👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº9474
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Rosenheim poltergeist claim
Rosenheim poltergeist claim is a location reputed to be haunted in Bavaria, DE. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.
Where is Rosenheim poltergeist claim?
- Location
- Bavaria, DE
- Type
- House / mansion
- Coordinates
- 47.854, 12.13
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
Why is Rosenheim poltergeist claim said to be haunted?
In the autumn of 1967 the law office of Sigmund Adam at Königstraße 13 in Rosenheim, Upper Bavaria, became the most heavily instrumented poltergeist case in German history. Fluorescent tubes twisted out of their fittings, bulbs burst, automatic fuses tripped without the circuit overloading, pictures spun on their hooks — and the telephone kept dialling 0119, the speaking clock, up to fifty times in a day with nobody at the dial. The municipal utility sealed recorders to the circuit; the Deutsche Bundespost logged the calls and concluded they were being made inside the office; two physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha, brought an oscilloscope and found that the recorder was writing surges the mains was not delivering. Hans Bender of the Freiburg institute concluded that the disturbances followed a 19-year-old trainee, Annemarie Schaberl, and called it spontaneous psychokinesis. Within two years a Viennese conjuror had published an account of nylon threads and a rubber truncheon found in the same office. This file separates what the instruments actually recorded from what was inferred from it, names the sceptics instead of hiding them behind "critics said", and follows the young woman at the centre of it, who has always denied having any powers.
What is the history of Rosenheim poltergeist claim?
Sigmund Adam ran an ordinary provincial law practice at Königstraße 13 in Rosenheim, a market town on the Inn some sixty kilometres south-east of Munich. What made his office famous is that, for roughly three months, it was one of the most heavily instrumented rooms in West Germany.
The trouble began with the telephone. In the summer of 1967, according to Hans Bender's own report, the four handsets of the office's Siemens system would ring at once, conversations collapsed, and the bills climbed to an unusual height. The Fernmeldeamt — the local branch of the Deutsche Bundespost — stripped out the Siemens installation and left a single Post test apparatus with a metering counter. The logs of the automatic call control then showed something very specific: the number 0119, the speaking clock, was being dialled four or five times a minute, and on some days forty to fifty times in a row. The clearest single episode is dated. On 19 October 1967 the tax adviser Dr Schmidt sat in the office from 17:35 to 17:55 and signed a written statement, before leaving, that nobody had spoken on the only telephone present. In those twenty minutes the automatic call control registered about twenty dialings of 0119. The Fernmeldeamt worked through every fault source it could think of and concluded that the dialling must have taken place inside the office.
Everyone still assumed the cause was electrical. On 16 November 1967 the testing department of the Rosenheim municipal utility, led by the assistant to the director, Paul Brunner — later the utility's director — installed continuously recording voltage and current recorders on the circuit and sealed them, and asked the staff to write down every anomaly. The strips filled with deflections. The utility's audit report of 21 December 1967 describes one of the first test days: on Monday 20 November at 07:30 a fluorescent tube fell out of its fitting in the principal's room after a loud bang and shattered, the recorder wrote two full deflections up to about 50 amperes — and the circuit fuses had not tripped, which was exactly what nobody could explain.
The utility then eliminated its own network as the cause. The fluorescent tubes were swapped for ordinary bulb fittings, and the bulbs began to burst; a direct cable was laid to the transformer station to rule out the street cable, the house connection and the riser, and nothing changed; on 30 November the light fittings began to swing hard, switched on or off, in front of the utility's own auditors, who checked and excluded vibration from the rooms above and from street traffic. By the end of November both German television channels had broadcast reports that ended on the same open question: technical anomaly, or wilful damage?
That was the situation Bender walked into on 1 December 1967 with two colleagues from the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg. He noticed within a day what the engineers had seen without drawing conclusions: the deflections only appeared during office hours, and they started with particular force when the two young women employed there arrived — the 19-year-old trainee Annemarie Schaberl and her 17-year-old colleague, named in his report only as Gustel H. The criminal police were already involved, because Adam had filed a complaint against persons unknown.
