Rosenheim 1967:

At Sigmund Adam’s law office, the working day was usually predictable. Telephones rang, documents moved from desk to desk, and beneath the fluorescent lights overhead, the staff went about the routine business of a busy office.

Then the lights began to go out.

At first, there seemed little reason to make much of it. Lights fail. Bulbs do not last forever, and electrical systems can be unpredictable. In an office where telephones, lighting, and other electrical equipment were in constant use, it was only natural to look for the simplest explanation first.

But it kept happening.

The fluorescent lights mounted high in the ceiling went out again and again. When electricians examined them, they found something unusual: according to reports, some of the tubes had rotated by roughly a quarter turn in their fittings.

Someone — or something — appeared to have loosened them just enough to break the electrical contact.

That did not necessarily mean anything mysterious was happening. Fittings can fail. Vibrations can cause things to shift. Old equipment can behave in unexpected ways.

But the lights were only the beginning.

Sudden, loud bangs began to be heard around the office. Staff reported that automatic circuit breakers were tripping for no apparent reason. Fluid from the photocopier was also said to have leaked out repeatedly.

And then there was the telephone system.

In fact, those problems had begun earlier, during the summer.

The office had four telephones connected to a Siemens telephone system. According to staff accounts, all four would sometimes ring at the same time. Calls were cut off without warning, and the telephone bills began rising unusually.

Taken on its own, each incident might have had an ordinary explanation.

A faulty light.

A defective circuit breaker.

A problem with a telephone line.

But as the incidents accumulated, it became increasingly difficult for the people in the office to dismiss them as a series of unrelated faults.

Something, somewhere, had to be malfunctioning.

Suspicion turned to the electrical supply.

If there were disturbances in the power network supplying the office, they might explain at least some of what the staff had been experiencing. And unlike rumours or an uneasy feeling, electricity was something that could be tested.

It could be measured.

So, on November 16, a detailed investigation of the electrical system began. Technicians arrived at the office and installed equipment designed to monitor voltage and current continuously. The staff were also instructed to keep a record of anything unusual that happened and report it.

At last, they were going to find the fault.

Four days later, early on the morning of November 20, a loud bang came from Adam’s office.

A fluorescent light came loose from its ceiling fitting, fell, and shattered on the floor.

But the circuit breakers had not tripped.

The instrument monitoring the electrical current, however, had recorded something at the same time.

Two sharp surges.

Reaching as high as approximately fifty amperes.

That alone caught the technicians’ attention. But there was something else about the recording that seemed unusual. The pen tracing the graph had not simply moved up and down in the way they might have expected.

At the peak of the surge, it had formed a loop.

It was no longer only the employees of the law office who were reporting strange incidents.

The technicians’ measuring equipment had recorded something too.

And no one yet knew why.

The fluorescent light had fallen from the ceiling and shattered. At the same time, the monitoring equipment had recorded two significant surges. Yet the circuit breakers had not tripped.

Something did not add up.

And now there was a risk that someone could be injured.

The fluorescent lights hung roughly two and a half metres above the office. If another one came loose, an employee could be standing directly beneath it when it fell.

The decision was straightforward.

The fluorescent lights had to go.

They were replaced with ordinary light bulbs.

If the problem lay with the fluorescent lights themselves — their fittings, connections, or associated equipment — that should have put an end to it.

The following day, a light bulb exploded in the front room of the office.

Around the same time, the monitoring equipment recorded three large spikes in quick succession.

Later that day, another six spikes appeared.

On those occasions, the staff noticed nothing else unusual.

In some ways, that was almost more unsettling.

At times, the instruments seemed to react when nothing visible was happening. At others, something would occur in the office just as the pens on the recording devices suddenly sprang into motion.

The light bulbs continued to explode.

Shards of glass fell to the floor.

Even the light fittings themselves began to come apart.

The technicians needed to find the source.

If the problem was not originating inside the office itself, it might lie elsewhere in the electrical system: in the building’s supply line, its wiring, or the distribution network delivering power to the property.

They decided to go further.

Over the following days, the law office was connected by a separate cable directly to the transformer station.

This bypassed the parts of the system most likely to conceal a fault. If the disturbance originated there, the change should have made a difference.

Inside the office, the staff waited.

The monitoring instruments continued tracing their lines.

And then came another spike.

The bangs did not stop.

The light bulbs continued to explode.

The pens on the monitoring equipment continued to shoot across the recording paper.

The direct connection had not solved the problem.

By now, the range of possible technical explanations was narrowing considerably.

But on November 30, something happened that was more difficult to connect with voltage or electrical current.

The lights began to move.

According to the investigation report, light fittings in the office began swinging violently — whether the lights were switched on or off.

This time, employees of the electricity company were there.

They saw it themselves.

Even then, however, there were still ordinary explanations to consider.

Perhaps the movement was caused by vibrations coming from somewhere else.

There were rooms above the law office. Traffic passed along the streets outside. Movement elsewhere in the building might conceivably travel through the walls and ceilings, causing the light fittings to swing.

The technicians investigated that possibility.

They looked for vibrations coming from the floor above.

They examined whether traffic outside could be responsible.

According to their report, they found nothing that could explain the movement.

By this point, the electricity company’s investigation had been underway for around two weeks.

They had installed monitoring equipment.

Replaced the lighting.

Monitored the electrical current.

Bypassed part of the distribution system supplying the office.

Searched for sources of vibration.

Still, the incidents continued.

But something else had changed.

What was happening was no longer known only to the employees of the law office.

News of the events in Rosenheim had spread beyond the office walls. German television had covered the case, and the question hanging over it remained a simple one:

Was this an unusual technical malfunction?

Or was someone deliberately causing it?

On December 1, three men arrived at the law office to begin a new investigation.

One of them was Hans Bender.

He had investigated unusual cases before.

And it did not take long for him to notice something the technicians had recorded — but had not considered particularly significant.

At night, the office was quiet.

The monitoring instruments were quiet.

The phenomena seemed to occur when the staff were at work.

Before long, Bender’s attention began to focus on one person in particular.

A nineteen-year-old employee named Annemarie.

It had not.

Several months earlier, around the middle of the summer, another piece of equipment at Sigmund Adam’s law office had begun behaving strangely.

The telephone.

At first, there was little cause for concern.

A call would be cut off.

A connection would drop.

A line would suddenly go dead.

In an office where the telephone was in constant use throughout the day, things like that could happen. This was 1967. The office had a Siemens telephone system with four handsets, and if something went wrong, the most obvious explanation was simply a fault in the equipment or the telephone line.

But the disruptions continued.

Sometimes conversations were cut off in the middle of a call.

At other times, the telephones would ring with no apparent caller on the other end.

And sometimes, all four telephones would ring at once.

It was becoming harder to work around the problem.

The telephone was not an optional convenience in a law office. It was part of its daily operation. Clients needed to be able to get through. Calls needed to be connected. Once the lines began behaving this way, the problem became more than a minor annoyance.

Siemens was called in.

Technicians examined the equipment and searched for the cause.

Weeks passed.

But the disruptions did not stop.

Then another problem appeared.

The telephone bill.

Somewhere in the system, calls were being recorded that the law office staff said they had never made.

Most of them appeared to have one thing in common.

The number was 0119.

It was the number for the German telephone time service — an automated service people could call to hear the exact time.

There was nothing unusual about calling the number itself.

What stood out was how often it appeared to be happening.

Adam and his staff began comparing their own records with those of the telephone system. According to records later presented in connection with the case, calls appeared that no one in the office recalled making.

On October 20, the pattern became particularly striking.

Within a period of just fifteen minutes, from 7:42 to 7:57 in the morning, the system recorded dozens of connections to the time service.

Some of the entries were so close together that more than one call appeared to have been connected within the same minute.

No one in the office claimed to have been standing at the telephone making them.

This was no longer simply a matter of a dead line or a telephone ringing at the wrong time.

The system appeared to be recording actual usage.

And someone had to pay for it.

The German postal and telephone service became involved. The telephones were disconnected and replaced. Monitoring equipment was installed so that what happened inside the office could be compared with the records generated by the telephone system.

That should have resolved the matter.

If the fault was in the telephones, replacing them should make it disappear.

If an employee was making the calls, the monitoring should reveal it.

