Rosenheim Poltergeist

The story

The Rosenheim case is not a haunted building you can visit. It is a series of events that took place in the premises of a law firm in Rosenheim, in Bavaria, in the late 1960s, and it exists today as a body of papers, articles and arguments. The sources we read do not even agree on which street the office stood on, and we give no address.

According to the Anomalistik-Handbuch, a German reference work on anomalistics (chapter 15 by Mayer and Bauer, which we read), the trouble came at the end of 1967, with disturbances to telephones, fluorescent tubes and circuit breakers, and the municipal utility, the Stadtwerke, inspected the electrical network without finding a cause. An early account is by the parapsychologist Hans Bender, whose 1968 report we read in the scan published by Freiburg University Library. He says telephone faults had been noticed since the summer, that the utility began its inspection on 16 November, that press reports spread the story at the end of November, and that he began his own investigation on 1 December 1967. English Wikipedia says the disturbances came only at weekends; Bender’s report says they were seen only during office hours.

The published record begins in 1968. Bender wrote “Der Rosenheimer Spuk – Ein Fall spontaner Psychokinese” in the Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie, vol. 11, pp. 104-112, and the physicists Karger and Zicha followed with “Physikalische Untersuchung des Spukfalles in Rosenheim 1967” in the same journal, pp. 113-131. English Wikipedia dates the physicists’ paper to 1967, but the volume is that of 1968. Bender places them at the Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, which the Handbuch calls a Max Planck institute. Bender called his paper a preliminary report and announced a fuller book. Bender added a second paper in 1970, “Neue Entwicklungen in der Spukforschung” (vol. 12, pp. 1-18).

The legend

There is no ghost here in the classical sense. The case was presented as an example of recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, often shortened to RSPK: the idea that the strange events were caused by a person’s mind, in this case a young woman who worked at the firm. We do not name her. She was a private person, and she appears by name only in some sources. The sources differ on her status: the Handbuch speaks of the “Beendigung des Lehrverhältnisses” (the end of her apprenticeship), Bender of a 19-year-old office employee finishing her training, and English Wikipedia of a secretary. According to German Wikipedia, she denied having any such power.

These are the phenomena as reported in the Handbuch and English Wikipedia. Telephones repeatedly dialed the speaking clock, “die damalige Zeitansage 0119,” and the firm’s phone bills were very high. Lamps burst or swung, a painting turned, drawers slid out and a heavy cabinet was moved. The Handbuch says audio and video recordings exist. Current spikes appeared on recorders with no cause in the supply network; the physicists’ study reported for electrodynamic causes the result “mit negativem Ergebnis,” according to the Handbuch.

This is a case without an old legend. It was born in the press and in the journal of Bender’s institute (the IGPP in Freiburg) in 1967-68, and Bender used it as proof of spontaneous psychokinesis. The Handbuch calls it “Einer der aufsehenerregendsten Spukfälle der letzten 50 Jahre,” one of the most sensational haunting cases of the previous fifty years, but it also concedes that some of it is “wohl nicht mehr aufklärbar,” probably no longer solvable.

The criticism

The critique is serious and began early. In 1969 Schiff, Neumann and Kramer published a skeptical book, Falsche Geister, echte Schwindler?, with the publisher Zsolnay. According to English Wikipedia, a Die Zeit article of 10 April 1970, titled Geister oder Nylon?, reported that the authors had found nylon threads. The firm is said to have asked for an injunction, which was refused, and further hearings were scheduled in Traunstein. We could not open the Die Zeit article, so this comes only from English and German Wikipedia.

Later critics went further. The Dutch skeptic Piet Hein Hoebens argued in 1986 that without a full published report of the investigation, the exclusion of natural explanations could not be checked. He also says that a policeman caught the young woman cheating and that Bender left this out; we could not verify that incident. Bender’s 1968 report says the criminal police took part and that fraud seemed excluded, and we did not find the fuller book he announced. The physicist John Taylor, in 1980, also rejected the meter readings: in the passage quoted by English Wikipedia he says the deflections were made mechanically and that a human hand seems most likely. A further book by Herbert Schäfer came out in 1994; we have not read it. English Wikipedia also notes controversy in Bender’s own past, including membership of the NSDAP and a dispute over a degree in 1977.

What remains today

Nothing remains to see. The premises were a private office, and the building is not a site. The case lives on mainly in parapsychological literature. The German television series Die Rosenheim-Cops has an episode titled “Spuk in Rosenheim,” but it is fiction; it is in the German Wikipedia episode list, and we did not watch it. Fairley and Welfare (1984) are also cited among the books on the case; we did not read them.

Visiting

There is nothing to visit. The events took place inside a private office in Rosenheim, no marker of the case is known to us, and the staff and neighbors of any building there deserve to be left alone, so please do not go looking for the address. The sensible way to follow the case is to read it. The Handbuch chapter is online as a PDF on anomalistik.de, and Freiburg University Library has scanned the 1968 articles listed above.

Sources

1. Der Rosenheimer Spuk: ein Fall spontaner Psychokinese (Hans Bender), Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie 11 — Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg, 1968
2. Die Rosenheim-Cops/Episodenliste — Wikipedia (German), 2026-11-06
3. Hans Bender — Wikipedia, 2026-11-06
4. Physikalische Untersuchung des Spukfalles in Rosenheim 1967 (Karger and Zicha) — Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg, 1968
5. Spukphänomene (Mayer and Bauer), Handbuch der Anomalistik, ch. 15 — Gesellschaft für Anomalistik, 2026-11-06
6. Spuk von Rosenheim — Wikipedia (German), 2026-11-06
7. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.