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By Anonymous - Anonymous photograph of the alleged poltergeist victim Annemarie Schaberl taken at Rosenheim, Germany in 1967. No copyright notice information published., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57102564
Rosenheim Poltergeist Case of paranormal occurrences in a German town that defied natural explanation. Some of the phenomena seemed to be directed by a disembodied “intelligence.”
The case began in November 1967 in a law office in the Bavarian town of Rosenheim. Phenomena were primarily electrical and electronic: neon ceiling lights repeatedly went out; fuses blew without apparent cause; developing fluid in a copy machine spilled several times of its own accord; and numerous problems erupted with the telephone equipment. Four telephones rang simultaneously, calls were cut short, and bills rose precipitously. In addition, sharp banging noises were heard.
The case was investigated by HANS BENDER of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie and others. Electronic monitoring equipment was installed, and large deflections in the power supply were measured in conjunction with the phenomena. Furthermore, these deflections occurred only during office hours.
The phenomena themselves seemed to be associated with a human focal point, a 19-year-old employee, Anna S. Whenever she walked down the hall, light fixtures would begin to swing behind her and light bulbs that were turned off would explode. Phenomena decreased the farther away she was. The investigators recorded the swinging light fixtures and banging noises on a video recorder.
According to Bender, in the Autumn of 1967 he was requested to investigate disturbances in Adam's legal offices which reportedly occurred only on weekends. It was claimed that lighting fixtures exploded, swung back and forth or had their bulbs removed, heavy office furniture was shifted, and copier fluid leaked from the office copier. Additionally, the staff denied having made a large number of outgoing calls to a correct time service that were charged to the firm's telephone company account. The electric company reported evidence of malfunctions due to substantial surges in the power system, and Bender alleges that unspecified tests were made by physicists Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha who reported that "some unknown form of energy is at work." Bender claimed that a heavy filing cabinet was reported to have been pushed across the floor by an invisible force, and that a framed painting was captured on film "rotating around its hook." Calling her "a typical poltergeist", Bender believed that the emotional unhappiness of Annemarie Schaberl, a young secretary at the firm, was "converted into psychokinesis." He said that Schaberl told him she was frustrated with her job and distressed over a broken marriage engagement. According to Bender, the alleged poltergeist activity ceased when Schaberl left the law firm and was married. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenheim_Poltergeist
After the investigation began, a new phenomenon arose: the movement and rotation of pictures hanging on the walls. In some cases, the pictures rotated 360 degrees or fell off their hooks. One was videotaped rotating 320 degrees. A test apparatus attached to the telephone revealed that the time announcement number was dialed four or five times a minute by invisible means; on some days, the number was dialed 40 to 50 times in a row. Employees denied doing the dialing.
More interesting was that at the same time, four dialings of a nine-digit Munich number were registered simultaneously. According to Bender, the psychokinesis (PK) required to do this would involve a mechanical influence upon certain springs at millisecond time intervals, which would require sophisticated technical knowledge. The investigators concluded that
• the phenomena defi ed explanation in terms of theoretical physics;
• the phenomena seemed to be the result of non-periodic, short duration forces;
• the phenomena, especially the telephone incidents, did not seem to involve pure electrodynamic effects;
• the phenomena included both simple and complex events; and
• the movements, especially involving the telephone, seemed to be performed by “intelligently controlled forces that have a tendency to evade investigation.”
https://occult-world.com/rosenheim-poltergeist-case/
Criticism
In April 1970 a story in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit reported that co-authors Albin Neumann (Allan), Herbert Schiff, and Gert Gunther Kramer suggested in their book "Falsche Geister, echte Schwindler?" ("False spirits, real swindlers?") that the claims of unexplained disturbances initially made by Adam were fraudulent. The authors wrote that they visited Adam's law offices and discovered nylon threads attached to office fixtures such as overhead lights and wall plates that, when pulled, would cause the fixtures to move, and concluded that "the public had been tricked by tricks." Adam reportedly filed a legal injunction to stop publication of the book, which was not granted, and further hearings were scheduled in the District Court of Traunstein.
Dutch journalist and skeptic Piet Hein Hoebens has criticized Bender's investigation claims of the Rosenheim Poltergeist, saying that "No full report of the investigations has ever been published, so we are in no position to check to what extent the parapsychologists have been successful in excluding naturalistic explanations." Hoebens wrote that Bender's accounts of his investigation show that he may not have made a rigorous enough examination of the evidence, which Hoebens deems highly questionable. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenheim_Poltergeist