What happened
In the autumn of 1967 strange faults began in the law office of Sigmund Adam in Rosenheim. Ceiling fluorescent tubes went out because something turned them 90 degrees in their sockets, fuses blew with a bang and fluid from the copier sprayed around the room. Phone bills showed up to 50 calls a day to the speaking clock, although nobody touched the office’s four telephones. Electricians and technicians found nothing, and at times the office could not function. On 1 December Hans Bender of the Freiburg Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health took up the case, while physicists Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics carried out measurements. It was noticed that the phenomena occurred only when a 19-year-old employee, Annemarie S., was present. Bender claimed to have filmed a picture rotating on its hook. When the young woman left the job, the office fell quiet.
Witnesses
Sigmund Adam and his staff, electricians, police officers, journalists; parapsychologist Hans Bender and physicists Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha.
Explanations and hypotheses
Bender considered Rosenheim a textbook case of spontaneous psychokinesis triggered by emotional tension, and Karger and Zicha wrote of “an unknown form of energy”. Critics point out that a full report was never published. Dutch sceptic Piet Hein Hoebens stressed that Bender left out a policeman’s account of catching the young woman cheating, and in 1970 the authors of the book “Falsche Geister, echte Schwindler?” claimed to have found nylon threads attached to the office lights. For parapsychologists it is one of the best-investigated cases; for sceptics, an example of a flawed investigation.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
Sources
- Der Spiegel – Dreh mit Lilien (1968)
- Hans Bender u. a., Der Rosenheimer Spuk – ein Fall spontaner Psychokinese (Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie, Bd. 11, 1968)
- Der Spiegel – Spuk von Rosenheim (2013)
More: Wikipedia (en)