And if the recording system itself was malfunctioning, comparing the measurements should expose the discrepancy.

But then another call appeared in the records.

No one in the office said they had made it.

More followed.

Adam had begun keeping careful records of the calls his staff actually made. Yet additional calls continued to appear in the telephone service’s records.

Attempts were made to prevent the telephones from being used without the staff’s knowledge.

But the situation did not become any easier to explain.

On November 14, a woman tried to call the law office.

Instead of being connected, she heard an automated message telling her that, for technical reasons, the number had been changed and that she should contact directory enquiries for the new one.

She did.

Directory enquiries gave her the number.

It was exactly the same number she had dialled in the first place.

She tried again.

This time, the call went through to the office without any difficulty.

The days passed, and the technicians continued searching for an explanation.

There was nothing supernatural about a faulty telephone.

Nor was there anything impossible about a recording system making mistakes.

The problem in Rosenheim was that whenever one explanation began to seem plausible, something else happened that did not quite fit.

And while the telephone technicians were still trying to understand what was happening with the lines, another problem had already begun to make itself known inside the office.

It did not come from the telephone.

It came from above.

From the lights.

The telephone service had been trying to determine why the lines were behaving strangely and why calls appeared to be showing up in the records that the staff did not recognise.

At the same time, another problem was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

The electricity.

The office lights had begun going out for no apparent reason. Circuit breakers tripped. Loud bangs were heard in the rooms.

And the fluorescent lights overhead appeared to be coming loose in their fittings.

When electricians came to inspect them, they found lights that had rotated in their fittings far enough to break the electrical contact.

It was unusual.

But it was not impossible.

Vibration.

A faulty fitting.

A problem somewhere in the electrical system.

Something they simply had not found yet.

So, on November 16, the technicians decided to stop waiting for the next incident.

They would monitor it as it happened.

Recording instruments were brought into the office to continuously measure voltage and current. Pens rested against long strips of paper, tracing lines as the hours passed.

If the voltage changed, it should show up.

If an unusual current passed through the system, it should leave a trace.

The staff were given another task.

Whenever anything unusual happened, they were to write down the exact time.

A bang.

A light going out.

A circuit breaker tripping.

The time could then be compared with the paper records.

For the first time, the investigation no longer depended solely on the memories of the people in the office.

Now a machine was waiting for the next incident.

During the first few days, spikes began to appear.

The pen would suddenly move across the paper, then return.

Sometimes the staff noticed something happening at the same time.

Sometimes they did not.

The technicians continued to monitor the equipment.

Then came the morning of November 20.

It was shortly after seven when a loud bang came from Adam’s office.

A fluorescent light had come loose from its fitting.

It fell from a height of roughly two and a half metres and struck the floor.

The glass shattered.

The first thing the technicians could check was the electrical system.

The circuit breakers had not tripped.

Then they turned to the recording equipment.

On the paper strip were two large spikes.

Around fifty amperes.

But it was not only their size that caught the technicians’ attention.

The pen had behaved strangely.

When it reached the top of the spike, it had not simply reversed direction and retraced its path.

It had formed a loop on the paper.

The technicians examined the recording.

If the pen was merely following a change in current, why had it moved that way?

No one had an answer.

But now there was another problem.

The fluorescent lights had become a safety hazard.

If one of them could come loose and fall into the working area below, the next one might land on someone.

So they were removed.

Ordinary light bulbs were installed in their place.

It seemed a sensible precaution.

If the fault lay with the fluorescent lights, their electrical components, or their fittings, the change should at least put an end to that part of the problem.

The following day, one of the new light bulbs exploded.

The monitoring equipment recorded three large spikes around the same time.

Later that day, another six appeared.

On those occasions, the staff saw nothing happen.

That was precisely what made the readings so difficult to interpret.

Sometimes something happened in the office and the instruments reacted.

Sometimes the instruments reacted when nothing visible happened.

And sometimes something occurred that no one could understand in electrical terms at all.

The technicians needed to narrow the search.

Perhaps the disturbance was not coming from the office itself.

Perhaps it lay somewhere in the building’s electrical system.

Or in the distribution network outside.

So they decided to bypass as much of it as possible.

A separate cable was installed.

The law office was connected directly to the transformer station.

A large part of the normal electrical supply route had now been removed from the equation.

If the disturbance was coming from there, it should disappear.

The monitoring equipment was started again.

The pens continued to creep across the paper.

The staff carried on with their work.

And the men who had come to find the fault waited.

Then the pen moved again.

The spikes were still there.

So were the bangs.

Light bulbs continued to explode.

The direct connection to the transformer station had not stopped whatever was happening.

That was when the investigation took a new turn.

On November 30, employees of the electricity company were in the office when something above their heads began to move.

The light fittings.

They were swinging back and forth.

The men looked up.

They had come there to investigate an electrical problem.

But what they were now watching did not need electricity in order to move.

They searched for vibrations.

From the floor above.

From the building itself.

From the traffic outside.

According to the reports, no sufficient cause was found.

And now one important thing had changed.

This was no longer something only the law office staff claimed to have witnessed.

The technicians had seen it too.

The following day, three new men walked through the door.

They had not come to Rosenheim to repair the electrical system.

One of them was Hans Bender.

The date was December 1, 1967.

One of them was Hans Bender.

Bender was a psychologist who had spent years investigating reports of phenomena that people believed could not be explained by ordinary means. He headed the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg and had a particular interest in so-called poltergeist cases — reports involving knocks, moving objects, and other physical disturbances with no visible cause.

That did not mean he arrived in Rosenheim with an answer.

But he came with a very different question from the electricians.

They had been asking:

Where is the fault?

Bender wanted to know:

When does it happen — and who is nearby when it does?

During his first few days, he reviewed what had already been collected.

The paper records from the monitoring equipment.

The timings.

The accounts given by the staff.

The telephone disturbances.

The lights.

The bangs.

And the incident the electricity company employees had witnessed themselves the previous day.

One detail quickly caught his attention.

At night, everything was quiet.

Once the working day ended and the staff left the office, the phenomena appeared to stop.

The monitoring equipment could remain there for hours without recording the same unusual spikes.

Then morning came.

The staff returned to work.

And the incidents began again.

There could, of course, have been a perfectly ordinary explanation for that.

During the day, electricity was being used.

Telephones were in operation.

People walked across the floors.

Doors opened and closed.

Machines were switched on.

If there was some hidden fault in the building, it would be more likely to reveal itself when the office was full of people than when it stood empty overnight.

Bender needed more than a correlation.

He needed to understand what the instruments were actually recording.

There was one detail that had become increasingly difficult to explain.

The pen.

The recording instruments installed by the electricity company were designed to do something simple. When a change occurred in the electrical system, a pen moved across a strip of paper and recorded it.

But some of the readings from Rosenheim looked unusual.

Especially the loops.

If changes in current or voltage alone were controlling the pen, it should have followed the movement of the meter in a predictable way.

Yet at times, it appeared to move differently.

Bender began to consider a possibility that almost turned the problem on its head.

What if the electricity was not causing the reading?

What if the pen itself was moving?

There was an important difference between the two.

If that were true, the readings that had been interpreted as electrical disturbances might have been something else entirely.

But the idea had to be tested.

And for that, Bender needed people who understood the physics and the measuring instruments better than he did.

A few days later, two physicists arrived in Rosenheim.

Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha.

Karger worked at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, near Munich.

They had not come to look for ghosts.

Their task was far more practical:

Find out what could make the instruments behave this way.

From December 6 to 8, a new round of investigations began inside the office.

This time, the possible explanations were examined systematically.

Could sudden changes in voltage produce the readings?

They tested it.

Could static electricity affect the instruments?

They tested that too.

Magnetic fields?

Tested.

Vibrations in the building?

Tested.

Sound waves outside the range of human hearing?

Investigated.

Could a fault inside the measuring equipment itself be responsible?

That possibility was examined as well.

And, of course, the simplest explanation was still on the table.

A human hand.

Could someone reach the instrument and physically move the pen?

Attempts had already been made to prevent that.

The monitoring equipment had been protected so that the recording mechanism should not have been accessible by ordinary means.

Yet the spikes continued.

Karger and Zicha watched.

They altered the conditions.

Tested the instruments.

Looked for effects that could reproduce the same movement.