On 6–8 December two physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics at Munich-Garching, Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha, set up a four-channel measuring rig in the office: a Tektronix 549 storage oscilloscope, a potential probe, a Hewlett-Packard magnetic-field probe and a crystal microphone, all trained on the recorder. On 8 December between 16:30 and 17:48 the recorder produced about fifteen strong deflections while they stood beside it — and the oscilloscope's time base was never triggered, which meant the mains voltage had not in fact risen. They went on to exclude, one at a time, radio-frequency injection (tested with a 100-watt, 10 MHz transmitter applied to the recorder's own input sockets), capacitor discharges, static magnetic fields, infra- and ultrasound, and mechanical tampering: the recorder sat under a glass cover, mechanically locked against threads, with the two of them half a metre away. Later the utility fed a 1.5-volt dry cell into the recorder input instead of the mains, and the deflections still came.
After the oscilloscope work the case changed character. Pictures started to move. Brunner's statement in the audit report describes standing a metre from a flower picture as Adam entered the room, and watching it turn about 320 degrees anticlockwise until the hanging wire tangled on its hook; the auditor A. Mayr, present at the same moment, confirmed it, and the electrical foreman Friedinger and the trainee Meng saw the same thing the next day. Adam's son eventually caught a 320-degree rotation on an AMPEX video recorder.
The end came quickly. After the Christmas break Schaberl was formally on leave but kept coming in between 5 and 17 January 1968; she had identified with her employer's fight against a rumour circulating in Rosenheim that his sons were staging the whole thing. In those two weeks a filing cabinet weighing about 175 kilos shifted some 30 centimetres from the wall in front of the physics professor P. Büchel SJ, drawers slid open, pictures and calendars came off the walls, and both Schaberl and the colleague sitting opposite her developed a pressure in opposite ears with a reddening that ran down the neck, which a doctor called on to look at it diagnosed as hyperaemia. A Freiburg team led by a physician took her to the institute for psychodiagnostic testing. She left the office later that month, and the phenomena stopped.
Timeline: the documented record of Rosenheim poltergeist claim
- Summer 1967 Telephone faults begin in Sigmund Adam's law office: the four handsets of the Siemens system ring simultaneously, calls collapse, and the bills climb to an unusual height. Bender's report treats this, not the lights, as the start of the case.
- 19 October 1967 The tax adviser Dr Schmidt stays in the office from 17:35 to 17:55 and signs a written statement that nobody spoke on the only telephone present. In those twenty minutes the Bundespost's automatic call control registers about twenty dialings of 0119, the speaking clock. It is the best-documented single episode of the case.
- 16 November 1967 The testing department of the Rosenheim municipal utility, under the assistant to the director Paul Brunner, installs sealed voltage and current recorders on the office circuit and asks the staff to log every anomaly.
- 20 November 1967 At 07:30 a fluorescent tube falls from its fitting after a loud bang and shatters. The recorder writes two full deflections up to about 50 amperes, but the circuit fuses do not trip — the detail the utility's audit report of 21 December calls inexplicable.
- 30 November 1967 Light fittings begin to swing hard whether switched on or off, in front of the utility's own auditors. Vibration from the rooms above and from street traffic is checked and excluded. A direct cable to the transformer station has already ruled out the supply network.
- 1 December 1967 Hans Bender arrives from the Freiburg institute with two colleagues, days after both German television channels have broadcast on the case. He notes that the deflections occur only during office hours and intensify when the 19-year-old trainee Annemarie Schaberl and her 17-year-old colleague enter the building.
- 6–8 December 1967 Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics run a four-channel rig in the office. On 8 December, between 16:30 and 17:48, the recorder produces about fifteen strong deflections while they stand beside it and the oscilloscope's time base is never triggered — proof that the mains voltage had not risen. They exclude RF injection, magnetic fields, ultrasound and mechanical tampering in turn.
- 18 December 1967 During a telephone report to Freiburg the connection is cut four times and the auditor Mayr has to reset the four automatic fuses each time. The Freiburg institute keeps the tape, on which the witness also describes pictures turning and shaking.
