Was the Rosenheim Poltergeist Ever Explained?

Background

In the summer of 1967, staff at a law office belonging to Sigmund Adam in Rosenheim, a city in Upper Bavaria, southern Germany, began reporting phenomena they could not explain. Fluorescent light tubes swung and flickered or unscrewed themselves from their fittings; fuses blew repeatedly despite no fault the local power company could find; photocopier fluid leaked from a sealed container; a heavy filing cabinet was found to have moved several centimetres, and a wall-mounted picture was seen to have rotated on its hook. Most striking to the staff, the office telephone rang up almost daily with calls to the speaking clock, the automated time-announcement service, sometimes dozens of times in a single day, far more than any of the four phone lines could plausibly be dialled by hand in the time recorded.

The Bavarian post office (Deutsche Bundespost) confirmed some of the telephone anomalies at the network level and could not identify a fault on its own equipment, which is what pushed the case from office gossip into a formal enquiry. Adam contacted parapsychologist Hans Bender, director of the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health (IGPP) in Freiburg, who arranged for physicists to bring recording instruments into the office alongside his own team.

Investigators soon noticed that the disturbances clustered around one member of staff: Annemarie Schaberl, a 19-year-old secretary who had recently joined the firm. Incidents were markedly less frequent when she was out of the office and on leave, and effectively stopped when she left the job in January 1968. Bender interpreted this pattern, combined with reports that Schaberl was unhappy in the job and had recently ended an engagement, as consistent with a documented pattern in poltergeist literature: disturbances clustering around a young person under emotional strain, a "focus person" in the field's terminology.

The Investigation

What sets Rosenheim apart from most claimed hauntings is how much of it was measured rather than merely witnessed. From December 1967, physicist Friedbert Karger of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, working with Gerhard Zicha of the Technical University of Munich, installed voltage recorders, cameras, and other instruments in the office. Their 1968 published report, and a further 1970 paper responding to critics, described large, rapid fluctuations in the office's electricity supply that coincided with the reported disturbances and that they could not attribute to the building's wiring, external mains interference, static discharge, or any other conventional source they tested for. This is the closest thing to independently instrumented evidence any poltergeist case has produced, and it is also the case's most misrepresented detail: Karger and Zicha's own published findings describe an unexplained electrical anomaly, not a confirmation of psychokinesis, though Karger himself later spoke of the case in considerably stronger terms as physically documented evidence of the phenomenon.

Bender's own investigation ran in parallel. He interviewed staff, reviewed police statements taken after officers visited the office and reportedly saw a lamp swinging without an apparent cause, and filmed Schaberl in the office, footage that Bender said showed lights beginning to flicker as she entered. He concluded the case was a genuine instance of spontaneous psychokinesis, the unconscious externalisation of psychological distress as physical force, a concept with no accepted mechanism in physics and no laboratory replication to this day, though it has a long history within parapsychological case literature reaching back to nineteenth-century poltergeist reports.

A separate and more sceptical investigation followed once the case had become a media sensation. In 1969, the Austrian stage magician Albin Neumann, performing under the name "Allan," searched the office with journalists Herbert Schiff and Gert Günther Kramer. They reported finding nylon threads attached to the swinging lamp, a gas pipe, and a wall fixture, fine enough to go unnoticed but strong enough to produce controlled movement from an adjoining room, and a rubber truncheon hidden behind a cabinet that could produce a knocking sound when struck against a wall or pipe, which a member of the office's cleaning staff reportedly confirmed having seen used. They published their account as the 1969 book Falsche Geister, echte Schwindler? (roughly, "False Ghosts, Real Swindlers?"). Adam sought a court injunction to block the book; a district court in Traunstein declined to grant it, and the book was published. Separately, the Dutch sceptical journalist Piet Hein Hoebens later wrote that Bender's own published accounts of the case omitted a significant detail: that a police officer reported catching Schaberl in an act of deliberate fraud during the investigation, a claim Hoebens argued undermined Bender's presentation of the case as free of any detected trickery on her part.

Main Theories

The Psychokinesis Hypothesis

Bender's explanation, and the position Karger's early published measurements were sometimes read as supporting, holds that the office's electrical anomalies and some of the physical movements were produced by an unconscious anomalous force originating in Schaberl, triggered by acute personal distress. Proponents point to the instrumented voltage recordings as the case's strongest evidence: a documented physical effect, not merely testimony, that investigators trained in electrical engineering could not attribute to a conventional fault after months of testing. They also note the striking correlation between Schaberl's presence and the disturbance rate, and Bender's contemporaneous field notes describing incidents observed directly by investigators rather than only reported after the fact.

The hypothesis has no accepted physical mechanism, has never been reproduced under controlled laboratory conditions either in this case or in any other claimed psychokinesis case since, and rests on a chain of inference, unexplained readings plus a correlated presence equals an anomalous human ability, that critics regard as a leap well beyond what the instruments actually showed. Mainstream physics has no framework in which a person's emotional state could measurably alter mains voltage at a distance, and no comparable effect has been documented under conditions that rule out the office's own wiring, staff behaviour, or undetected interference.

The Trickery Critique

Neumann, Schiff, and Kramer's position holds that at least a substantial part of the case, and plausibly the more theatrical physical effects (the swinging lamp, the rotating picture, the knocking sounds), were staged using simple, low-technology methods: threads that could be tightened or released from an adjoining room and a concealed object used to produce a percussive sound. This reading is supported by physical objects the investigators say they recovered from the office itself, not merely by inference, and by a corroborating account from a member of the cleaning staff. Hoebens's account of an officer catching Schaberl in a specific act of fraud, if accurate, would extend the trickery explanation from the swinging fixtures to at least one other documented incident.