One possibility after another was examined.

But the days passed without them finding the simple cause they had been looking for.

That did not mean there was no cause.

Nor did it mean that anything supernatural had been proven.

It meant only one thing:

The explanations they had tested had failed to reproduce what the instruments in Rosenheim were doing.

And while the physicists watched the equipment, Bender had noticed something else.

Not on the paper strips.

But among the people walking past them.

Two young women worked at the law office.

One of them was nineteen years old.

Her name was Annemarie.

Bender began to notice that when she was away from the office, things seemed quieter.

When she returned, the incidents appeared to start again.

At first, it could have been coincidence.

Then it happened again.

And again.

Gradually, his attention shifted away from the instruments and towards the young woman.

If he was right, the question was no longer simply what was happening inside the law office.

The question was why it seemed to happen when she was there.

The light bulbs could be replaced.

A new electrical cable could be installed.

The voltage and current could be measured, and the system could be checked for disturbances.

But how do you measure a light fixture that begins swinging above your head?

As December 1967 went on, the mystery inside Sigmund Adam’s law office was beginning to change.

Until then, electricity had always been somewhere in the background. Lights went out. Bulbs exploded. Monitoring equipment recorded unusual spikes. Even when fluorescent lights came loose from their fittings, it was still possible to search for an explanation in faulty electrical equipment, defective fixtures, or vibrations in the building.

But now people were beginning to witness things that fitted less comfortably into that picture.

The light fixtures were among the first.

On November 30, employees of the electricity company had themselves witnessed lights in the office begin to swing violently.

What made it particularly strange was that it did not seem to matter whether the lights were switched on or off.

They moved anyway.

The technicians looked for an explanation in the obvious places.

There were people in the rooms above. Traffic passed along the streets outside. A building can vibrate without those inside being particularly aware of it.

If those vibrations travelled through the structure and into the ceiling, they might cause a hanging light to swing.

They investigated that possibility.

According to the reports, they found nothing sufficient to account for the movement.

That proved nothing extraordinary.

But another ordinary explanation had failed.

And the lights continued to move.

By now, no one in the office could know when the next incident would come.

Sometimes it was a bang.

Sudden and sharp.

Then another.

The staff recorded the times, and the investigators compared them with what they themselves had seen and heard.

At other times, it was the light fixtures.

A light might begin swinging along the corridor. Sometimes the movement was slight at first, then grew stronger.

This was no longer simply a matter of lines appearing on a strip of recording paper.

The people in the office could watch it happen.

And that changed the atmosphere.

It is one thing to see an unusual reading on an instrument.

It is another to stand beneath an object that appears to have started moving without anyone touching it.

Then attention shifted to the walls.

Framed pictures hung there, as they do in countless other offices.

One of them was a framed picture of flowers.

Paul Brunner, who had been involved in the electricity company’s investigation, was standing nearby when something happened that would later become one of the best-known incidents in the entire Rosenheim case.

He was speaking with an employee in the office.

Adam entered the room.

And the picture behind Brunner began to turn.

Not just slightly to one side.

According to Brunner’s account, it rotated rapidly through almost a full circle — approximately 320 degrees — until the wire holding it had twisted around the hook.

Brunner was standing only a short distance away.

He said he saw no one touch the picture.

When it stopped, it hung crooked on the wall, its hanging wire twisted around the hook.

It was difficult to connect something like that with electrical voltage.

The picture was not connected to anything.

There was no cable running to it.

No instrument controlled it.

It simply hung on the wall.

And this was reportedly not the only time.

Other electricity company employees later described seeing pictures move and swing without seeing anyone touch them.

The nature of the problem had now changed.

If only the light bulbs had exploded, investigators could have continued searching the electrical system.

If only the monitoring instruments had produced unusual traces, the instruments themselves could have been questioned.

If only the office staff had reported the incidents, there would have been room to consider memory, misunderstanding, or exaggeration.

But now technicians who had originally come to find a fault were themselves describing what they believed they had witnessed.

That did not make their accounts automatically infallible.

But it made the case harder to dismiss.

Meanwhile, the bangs continued.

Lights swung.

Bulbs exploded.

Pictures on the walls were said to move.

And at precisely this point, it was important not to lose sight of the simplest explanation.

A person.

If someone in the office was staging the incidents, no unknown law of nature was required.

A picture could be moved.

A light could be set swinging.

An object could be broken.

Even if witnesses did not see how it was done, that did not mean no one had done it.

This possibility was not something raised only by sceptics who examined the case years later.

It was part of the investigation while the events were still taking place.

Adam had contacted the police, and criminal investigators became involved in examining what was happening at the office. In Bender’s contemporary account, deliberate deception was among the possible explanations the investigators believed they needed to consider.

But no simple answer emerged.

And as the investigation continued, another pattern began to appear.

The phenomena did not seem to occur at just any time.

At night, things were generally quiet.

When the office stood empty, the monitoring equipment did not show the same spikes seen during the working day.

The incidents happened when people were there.

There could, of course, have been a straightforward reason for that.

That was when the office was in use.

People walked around.

Telephones were used.

Doors opened.

Electrical equipment was running.

But as the days passed, one of the men following the case began to wonder whether the presence of people was more than a coincidence.

He had arrived in Rosenheim on December 1 with two colleagues.

He had studied the measurements, listened to the witness accounts, and compared the incidents.

And what he was seeing in the law office reminded him of other cases he had investigated before.

Cases in which lights broke.

Objects moved.

Bangs were heard.

And the reported phenomena seemed to cluster around people rather than places.

The man was Hans Bender.

And he was beginning to consider an explanation that would transform the Rosenheim case from a technical mystery into something else entirely.

The man who walked into the law office in Rosenheim on December 1, 1967, had not come to repair the lights.

Hans Bender was a psychologist and one of West Germany’s best-known parapsychology researchers. For years, he had studied reports of phenomena that seemed to fall outside conventional explanations — including apparitions, clairvoyance, and so-called poltergeist cases.

So when news of the events in Rosenheim reached him, something about the case caught his attention.

Not because light bulbs were exploding.

Not because telephones were malfunctioning.

Those things happened.

It was the pattern that was unusual.

The telephone disturbances had begun months earlier. Then came the bangs, the lights going out, and the exploding bulbs. The electricity company had installed monitoring equipment and recorded unusual spikes. A separate cable had been run directly to the office, yet the problem had continued.

And now people were beginning to describe objects that appeared to move.

Bender had heard similar stories before.

He even had a particular word for phenomena of this kind.

Poltergeist.

Over time, the word has taken on a very specific meaning.

In films, a poltergeist is often portrayed as an invisible entity that haunts a house, throws furniture, and terrorises the people living there.

That was not exactly what Bender meant by it.

For him, a “poltergeist” did not necessarily mean a ghost.

He was interested in the idea that certain cases — in which objects appeared to move or knocks were heard without any visible cause — might somehow be connected to a living person.

Not someone who had died.

Not a spirit.

A living person.

Within parapsychology, terms such as spontaneous psychokinesis and, later, recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis came to be used for ideas of this kind: the possibility that a person might somehow affect their physical surroundings without touching them.

Perhaps without even being aware of it.

There is no conclusive scientific evidence demonstrating that such a phenomenon is real.

But in 1967, it was one of the hypotheses Bender was prepared to consider.

And Rosenheim had aroused his suspicions.

By the time Bender and his colleagues arrived, the office had already become something of a laboratory.

Wires ran to monitoring instruments.

Rolls of paper recorded the movements of their pens.

Technicians had documented the timing of events.

The staff had kept records of incidents.

And everywhere there were signs of what had happened during the previous weeks.

Light fixtures had been removed and replaced.

Bulbs had broken.

The telephone lines had been investigated.

Bender did not have to start from nothing.

He could examine what others had already done.

But he approached the evidence differently.

The electricians had searched for a fault in the electrical system.

The telephone technicians had searched for a fault in the phones.

Karger and Zicha had tested possible influences on the monitoring equipment.

Bender began looking at timing.

When did something happen?

When did nothing happen?

And who was in the office when it did?

One detail was particularly interesting.

Night after night, the office appeared to remain quiet.

Once the staff went home, the unusual spikes largely disappeared from the recordings.

Light bulbs did not explode.

The bangs stopped.

Then another working day began.