- 5–17 January 1968 Formally on leave but still coming in, Schaberl is present as the case peaks: a filing cabinet of about 175 kilos shifts some 30 centimetres from the wall in front of the physics professor P. Büchel SJ, drawers slide open, and both she and a colleague develop a reddening of the neck a doctor diagnoses as hyperaemia. A Freiburg team led by a physician takes her to the institute for psychodiagnostic testing.
- January 1968 Schaberl leaves the practice and the phenomena stop. Bender writes that brief incidents followed her home and probably to a second law office; Hans Joachim Bogen states in 1982 that nothing ever happened at her new workplace. She has consistently denied having any powers.
- 1969 The conjuror Albin Neumann ("Allan"), with Herbert Schiff and Gert Gunther Kramer, publishes Falsche Geister – Echte Schwindler, reporting nylon threads on a lamp, a gas pipe and a wall plate, and a rubber truncheon behind a cabinet that reproduced the knocking. Adam replies that the truncheon was for self-defence.
- 10 April 1970 Die Zeit reports under the headline "Ghosts or nylon?" that Adam's application for an injunction against the book has been refused. The case returns to the courts, not to the laboratory.
- 1986 Piet Hein Hoebens argues in Kendrick Frazier's Science Confronts the Paranormal that no full report of the investigation was ever published — Bender had announced one in 1968 — and that Bender omitted that Schaberl was caught in fraud by a policeman. Herbert Schäfer repeats the charge in 1994.
- 2013 A television interview with Schaberl, quoted by Der Spiegel's history section and by the German sceptics' association GWUP, records her position half a century on: "I am a completely normal person, with a normally developed brain that can think normally. I have no powers, believe me. It must have been something else."
Is there a rational explanation for Rosenheim poltergeist claim?
The case is usually summarised as "critics said the investigation was sloppy". That is the one thing worth not doing here, because the critics have names, dates and page numbers.
The first and most damaging arrived in 1969. The Viennese conjuror Albin Neumann, working under the stage name Allan with Herbert Schiff and Gert Gunther Kramer, went over the office himself and published the result as Falsche Geister – Echte Schwindler. They reported nylon threads attached to a swinging lamp, to a gas pipe and to the wire frame of a wall plate that had been seen to "jump", and a rubber truncheon behind a cabinet with which the knocking could be reproduced by striking the wall — the housemaid confirmed it, and the suspicious black marks on the plaster could be reproduced the same way. Adam's answer, reported at the time, was that he kept the truncheon for self-defence. He sought an injunction to stop the book; the court refused it, and Alexander Adrion covered the hearing in Die Zeit on 10 April 1970 under the title "Ghosts or nylon?".
Hans Joachim Bogen (Magie ohne Illusionen, 1982) added the mundane mechanisms: an X-ray machine in the same building, or deliberate short circuits, could account for the electrical events, and a hot bulb sprayed with liquid bursts loudly. Bogen also contradicted Bender on a point of fact that matters more than any of the tricks: Bender wrote that brief phenomena followed Schaberl to her family's home and probably to the second law office where she meant to finish her apprenticeship; Bogen states flatly that nothing ever happened at her new workplace.
The English-language attack is Piet Hein Hoebens's chapter in Kendrick Frazier's Science Confronts the Paranormal (1986), which makes two charges. One is documentary: no full report of the investigation was ever published, so nobody can check how natural causes were excluded. Bender himself announced in the 1968 paper that the complete material would appear in book form as a supplement to the journal; it appears never to have done. The other is specific — that Bender left out of his account that Schaberl was caught in fraud by a policeman. The criminologist Herbert Schäfer repeats the charge in Poltergeister und Professoren (1994, p. 278), and the physicist John Taylor (Science and the Supernatural, 1980) concluded that the recorder readings were probably fraudulent and the case a mixture of expectation, hallucination and trickery. Not all parapsychologists concede the point: Walter von Lucadou has argued that at least one of the nylon threads found in the office belonged to the investigators' own test rig.
