criminal Police Office obtains a confession from Heinrich Scholz, the central figure in a 1965 haunting at a Bremen porcelain shop that Bender had declared genuine. Scholz, an apprentice at the shop at the time, admits manipulating both the original phenomena and the later tests in Bender's Freiburg laboratory, a controlled setting and not just the field. Bender's assistants publish counter-reports arguing that some of the manipulations Scholz described could not have happened as he said.

Later assessmentGerman-language anomalistics scholarship still cites Rosenheim as one of the most closely instrumented poltergeist cases of the last half-century, and Bender gave it particular weight in his own work. The credential affair and the Bremen confession make it harder to know how much his conclusions about Rosenheim should count.

Key figures

Schaberl is the unresolved centre of the case. Either she was, as Bender concluded, the unwitting focus of genuine psychokinesis, or, as skeptics propose, she produced the effects herself, though she never confessed. The clean ending, the disturbances stopping when she left, does not settle it either way.

Bender is the investigating authority. His later problems, the 1977 dissertation inquiry and the 1978 Bremen confession, do not disprove anything he reported from Rosenheim. They do weaken how much his personal interpretation should count next to the instrument readings, which stand on their own.

Karger and Zicha supply the most independent technical evidence. They ran systematic tests and recorded an anomalous reading that exists apart from Bender's interpretive framework.

Scholz belongs to a different case, but his confession is a confirmed precedent for exactly the kind of undetected trickery Rosenheim's skeptics propose. It shows that Bender could be fooled. It does not show that he was fooled here.

Physical and documentary trail

The record is unusually wide for a poltergeist case: film, physicist instrumentation with an anomalous reading, phone company and power utility confirmation of real technical faults, and police involvement.

What is missing is a confirmed mechanism, fraudulent or otherwise, for the instrument readings. Also missing is any independent check that Bender's reading of Rosenheim was free of the weaknesses that Bremen later exposed. The skeptic Piet Hein Hoebens noted that no full report of the investigation was ever published, which leaves outsiders unable to test the ordinary explanations themselves.

Things you might not know

• Forty-six calls in fifteen minutes. Post office instruments are reported to have logged around 600 calls to the speaking clock (0119) over about five weeks, at one point 46 in a quarter of an hour, a rate that would have been hard to dial on a 1960s rotary phone.
• The painting turned on tape. Bender reported a framed picture rotating on its hook on Ampex film. Hoebens wrote that it turned 120 degrees, 200 degrees less than Bender's first report claimed.
• A physicist thought the chart looked hand-made. John Taylor said the current meter's chart recording looked mechanically produced, with torn recording paper, and concluded that "a human hand seems most likely."
• A policeman's report is missing from Bender's version. Hoebens said Bender left out that Schaberl had been "caught in fraud by a policeman." No further detail of that incident has surfaced.
• The town's own engineer tried too. Paul Brunner of Rosenheim's public works is reported to have worked to isolate the cause of the electrical faults, without finding one.
• The investigators caught one trick themselves. According to accounts of the Max Planck physicists' work, not every effect resisted explanation: at least one manipulation by the focus person, Schaberl, was detected during the investigation, even as they reported that other effects could not be explained by physics.
• The lawyer went to court. Adam sought an injunction to stop the 1969 nylon-thread book. It was not granted, and further hearings were set at the district court in Traunstein.
• Bender's diagnosis was emotional. He called Schaberl "a typical poltergeist" and linked the activity to her unhappiness with the job and a broken engagement. He said it ended when she left the firm and married.

Competing explanations

A deliberate hoax by Schaberl, using nylon threads for the lights and other physical means for the rest. The disturbances stopping when she left supports this, and so does the Bremen precedent of undetected manipulation in a case Bender also vouched for.

Genuine anomalous physical activity, as Bender concluded, with Schaberl as an unwitting psychokinetic focus. This reading rests on the physicists' readings and the utility and phone company records, none of which Bender needed to fabricate or interpret for them to exist.

A genuine electrical or mechanical fault, correlated with Schaberl's presence through something ordinary such as her working hours or her desk's position on a particular circuit. That would account for the power surges without fraud or the paranormal, though it struggles with the telephone calls and the moving furniture.

A split verdict: take the instrument and utility findings on their own merits and discount Bender's interpretation, given that he was later shown to have been fooled by, or to have missed, deliberate manipulation in a comparable investigation.

Later life of the case

Rosenheim remains a staple of serious parapsychological literature because its evidence goes beyond testimony: physicists, utility records and police. Bender's title troubles and Scholz's admission came well after the case first became famous, and any modern assessment of it has to weigh them.

Finding

Independent physicists, a power utility and a telephone company all documented real, unexplained technical anomalies at Sigmund Adam's office in 1967, and that evidence does not depend on Hans Bender. His interpretation, that the anomalies were psychokinesis centred on Annemarie Schaberl, rests far more on his own judgment, and that judgment was later called into question by the title inquiry and by a confessed hoax in a case he had personally vouched for.

What still will not resolve: a confirmed mechanism, trickery or anomaly, for the instrument and utility readings at Rosenheim, and the full investigation report that was never published. Until one surfaces, this report treats the raw data as real and interesting, and Bender's conclusions about it as needing more scrutiny than his reputation got them at the time.