People came in.

And the phenomena started again.

According to Bender’s account, the unusual spikes appeared only during the hours when the office was in use.

It was tempting to see something significant in that.

But there could also have been an entirely ordinary explanation.

Of course more happened in an office when people were there.

Lights were switched on. Telephones were used. Doors opened and closed. People walked across the floors. Machines were put into operation.

An empty office was simply a quieter office.

Bender needed more.

So he began watching the staff.

Meanwhile, the incidents continued.

And in some cases, Bender himself was present.

In his report, he described light fixtures beginning to swing, as well as bangs and other phenomena occurring while investigators were observing the office.

That mattered to him.

He was no longer simply listening to a story someone else had told him after the event.

He believed he was witnessing some of the phenomena himself.

But that created another problem.

Because no matter how strange something appeared, the same question could still be asked:

Could someone be doing this?

Bender knew that question had to remain part of the investigation.

Seeing a picture rotate on a wall without seeing anyone touch it did not prove that no one had.

If a light began to swing, there could be a cause that had gone unnoticed.

If a monitoring instrument produced an unusual trace, there could still be a fault that had not yet been found.

It was the gap between what people saw and what they could prove that made Rosenheim so difficult to unravel.

And Bender was beginning to look elsewhere for the answer.

He compared the incidents with the movements of the staff around the office.

Who came in?

Who left?

Where was everyone when the lights began to swing?

Who was nearby when a bang was heard?

At first, it was difficult to see anything but chaos.

Many people worked in the office.

Many of them walked through the same corridors.

But as the observations accumulated, Bender believed he could see a pattern emerging.

It was not the building that caught his attention.

Not a particular room.

Not a particular light.

But one person.

A young woman who worked at the office.

When she was away, things seemed to become quieter.

When she returned, the incidents appeared to begin again.

Bender became increasingly convinced that this was more than coincidence.

If he was right, the investigation had been looking in the wrong place all along.

They had traced wires.

Opened electrical panels.

Replaced telephones.

Connected the office directly to the transformer station.

But perhaps what they were looking for had never been inside the walls.

This was the point at which Bender began to regard Rosenheim as a possible poltergeist case.

Not because he had found a ghost.

He had not.

Not because the investigations had proven the existence of a supernatural force.

They had not done that either.

But because the sequence of events reminded him of a pattern he believed he recognised from other cases: repeated physical disturbances, no obvious cause, and a possible connection to a particular individual.

That was Bender’s interpretation.

And it would become both famous and controversial.

But before it could be taken seriously, attention had to turn to the person he believed was at the centre of the case.

She was nineteen years old.

She had started working at the law office only a few months earlier.

And her name was Annemarie.

She had been there all along.

While electricians opened electrical panels and traced wiring through the building.

While telephone technicians tried to explain the mysterious calls.

While monitoring instruments drew strange lines across rolls of paper and people looked up as light fixtures began to swing.

She was simply one of the people who worked in the office.

Nineteen years old.

Her name was Annemarie.

And now Hans Bender had begun paying particular attention to her.

There was nothing mysterious about Annemarie herself.

She was a young employee at Sigmund Adam’s law office. She answered telephones, ran errands, and moved between rooms just like the other members of staff.

Nor had Bender come to Rosenheim specifically because of her.

His attention had initially been focused on the phenomena.

But as he compared the timing of the incidents and watched what was happening inside the office, he believed he could see a correlation emerging.

When Annemarie was nearby, something seemed more likely to happen.

As she moved from one room to another, lights were sometimes said to begin swinging.

Bangs were heard.

Bulbs exploded.

According to Bender’s account, there were even occasions when pieces of light fittings fell near her.

At first, this could have been coincidence.

In an office where she worked every day, there was nothing remarkable about her being nearby when something happened.

But Bender continued to observe her.

And to him, the pattern seemed to become clearer.

One thing that caught his attention was the way the phenomena appeared to shift as Annemarie moved through the office.

In his account, he described her walking along a corridor as a light fixture began to swing behind her.

She continued walking.

The next light began to move.

Then another.

If the description was accurate, it was difficult to see how a fault in one particular location could explain it.

The problem did not appear to be confined to a single light.

A single room.

Or one part of the electrical system.

It seemed to move.

And Bender began to wonder whether the important factor was not the place itself.

But the person moving through it.

Even so, this was far from proof.

It is possible to see patterns where none exist.

Once suspicion had fallen on a particular person, it became easy to pay special attention to everything that happened when she was nearby — and less attention to what happened when she was elsewhere.

There was also another explanation.

A much simpler one.

If Annemarie was always nearby when objects moved, it could mean she was connected to the incidents in the way Bender had begun to consider.

But it could also mean that she was moving them herself.

The question became unavoidable.

Were the investigators observing something unexplained?

Or a very human deception?

The investigators therefore tried to watch her more closely.

It was not enough to know that she was somewhere in the building.

They needed to see what she was doing when an incident occurred.

Where were her hands?

Who was closest to the object?

Could it have been touched without anyone noticing?

Could someone have pulled something?

Could a thread have been used?

Could the incident have been prepared in advance?

These were not minor details.

Unless possibilities like these could be ruled out, the movement of an object could not be treated as evidence of anything extraordinary.

And yet Bender maintained that he witnessed incidents for which he could not see how Annemarie could have been responsible.

That convinced him.

But it did not convince everyone.

Bender also tried to see what happened when Annemarie was away from her usual workplace.

According to his account, the office seemed to become quieter when she was absent.

When she returned, the incidents began again.

For Bender, this was an important clue.

For a sceptic, it was still only a correlation.

Other variables could be imagined.

Different working days.

Different numbers of people in the office.

Different levels of electrical use.

Or simply the fact that once everyone was waiting for something to happen around Annemarie, her presence itself had become part of the investigation.

Then came another test.

If the office itself was the problem, the phenomena should have remained there.

Annemarie temporarily went elsewhere.

According to Bender, unusual incidents followed her there as well.

This strengthened his belief that Rosenheim was not primarily the story of a haunted building.

He believed the phenomena were connected to her.

This is where the Rosenheim case becomes particularly sensitive.

Annemarie was a nineteen-year-old woman who suddenly found herself at the centre of an investigation attracting attention far beyond the law office.

Technicians had been monitoring her workplace.

Police had become involved.

Investigators were watching her movements.

And the media were beginning to take an interest.

Yet she had not been caught causing all of the phenomena that had been recorded or described.

Nor was there any evidence demonstrating that she possessed any unusual abilities.

What the investigation had established was much narrower:

Bender believed there was a strong correlation between her presence and the incidents.

He then interpreted that observation through his ideas about poltergeist phenomena.

Not as a ghost following her.

But as a possible phenomenon originating with a living person.

That idea could also place Annemarie in an uncomfortable position.

According to theories proposed by Bender and other parapsychology researchers about similar cases, such phenomena were sometimes thought to be associated with inner tension or emotional stress in the person regarded as the “focus” of the activity.

That interpretation needs to be treated with care.

There is no reason for us to diagnose Annemarie from a distance or turn her personal life into an explanation for what happened.

This was a theory proposed by the investigators, not an established conclusion about her.

But for Bender, she had become the key to Rosenheim.

And then something happened that, from his perspective, seemed to strengthen that idea even further.

Annemarie left her job at the law office.

She walked away from the place that for months had been filled with bangs, malfunctioning lights, strange telephone calls, monitoring equipment, and investigators.

And according to Bender’s account, the phenomena diminished significantly after she left.

Eventually, they stopped.

After everything that had been tried — new lights, new telephones, monitoring equipment, a separate electrical connection, investigations by technicians and physicists — the biggest change appeared to come when one young woman walked out of the door.

It was easy to understand why Bender considered that significant.

But the correlation left behind two very different stories.

In one, he had identified the person to whom the unexplained phenomena appeared to be connected.

In the other, a possible perpetrator had simply left the scene.

And there was a third possibility as well.

That neither explanation was correct.

That Rosenheim had been a mixture of genuine technical disturbances, human reactions, misunderstandings, and individual incidents that later merged into a single famous story.

To get any closer to an answer, the investigation had to return to the one source that seemed less dependent on human memory and testimony.

The rolls of paper.

The telephone records.

The monitoring instruments.