And there is a sceptical argument that comes from inside Bender's own paper, which is the one our previous file managed to invert. It was never a case of the telephone line being tampered with; the Fernmeldeamt checked the line and the equipment and concluded the opposite — that somebody or something inside the office was dialling. Bender knew what that implied. He worked out with telephone engineers how a psychokinetic force would have to act to dial 0119 without turning the dial, and wrote that it would have to press specific springs at specific millisecond intervals, guided by "an intelligence which has precise technical knowledge". Read as physics, that is an extraordinary claim. Read as a description of what a bored, unhappy nineteen-year-old with access to the only telephone in the room could do with a fingertip on the hook switch, it is not extraordinary at all. Nothing in the published record settles which of the two it was, and no charge was ever brought against her.
Can you visit Rosenheim poltergeist claim?
There is nothing to visit, and saying so plainly is more useful than pretending otherwise.
Königstraße 13 in Rosenheim is a private building in the town centre, in ordinary residential and commercial use. Sigmund Adam's practice is long gone, there is no plaque, no display and no access of any kind, and the people who live and work there today have no connection to what happened in 1967. Photographing a doorway from the public pavement is one thing; ringing a bell is harassment. Treat it as an address you can walk past and leave alone.
What can be visited is the archive, and it is free. The two primary reports on this case — Bender's preliminary account and Karger and Zicha's physical investigation, published back to back in volume 11 of the Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie in 1968 — have been digitised page by page by the university library of Freiburg and can be read in full online, with OCR text, at no cost. Almost nothing written about Rosenheim in English goes back to them. The Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, which Bender founded, still operates in Freiburg im Breisgau.
Rosenheim itself is worth the trip for other reasons and is easy to reach: it sits on the Munich–Salzburg main line, and the station is about twelve minutes' walk from the old town. The Städtisches Museum in the Mittertor, the medieval town gate at Ludwigsplatz 26, opens Tuesday to Sunday from 12:00 to 17:00 and charges €6, reduced €4, with free entry under 22; because of the building it is not fully step-free, and staff ask visitors with access needs to get in touch in advance. The Ausstellungszentrum Lokschuppen at Rathausstraße 24, a former railway workshop turned exhibition hall, opens daily 10:00 to 17:00, Mondays included, and charges €19.50 for adults and €8 for children aged 5 to 17 and students; its current show, Römer – Gesichter eines Weltreiches, runs from 20 March 2026 to 1 August 2027. Königstraße is a few minutes on foot from both.
Sources consulted
- Hans Bender, «Der Rosenheimer Spuk – ein Fall spontaner Psychokinese. Ein vorläufiger Bericht» — Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie 11, pp. 104–112, 1968 academic
- Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha, «Physikalische Untersuchung des Spukfalles in Rosenheim 1967» — Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie 11, pp. 113–131, 1968 academic
- Albin Neumann (Allan), Herbert Schiff and Gert Gunther Kramer, «Falsche Geister – Echte Schwindler. Geisterjagd durch drei Jahrhunderte» — Zsolnay, Vienna, 1969 book
- Alexander Adrion, «Rosenheimer Spuk wieder vor Gericht: Geister oder Nylon?» — Die Zeit, 10 April 1970, 1970 newspaper archive
- John Taylor, «Science and the Supernatural: An Investigation of Paranormal Phenomena» — Temple Smith, London, pp. 107–108, 1980 book
- Hans Joachim Bogen, «Magie ohne Illusionen» — Aurum Verlag, Freiburg, 1982 book
- Piet Hein Hoebens, «Sense and Nonsense in Parapsychology» — In Kendrick Frazier (ed.), Science Confronts the Paranormal, Prometheus Books, pp. 28–42, 1986 book
- Herbert Schäfer, «Poltergeister und Professoren. Über den Zustand der Parapsychologie» — Schäfer, Bremen, p. 278, 1994 book
- Bernd Harder, «Der Spuk von Rosenheim» — GWUP – Die Skeptiker, 2013 web
- Städtisches Museum Rosenheim, «Informationen für Ihren Besuch» — Official visitor information, 2026 web
- Ausstellungszentrum Lokschuppen Rosenheim, «Preise & Tickets» — Official visitor information, 2026 web
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-13 · How we verify our content
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