The critique's limitation is that Neumann's team did not investigate on-site during the period Karger and Zicha were recording their voltage anomalies, and a nylon thread rigged to a lamp does not, on its own, account for the specific power fluctuations the physicists measured with independent instruments; a full, methodologically detailed rebuttal of Karger and Zicha's electrical findings specifically has never been published. Bender's defenders have also argued that Neumann's book, however persuasive on the mechanical points, never established that staff or investigators witnessed the alleged threads in active use during a documented incident, only that materials capable of producing similar effects were later found in the building.

Rosenheim and Enfield: A Recurring Pattern

Rosenheim is regularly discussed alongside the Enfield poltergeist, Britain's best-known haunting case a decade later, and the comparison holds up on more than coincidence of genre. Both cases centre on a single young person, an 11-year-old girl at Enfield, a 19-year-old secretary at Rosenheim, around whom investigators repeatedly reported that disturbances clustered and without whom the phenomena reportedly did not occur. Both were investigated at length by researchers who split into opposing camps working from substantially the same body of evidence, and both produced documented instances of detected or alleged trickery sitting alongside incidents that investigators maintained they could not explain by normal means.

The cases differ in what kind of evidence each produced. Enfield's record is built overwhelmingly from testimony and audio tape: named witnesses, including a police officer, describing what they saw and heard. Rosenheim's distinguishing feature is Karger and Zicha's instrumented electrical data, a form of physical measurement Enfield's investigation never attempted. That difference cuts both ways in the debate: Rosenheim's numbers are harder to dismiss as misperception, but they are also further removed from any framework that could explain what, if anything, produced them, whereas Enfield's testimony is easier to interrogate for consistency but easier to attribute to ordinary human error and exaggeration.

Common Misconceptions

The case is frequently summarised as "Max Planck Institute scientists proved the Rosenheim poltergeist was real," a claim stronger than what was actually published. Friedbert Karger held a position at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, but his research partner Gerhard Zicha worked at the Technical University of Munich, a separate institution, and their joint 1968 report described unexplained instrument readings, not a confirmation of a paranormal cause; the Max Planck Society itself never issued a finding on the case. It is also sometimes claimed that the case was "solved" as a hoax once Neumann's book appeared; in fact, Adam's own legal challenge to the book's publication failed rather than succeeded, but Neumann's findings addressed the mechanical, visible effects far more convincingly than they addressed the physicists' electrical measurements, which is why serious accounts of the case, sceptical and credulous alike, still describe it as unresolved rather than closed in either direction.

Current Consensus

There is no scientific consensus that anything paranormal occurred in Rosenheim, and psychokinesis has never been demonstrated under controlled, replicable conditions in any setting; mainstream psychology and physics treat the case, like other poltergeist reports, as most plausibly explained by a combination of undetected mechanical tampering, ordinary electrical faults that were never fully traced to their source, and the amplifying effect of national media attention on an already ambiguous situation. That said, the case has not been debunked to the same degree as more thoroughly resolved hauntings on this site: no rebuttal has directly addressed Karger and Zicha's specific instrumented voltage readings, which remains the strongest piece of evidence proponents still cite. Parapsychological sources, including publications connected to the IGPP that Bender founded, continue to present Rosenheim as one of the field's best-documented cases of claimed spontaneous psychokinesis; sceptical organisations, including Germany's GWUP, continue to present it as a demonstrated case of detected trickery with the residue of unexplained electrical data attributed to measurement error, an undetected conventional fault, or an aspect of the fraud investigators never located. Both positions currently coexist in the published record without a single decisive study having closed the question either way.

Why This Mystery Endures

Rosenheim endures partly because it occupies an unusually specific evidentiary middle ground: unlike most reputed hauntings, it produced instrument readings from qualified physicists rather than only testimony, which makes it harder for sceptics to dismiss outright, and unlike a laboratory experiment, it was never repeated or independently replicated, which makes it impossible for proponents to treat as settled science. That combination, real measurement without a mechanism, keeps drawing new investigators back to reread the same 1968 data.

The setting adds to the case's staying power. An ordinary provincial law office, rather than a haunted castle or a family home under acknowledged strain, strips away some of the usual explanations available for other cases, there was no old ghost story attached to the building, no grieving family whose distress might explain away the phenomena as psychological, just a workplace and a group of adults with no obvious motive to sustain an elaborate hoax for months, which is precisely the feature Bender's defenders return to and precisely what Neumann's critics answer with the nylon threads.

The unresolved figure of Annemarie Schaberl herself gives the case its lasting human dimension. She never published a memoir, gave a sustained public account of her own experience, or, as far as the record shows, either confirmed or denied Bender's psychokinesis framing in her own words; the case was built and argued almost entirely around her rather than by her, a pattern that recurs across poltergeist cases and one Rosenheim shares directly with the Enfield poltergeist, where the two sisters at the centre of the case likewise spent decades fielding other people's interpretations of what had happened to them. Rosenheim is part of this site's ghosts and hauntings coverage, within the broader paranormal claims cluster, alongside the laboratory-adjacent claims examined on the Project Stargate page, another case where trained researchers reviewed the same data and reached opposite conclusions about what it showed.