Because if anything from Rosenheim could remain once the witness accounts were taken out of the equation, it would have to be there.

The only question was what the instruments had actually proven.

After weeks of strange incidents, it was easy to become fixated on what people had seen.

Lights swinging.

Pictures turning on the walls.

Bulbs exploding.

Bangs echoing through the office.

And a young employee whom Hans Bender believed the phenomena seemed to follow.

But eyewitness testimony has an obvious weakness.

People can see things incorrectly.

Remember them incorrectly.

Misunderstand what happened.

And when a group of people has spent weeks waiting for the next unusual incident, even something ordinary can begin to take on a different meaning.

If the Rosenheim case had anything stronger to offer, it needed to be something that did not depend entirely on human memory.

And there was.

Inside the office, machines had been watching.

The instruments installed by the electricity company had not been brought in to investigate a haunting.

They were there to find a fault.

Pens rested against slowly moving rolls of paper. Whenever something changed in whatever the instrument was measuring, the pen moved and left a trace.

Day after day.

Hour after hour.

If something happened in the electrical system, it was supposed to leave a record.

And there were records.

That was what made the case interesting.

But it was also what made it so easy to misunderstand.

On the morning of November 20, a loud bang had been heard in the office.

A fluorescent light came loose from its fitting and fell to the floor.

At the same time, the current meter recorded two large spikes which, according to the contemporary report, reached around 50 amperes.

Yet the circuit breakers had not tripped.

What attracted particular attention, however, was the shape of the trace.

At the peak of the reading, the pen had formed a loop.

In other words, it had not simply moved upwards and then returned along the same path.

It had moved sideways.

It was a small detail.

But an important one.

Because if the pen was responding only to a change in electrical current, there had to be an explanation for why it had moved in that way. Bender’s contemporary report describes both the roughly 50-ampere readings and this unusual looping movement.

Perhaps the question was no longer simply:

What happened in the electrical system?

But:

What happened inside the measuring instrument itself?

That opened up a new possibility.

Perhaps some of the lines on the paper were not evidence of the electrical changes investigators had first assumed.

Perhaps the pen itself was moving.

That may not sound as dramatic as a poltergeist.

But for the investigation, it was a major problem.

Because if something could move the pen without a corresponding electrical change taking place, then the recording was no longer a straightforward window into the electrical system.

The instrument itself had become part of the mystery.

That was why Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha became involved.

They did not need to answer whether Rosenheim was haunted.

They needed to answer a much narrower question:

What could produce these movements?

From December 6 to 8, they worked through the possibilities systematically.

Changes in voltage.

Static electricity.

Magnetic fields.

Vibration.

Sound waves outside the normal range of human hearing.

Possible faults in the electronic equipment.

And the possibility that someone was physically interfering with the instrument.

They tried to reproduce similar readings.

If static electricity could cause them, it should be possible to demonstrate it.

If a magnetic field could move the pen, it should be possible to test that.

If vibration in the floor or walls was responsible, it should have a measurable effect.

One by one, these possibilities were examined.

And according to their conclusion, they did not identify a conventional physical cause among the factors they tested that could account for the recordings in question.

It is one of the most famous conclusions to come out of the Rosenheim investigation.

It is also one of the easiest to overstate.

Karger and Zicha did not prove that an unknown force had moved the pen.

They did not prove psychokinesis.

And they did not prove the existence of a poltergeist.

Their conclusion was narrower than that.

They had tested certain possible causes and had not succeeded in explaining the particular movements through those causes.

That distinction matters.

Failing to explain something is not the same as proving whichever explanation remains.

Especially when that remaining explanation depends on a phenomenon that has itself never been established.

Even so, the result mattered to Bender.

The physicists had come to find an ordinary cause.

And they had left without being able to identify one.

The electrical measurements, however, were only half of the story.

The other half involved the telephones.

There, too, something could be recorded.

Not merely remembered.

The telephone service had records of calls passing through the system.

And one number appeared again and again.

0119.

The German telephone time service.

According to the case records, numerous connections to the service were logged within a very short period on October 20.

The staff said they had not made them.

That was stronger than an account of a telephone ringing by itself.

Here, there was a record within the telephone system.

But once again, the same problem remained.

The record could show that the system had logged a connection.

On its own, it could not show how that connection had been created.

An equipment fault?

An incorrect entry?

Human intervention?

Something else?

The data showed an event.

Not necessarily its cause.

And that was the pattern throughout Rosenheim.

The closer investigators seemed to get to hard evidence, the narrower the conclusion became.

The instrument recorded a spike.

Yes.

But what caused it?

The telephone system recorded a connection.

Yes.

But who or what initiated it?

A light fell at roughly the same time a large spike appeared on the recording.

Yes.

But did that prove the two events had the same cause?

Not necessarily.

It was as though Rosenheim kept giving the investigators half an answer.

Enough to keep the investigation alive.

Never enough to close it.

Then there were the eyewitnesses.

They mattered because the incidents were not all said to have occurred while the office staff were alone.

Electricity company employees described light fixtures swinging.

Paul Brunner described a picture rotating on the wall close to where he was standing.

Bender and his colleagues said they personally witnessed some of the phenomena.

In one sense, that strengthened the case.

More than one group of people reported seeing unusual things.

But eyewitnesses are still eyewitnesses.

They can tell us what they believed they saw.

They cannot always tell us how it happened.

Taken together, Rosenheim appeared to have an unusually strong foundation compared with many other stories involving so-called poltergeist phenomena.

There were more than rumours.

There were contemporary reports.

Technicians.

The telephone service.

The electricity company.

Monitoring instruments.

Physicists.

And investigators who went to the site themselves.

That is one reason the case endured.

But none of that evidence said:

“This was a poltergeist.”

That interpretation was added by people looking at the evidence.

And when later critics began examining how the investigation had been conducted, they raised questions that were far more uncomfortable for Bender than any exploding light bulb.

Because some of those who studied the case later believed the investigators had not merely overlooked a possible explanation.

They believed they had overlooked deception.

And that raised a question capable of changing the entire story:

What if someone inside the law office knew exactly when no one was watching?

When Annemarie left the law office, things became quieter.

For Hans Bender, the timing was striking.

From his point of view, the investigation had gradually been pointing in the same direction: the phenomena seemed to follow the young woman. When she was there, things happened. When she was absent, the incidents appeared to diminish. And when she left for good, the Rosenheim case largely came to an end.

It fitted his theory.

But exactly the same sequence of events also fitted another explanation.

If Annemarie herself had been responsible for some of the incidents, there was nothing surprising about them stopping when she left.

Two completely different explanations.

The same outcome.

And now the doubts were becoming harder to ignore.

One incident was particularly uncomfortable for the paranormal interpretation of the case.

According to later criticism of Bender’s investigation, Annemarie was caught on at least one occasion attempting to stage a phenomenon herself.

The Dutch journalist and sceptic Piet Hein Hoebens later drew attention to this when reviewing the Rosenheim investigation. Among other things, he criticised Bender for not giving the incident sufficient attention in his own accounts of the case.

According to that version of events, a police officer witnessed Annemarie attempting to create an incident herself.

That changes the picture.

But perhaps not as much as it first appears.

If she staged one incident, it shows at the very least that fraud was a genuine possibility within the case.

It does not automatically show that she caused everything.

The telephone disturbances.

The records.

The spikes on the monitoring instruments.

The lights that technicians said they saw swinging.

The pictures described by witnesses.

To explain the entire case as fraud would require more.

And more was still to come.

Several men who approached Rosenheim very differently from Bender later visited the office.

Among them was Albin Neumann, an Austrian magician who performed under the name Allan, together with Herbert Schiff and Gert Gunther Kramer.

They understood tricks.

They knew how an object could be made to move without an observer immediately seeing what caused it.

And when they examined the office, they found something that was difficult to ignore.

Nylon thread.

According to their account, nylon thread was attached to a light fitting — the same kind of object that had been described as swinging without visible contact.

They also said they found thread attached to equipment supporting a wall decoration.

By pulling on such a thread, it was possible to reproduce exactly the kind of movement that had attracted so much attention.

An invisible hand was not required.

An almost invisible thread was enough.

Suddenly, one of the most famous features of the Rosenheim case looked very different.

A light begins to swing.

People look up.

No one is standing beside it.

No one touches it.

It continues moving.

From the witness’s perspective, all of that could be completely true.

The witness would not have to be lying.

They would only have to fail to see the thread.

This is one reason an eyewitness can be entirely sincere and still be wrong about the cause of what they are seeing.

And now other incidents had to be reconsidered.

A picture turning on a wall.

A light swinging.

An object appearing to move without being touched.

How many of them could have been produced by simple means?

It was impossible to answer with certainty after the fact.

Adam was not prepared to accept the men’s conclusions.

When Allan, Schiff, and Kramer published their criticism in the book Falsche Geister – Echte Schwindler, the dispute became so intense that Adam took legal action over the publication.

The controversy reached the German press.

In 1970, Die Zeit covered the dispute under a headline that captured the problem in just a few words:

Geister oder Nylon?

Ghosts — or nylon?

The courtroom did not become the place where the existence of a poltergeist was proved or disproved. But Adam’s attempt to stop the publication did not achieve the result he wanted, and the allegations of trickery remained part of the Rosenheim story.

There were now two competing versions of the same office.

In one, experts had investigated phenomena that conventional explanations could not account for.

In the other, the investigators had simply failed to look carefully enough for the thread.

But the nylon thread did not explain everything either.

It could demonstrate how a light or wall decoration might be made to move.

It did not automatically explain all of the electrical spikes.

It did not, by itself, explain the telephone service records.

And the later discovery of a possible method of deception does not prove that the same method was used in every incident that had occurred months earlier.

This is one of the traps in the Rosenheim case.

It is tempting to choose a side.

Either:

“The scientists could not explain it, therefore it was a genuine poltergeist.”

Or:

“Nylon thread was found, therefore the entire case was a fraud.”

The evidence does not justify either conclusion with that level of certainty.

There was another problem with the investigation.

Despite the fame of the case, no single complete report was ever published that would allow independent researchers to reconstruct every incident and see exactly how all ordinary explanations had been ruled out.

Hoebens made this one of his central criticisms of the case.

We have Bender’s report.

We have the investigation by Karger and Zicha.

We have technical descriptions and witness accounts.

We have later retellings.

But we do not have an uninterrupted record of every moment inside the office.

And that matters.

Because the question is not simply whether someone could have cheated.

The question is whether the conditions of the investigation were strict enough to demonstrate that no one could have done so.

Critics argued that they were not.

The physicist John Taylor later went further still.

He considered it likely that the traces produced by the recording instruments had been created fraudulently and described Rosenheim, in essence, as a mixture of expectation, misinterpretation, and trickery.

That was a long way from Bender’s conclusion.

Bender had regarded the case as one of the strongest examples of what he called spontaneous psychokinesis.

Taylor saw no need for such an explanation.

Between them lay the same collection of accounts.

The same lights.

The same telephone calls.

The same rolls of paper.

The same young woman.

But entirely different interpretations.

Perhaps the most important question, however, is not which of them was right.

It is what remains when we strip away both of their interpretations.

We know that Sigmund Adam’s law office became the scene of prolonged disturbances that brought technicians, police, physicists, and parapsychology researchers into the case.

We know that monitoring instruments recorded unusual spikes.

We have witness accounts describing objects in motion.

We know that Bender believed the phenomena were connected to Annemarie.

But we also have serious indications that some incidents may have been staged, or at the very least could have been staged.

And with that, the question changes once again.

Not:

Was Rosenheim real or fake?

But:

How much of the Rosenheim story can we actually verify — and what remains when everything else is stripped away?

When the men with the monitoring equipment had gone, when the media had lost interest, and when calm had finally returned to Sigmund Adam’s law office, one question remained.

What had actually happened in Rosenheim?

It would be convenient if the answer could be reduced to a single sentence.

That it had all been a fraud.

Or that scientists had finally discovered a poltergeist they could measure.

But more than half a century later, neither conclusion can be supported with that level of certainty.

What remains is more complicated.

And perhaps more interesting.

We know that the problems were real in one very important sense.

The investigation itself happened.

This was not simply a ghost story that appeared decades later.

Problems arose at the law office that were considered serious enough for outside organisations and specialists to become involved.

The telephone service investigated.

The electricity company investigated.

Monitoring equipment was installed.

Police became involved in the inquiries.

The physicists Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha examined the measuring equipment.

Hans Bender and his colleagues observed the case.

These people really were in Rosenheim.

But that alone does not tell us what caused the phenomena.

We also know that monitoring instruments recorded unusual readings.

That is one of the hardest pieces of evidence at the centre of the story.

The paper rolls existed.

The spikes were recorded.

In connection with the incident on November 20, the contemporary account described two large readings reaching approximately 50 amperes, along with the unusual looping movement of the recording pen.

Karger and Zicha later tested several possible explanations for the movement of the instruments without finding a satisfactory cause among the factors they examined.

That is significant.

But only if we allow the result to say exactly what it says.

Unexplained is not the same as supernatural.

A test that fails to identify a cause does not eliminate every possible cause.

It tells us only that the cause was not found using the methods and under the conditions available at the time.

We also know that the telephone service investigated unusual activity in the office telephone system.

Calls were recorded that the law office staff said they had not made.

The number for the time service, 0119, appeared repeatedly.

The telephones were examined and replaced, and attempts were made to monitor their use more closely.

So this was not merely an employee telling a story about a telephone that had “called by itself.”

There were records that required an explanation.

But once again, we come up against the same problem.

A record can show that a system logged a call.

It does not automatically tell us who made it, or why the system recorded it.

That is the difference between an event and its cause.

Then there are the things people saw.

Light fixtures swinging.

Pictures said to have rotated on the walls.

Bulbs exploding.

Bangs.

Objects that appeared to move without visible contact.

Some of these incidents were not reported only by the office staff. Technicians and investigators also described what they believed they had witnessed.

That gives the accounts more weight.

But it does not turn them into measurements.

An eyewitness can be both honest and accurate about what they saw without knowing what caused it.

Someone can say, with complete sincerity:

“I saw the light begin to swing, and I saw no one touch it.”

That is not the same statement as:

“No one could have set the light in motion.”

In Rosenheim, that distinction matters enormously.

We also know that Hans Bender believed he had identified a connection between the phenomena and Annemarie.

According to his account, the incidents appeared to become more frequent when she was present and to decrease when she was absent.

When she eventually left the office, the phenomena reportedly diminished sharply and then stopped.

For Bender, this was one of the strongest features of the case.

But it does not tell us why that correlation existed.

If we accept Bender’s interpretation, it might point towards the phenomenon he believed was taking place.

If we assume deception, exactly the same correlation could suggest that Annemarie, or someone associated with her, was responsible for some of the incidents.

And if the case involved several different causes, the correlation may have been weaker than it appeared in the later narrative.

So we can say that Bender believed he saw a pattern.

We cannot say that he proved its cause.

Then there is the nylon thread.

It matters.

If thread was found attached in such a way that it could be used to move light fittings or other objects, then it demonstrates that at least some of the more dramatic phenomena could be produced by an ordinary trick.

That is a serious challenge to the idea that every moving object in the office was genuinely unexplained.

But even here, we need to stop before going too far.

Finding a method that can produce an incident is not automatically proof that the same method did produce every earlier incident.

Nylon thread does not, by itself, explain the telephone connections or every reading produced by the monitoring equipment.

What it does do is something very important:

It destroys the idea that all of the Rosenheim phenomena can be treated as one continuous body of unexplained events.

Perhaps that is the greatest problem with the story.

We speak of the Rosenheim Poltergeist as though it were a single phenomenon.

But was it?

What if the telephone disturbances had one cause?

The electrical problems another?

Some of the instrument readings a third?

And some of the most dramatic incidents — swinging lights or moving pictures — were staged?

It is not as elegant an explanation.

It gives us no single culprit.

No ghost.

No mysterious force.

Not even one technical malfunction.

But real events do not have to share a single cause simply because they later became part of one story.

And then there is what we do not know.

We do not know what caused every recorded spike.

We do not know with certainty who or what was responsible for all of the unusual telephone calls.

We cannot reconstruct the conditions surrounding every individual incident in the office.

We do not know how many of the visible phenomena were staged, if any of them were.

We do not know whether incidents that seemed inexplicable at the time would receive an ordinary explanation under a stricter, more modern investigation.

And we have no conclusive evidence that Annemarie affected her surroundings through some unknown force.

That last point is especially important.

Rosenheim is sometimes presented as a case in which “scientists proved a poltergeist.”

They did not.

They investigated unusual events.

Some of them they could not explain.

That is a very different claim.

But it would be just as simple to go too far in the opposite direction.

To say:

“It was all a fraud.”

To support that conclusion, we would need to show how all of the most important incidents were produced.

The surviving evidence does not allow us to do that either.

And so Rosenheim remains in an unusual position.

Between two very appealing conclusions.

Too much was documented and investigated for the story to be dismissed easily as a complete invention from the beginning.

But there are too many gaps, too many opportunities for deception, and too many unproven interpretations for the case to stand as evidence of a poltergeist.

What remains is uncertainty.

Perhaps that is exactly why the story has survived for so long.

If the nylon thread had explained everything, Rosenheim would probably have been forgotten long ago.

If the monitoring equipment had instead produced clear, repeatable evidence of a previously unknown phenomenon, this would no longer be a ghost story.

It would be part of physics textbooks.

But neither happened.

Instead, we are left with an office where something unusual was investigated, instruments that recorded events people disagreed over how to interpret, eyewitnesses who described movements they could not explain — and later indications that at least some of what people saw could have been staged.

Enough to doubt.

Enough to keep asking questions.

But never enough to close the case.

And that is why, almost sixty years later, people are still talking about a small law office in Rosenheim.

The law office became a law office again.

The monitoring equipment disappeared.

The technicians went home.

The paper rolls stopped feeding through the recording instruments, and the telephones became ordinary telephones once more.

Annemarie was gone.

And the phenomena that had drawn scientists, police, journalists, and investigators to Rosenheim gradually faded away.

That could easily have been the end of it.

A strange winter in a small law office in Bavaria. A story the staff might later tell around a dinner table, growing less precise with each passing year.

But that is not what happened.

Rosenheim was not forgotten.

The reason was not simply that people had reported objects moving.

Stories like that are old.

Long before anyone had heard of Sigmund Adam’s law office, people had told stories of knocks in walls, flying objects, and mysterious sounds.

What made Rosenheim different was the people who arrived when the telephone began behaving strangely and the lights started going out.

They brought instruments.

There were technicians looking for a fault.

An electricity company installing recording equipment.

A telephone service examining the lines.

Physicists testing possible causes.

Police.

And eventually Hans Bender, a man willing to ask whether what was happening might belong to an entirely different category of phenomena.

Suddenly, this was no longer just a story about people claiming to have heard something in the dark.

There were lines on paper.

Dates.

Times.

Technical reports.

Witnesses with names and professional roles.

And lights said to have swung in front of the very people who had come to repair them.

That gave Rosenheim something many ghost stories do not have.

The appearance of an investigation.

And that is powerful.

A photograph of an old measuring instrument can look convincing.

A graph traced across a paper roll even more so.

Put a scientist beside it, and the next step in the mind comes easily:

They measured something.

And then:

So something unexplained must have been there.

But as Rosenheim shows, the gap between those two statements is much wider than it appears.

An instrument can record an event without recording its cause.

A scientist can investigate a mystery without confirming a supernatural explanation.

And something can remain unexplained in a particular investigation without being inherently inexplicable.

That distinction is easily lost when a story is retold.

And retold.

And retold again.

With each retelling, Rosenheim became a little simpler.

Complicated technical descriptions became:

“The instruments reacted to the poltergeist.”

The experiments by Karger and Zicha became:

“Scientists could not explain it.”

Bender’s observations of Annemarie became:

“The phenomena followed her wherever she went.”

And before long, Rosenheim had become one of the things supernatural stories most often seek:

A case in which science itself was said to have been left without an answer.

The real story was not that simple.

But perhaps it was even more interesting.

Because this was not merely a contest between two explanations.

There were many.

Technicians searched for an electrical fault.

The telephone service searched for a problem in the system.

Bender saw a possible poltergeist pattern.

Karger and Zicha investigated the measuring equipment.

Critics later pointed to possible trickery and inadequate investigative controls.

Magicians found methods that could make some of the visible phenomena appear to happen without anyone touching them.

And after all of that, the same question could still be asked:

Did any one of them have an explanation for everything?

Perhaps that had been the wrong question from the beginning.

We like mysteries to have one solution.

If the telephones malfunctioned, the lights exploded, pictures turned, and measuring instruments produced unusual readings in the same place during the same period, it feels natural to connect them all.

The mind does it almost automatically.

One place.

One period.

One mystery.

One cause.

But reality does not have to work that way.

Perhaps the telephone problems had one cause.

Perhaps some of the electrical incidents had another.

Perhaps some of the recordings were misinterpreted.

Perhaps something was staged.

Perhaps witnesses sincerely saw things they could not explain.

If so, the elegant single solution disappears.

But what remains is a much more human story.

A story about how separate events can accumulate until they become one mystery.

There is another reason Rosenheim refuses to disappear.

The case does not end where we want it to end.

There is no moment when someone opens a wall and discovers the faulty cable that explains everything.

No one confesses to staging every incident.

And no experiment demonstrates an unknown force in a way that can be reliably repeated.

Instead, we are left with fragments.

A paper roll marked by an unusual trace.

A telephone record.

A witness who watched a picture turn.

An investigator who believed he had identified a connection to a young woman.

A length of nylon thread that cast doubt over part of the story.

Each fragment seems to tell us something.

None of them tells us everything.

That is why Rosenheim can still appeal to two very different groups of people.

Someone inclined to believe can point to the measurements.

To the physicists.

To the technicians who said they saw objects move.

To the fact that not every incident received a satisfactory explanation.

A sceptic can point to Annemarie.

To possible staging.

To the nylon threads.

To weaknesses in the investigative methods.

To how easily “we did not find the cause” can become “no natural cause was possible.”

Both can take one piece of Rosenheim and say:

Look. There is the answer.

But when all the pieces are placed together, the picture becomes less clear, not more.

Perhaps that is exactly why we are still talking about Rosenheim.

Not because the case proved that poltergeists exist.

It did not.

Nor because one simple deception has been conclusively shown to explain everything that happened.

That has not been established either.

Rosenheim endures because the story occupies an uncomfortable space somewhere in between.

Well documented enough to be difficult to ignore.

Flawed enough to be impossible to use as proof.

And that is where it has remained since the winter of 1967.

Today, the monitoring instruments are old.

The telephone technology that caused so much confusion belongs to another era.

The people who walked through the office have long since faded from public view, and the events themselves now survive mostly in reports, books, newspaper articles, and retellings.

But the question that began with a malfunctioning telephone and a flickering light remains the same.

What happened in that office?

Perhaps the answer was always more ordinary than the story became.

Perhaps there were several answers.

And perhaps there is something in the surviving evidence that we can simply no longer resolve.

We can return to the measurements.

Read the witness accounts.

Compare the explanations.

But we can no longer walk into that law office in Rosenheim in 1967 and watch as the next light begins to swing.

That moment is gone.

Only the story remains.

And one final question:

How much mystery has to remain before we stop calling something a mystery?

It did not begin with a ghost.

Not with a whisper from an empty room.

Not with a shadow in a corridor.

It began with malfunctions.

Telephones behaving strangely.

Lights going out.

Circuit breakers tripping.

Minor disruptions that seemed as though they should have simple explanations as soon as the right technician arrived.

But the technicians came.

And the answers did not.

When the electricity company installed monitoring equipment in Sigmund Adam’s law office, the purpose was not to prove anything supernatural.

The purpose was to find a fault.

That may be the most important fact in the entire Rosenheim story.

The first people called to the scene were not looking for a poltergeist.

They were looking for an electrical problem.

They measured.

Replaced equipment.

Bypassed part of the electrical system.

Monitored voltage and current.

And still, the unusual incidents continued.

Then other things were added to the story.

Lights that swung.

Pictures said to have turned on the walls.

Bangs no one could immediately explain.

And instruments that produced readings which themselves became part of the mystery.

At some point, Rosenheim stopped being a technical problem.

It became a story.

Hans Bender saw in that story a pattern he believed he recognised from other cases.

To him, the evidence seemed to point in a particular direction.

The incidents appeared to follow the presence of a young woman.

They intensified when she was there.

Diminished when she was absent.

And largely disappeared when she left the office.

Bender believed Rosenheim might be an example of what he associated with spontaneous psychokinesis.

But that was his interpretation.

Not an established conclusion.

And later information made the picture considerably more complicated.

Possible staging.

Nylon threads.

Criticism of the investigative methods.

Questions about whether human interference had been adequately ruled out.

And allegations that some incidents had been deliberately produced.

That matters.

It matters a great deal.

Because once it is shown that some of the phenomena could have been staged, it becomes harder to treat every other incident as independent evidence of something unknown.

But the same problem appears in the opposite direction.

Showing how one light could have been made to move does not automatically explain how every telephone call was generated.

Finding a possible trick behind one moving picture does not necessarily explain every spike on a recording instrument.

And the fact that an investigation had weaknesses does not mean that everything it examined was fabricated.

Rosenheim still refuses to fit neatly into either box.

Perhaps that is because we have always tried to make it one case.

One “poltergeist.”

One cause.

One mystery.

But what if it was never that simple?

What if the telephone disturbances had their own explanation?

What if some of the electrical incidents were genuine technical faults?

What if certain instruments were more vulnerable to interference than the investigators realised?

What if some of the most visible incidents were staged?

And what if other things people saw were simply never documented well enough for us to say now what actually happened?

That does not make Rosenheim less interesting.

It makes it more real.

Messier.

More uncomfortable.

And much harder to close.

Today, it is easy to read about the case and choose whichever version feels more convincing.

Someone who wants to see Rosenheim as one of Europe’s strongest poltergeist cases can point to the technicians, the monitoring equipment, and the investigations by Karger and Zicha.

Someone who wants to dismiss it as deception can point to the criticism, the possible staging, and the weaknesses in the investigation.

Both can find something that supports their view.

But what still makes the case worth examining is precisely what neither version resolves completely.

We have records.

We have witness accounts.

We have measurements.

We have criticism.

We have possible methods of trickery.

But we do not have one answer that fits everything perfectly.

Perhaps the strongest image from Rosenheim is not the picture turning on the wall.

Not a swinging light.

Not even the young woman the investigators were watching.

Perhaps it is the paper roll.

A pen slowly tracing a straight line while the office remained quiet.

Then a spike.

The line trembles.

Rises.

Forms a loop.

And men stand over the instrument, trying to decide what it means.

It is almost a perfect image of the entire Rosenheim case.

Something was recorded.

Something happened.

But the record never told them why.

And perhaps that is where the case has to remain.

Not as proof of ghosts.

Not as proof of psychokinesis.

Nor as a completely solved deception.

But as a historical case in which a real investigation, human experience, technical data, scepticism, and possible staging became entangled in one of the most famous mysteries of its kind.

Rosenheim became famous because instruments were installed to find the answer.

But the instruments did not solve the mystery.

They only made it more visible.

And when we look back at the winter of 1967, one question still remains:

If we had been standing inside that office when the pen began to move, what would we have believed was happening?

The Rosenheim case has endured for almost six decades because it offers no comfortable answer.

There were real investigations, measuring instruments, and specialists. There were also eyewitnesses who described events they said they could not explain.

But there were weaknesses too.

Opportunities for human interference.

Allegations of staging.

And interpretations that went further than the evidence itself could support.

Perhaps that is why Rosenheim will never be a story that can be closed with a single word — neither “poltergeist” nor “fraud.”

What we can say is that something caused an ordinary law office in Bavaria to become the scene of an unusual investigation during the winter of 1967. Technicians, physicists, police, and parapsychology researchers tried to understand both what the staff were experiencing and what the instruments were recording.

Some of it received possible explanations.

Some remained disputed.

And some of it can simply no longer be investigated under the conditions that would be necessary to reach a reliable conclusion.

Perhaps that is what still makes Rosenheim so compelling.

Not that the story proves anything supernatural.

But that it reminds us how wide the gap can be between witnessing something unusual — and knowing what actually happened.

Sources

Primary Sources and Contemporary Research

Hans Bender — “Der Rosenheimer Spuk – ein Fall spontaner Psychokinese. Ein vorläufiger Bericht.”
Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie, Vol. 11, 1968, pp. 104–112.

This is one of the principal primary sources used for this article. Bender describes the initial electrical and telephone disturbances, the investigation by Stadtwerke Rosenheim, the measurements taken in November 1967, his arrival in Rosenheim, and his interpretation of the case. Among other details, he states that the electricity company’s investigation began on November 16 and that, on November 20, monitoring equipment recorded two spikes reaching approximately 50 amperes when a fluorescent light fell from its fitting.

Read the digitised version at Freiburg University Library

Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha — “Physikalische Untersuchung des Spukfalles in Rosenheim 1967.”
Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie, Vol. 11, 1968, pp. 113–131.

Karger and Zicha visited Rosenheim from December 6–8, 1967, and investigated the measuring instruments and a range of possible physical causes. Among the factors examined were voltage fluctuations, electrostatic charge, magnetic fields, infra- and ultrasound, vibration, faults in electronic equipment, and possible manual interference. They reported that they could not explain certain recorded movements through the causes they tested. It is important not to interpret that conclusion as confirmation of a supernatural cause.

View the study in Freiburg’s digital collection

Paul Brunner / Stadtwerke Rosenheim — Revisionsbericht, December 21, 1967.

The electricity company’s report is one of the contemporary documents directly cited by Bender. It forms part of the basis for descriptions of the recorded current spikes and observations made by technicians. Portions of the report appear in Bender’s preliminary account.

Contemporary Coverage and Criticism

Alexander Adrion — “Rosenheimer Spuk wieder vor Gericht: Geister oder Nylon?”
Die Zeit, April 10, 1970.

An important contemporary critical source covering the controversy that followed the Rosenheim case, allegations of trickery, and the book Falsche Geister – echte Schwindler. The article also shows how disputed the interpretation of the case had become only a few years after the events themselves.

Read “Geister oder Nylon?” at Die Zeit

Allan [Albin Neumann], Herbert Schiff and Gert Gunther Kramer — Falsche Geister – echte Schwindler.
Zsolnay, Vienna, 1969.

The authors approached paranormal claims from the perspective of people familiar with illusion and trickery. In their discussion of Rosenheim, they argued that some of the visible phenomena could have been produced through ordinary methods, including nylon threads. The book became the focus of a fierce dispute over the investigation and was discussed by Die Zeit in 1970.

Later Critical Analysis

Piet Hein Hoebens — “Sense and Nonsense in Parapsychology.”
Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 1983–1984, Vol. 8, No. 2.

Hoebens critically examined research within parapsychology and the difficulty of distinguishing unusual observations from claims of paranormal causation. His article provides a useful counterweight to Bender’s interpretation and helps assess how far the evidence from Rosenheim actually allows us to go in drawing conclusions.

Read Hoebens’ article at Skeptical Inquirer

Further Reading

Hans Bender — Unser sechster Sinn.
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1971.

Bender discusses Rosenheim further alongside other cases that he interpreted within a parapsychological framework.

Andreas Resch — “Der Fall Rosenheim I–V.”
Grenzgebiete der Wissenschaft, 1967–1970.

A detailed contemporary discussion from within the parapsychology field that can be useful for comparison with Bender’s account and other sources.

A Note on Sources

The Rosenheim case is particularly vulnerable to later retellings becoming more dramatic than the earliest available accounts.

For that reason, this article has relied as far as possible on contemporary sources and original reports where they are accessible. Claims involving poltergeists, psychokinesis, or other supernatural influences are presented as interpretations offered by researchers or as witness accounts — not as established facts.

The same principle applies to allegations of fraud. Evidence suggesting possible staging is important when assessing the case, but it does not automatically establish that every incident in Rosenheim was produced through deception.

There is no conclusive evidence that the Rosenheim phenomena had a supernatural cause.

Disclaimer

This article is based on publicly available research reports, contemporary sources, witness accounts, and later critical commentary.

Its purpose is to tell the story of the Rosenheim case as accurately as the available sources allow, without dismissing the experiences reported by witnesses or presenting an unverified supernatural explanation as fact.

Where sources disagree, that uncertainty has been preserved, and no single explanation is presented as conclusively proven.