The Rosenheim Poltergeist

In late 1967, a law office in the Bavarian town of Rosenheim, Germany, experienced a series of bizarre phenomena that attracted the attention of police, physicists, and parapsychologists. The case became one of the most thoroughly documented poltergeist events in history, notable for the multiple independent investigations that failed to find any conventional explanation.

The Setting

The events centered on the law office of Sigmund Adam, located on Königstrasse in Rosenheim. The office employed several people, including secretaries and clerks. In the autumn of 1967, the office began experiencing problems that seemed initially to be technical malfunctions.

Telephone bills skyrocketed without explanation. The office’s phone system dialed the speaking clock repeatedly—hundreds of times per day—even when no one was using the phones. Fuses blew constantly. Light bulbs exploded. The copying machine malfunctioned.

Adam called in technicians from the phone company and the power company, assuming the problems were electrical in nature.

Technical Investigation

Engineers from the post office and power company examined the systems thoroughly. They found nothing wrong. To test the phone lines, they installed monitoring equipment that should have recorded any unauthorized use. The equipment showed calls being placed when no one was anywhere near the phones.

The power company installed special meters and even ran the office on an independent generator, isolated from the main grid. The disturbances continued. Lights swung on their fixtures. Power fluctuations occurred that should have been impossible on an isolated system.

Physicist F. Karger from the Max Planck Institute and Dr. G. Zicha from the Technical University of Munich examined the phenomena. Their instruments recorded inexplicable electrical variations—needle deflections that could not be explained by any known physical process.

Phenomena

As the investigation continued, the phenomena expanded beyond electrical disturbances. Pictures rotated on the walls, sometimes spinning completely around. Heavy filing cabinets moved on their own. Drawers opened without being touched. Objects flew across rooms.

The disturbances were observed by multiple credible witnesses, including the investigating physicists, police officers called to the scene, and journalists. The events were filmed and photographed.

The Focus

Investigators noticed a pattern: the phenomena occurred most intensely when a specific employee, a nineteen-year-old secretary named Anne-Marie Schneider, was present. When she was away from the office, the disturbances decreased or ceased. When she returned, they resumed.

Anne-Marie was described as emotionally troubled, frustrated with her job, and experiencing personal difficulties. This fit the classic poltergeist pattern of phenomena centered on an adolescent or young adult under psychological stress.

Hans Bender, a prominent German parapsychologist, was brought in to investigate. He concluded that Anne-Marie was the unconscious source of the phenomena—that her psychological state was somehow producing the physical effects through what parapsychologists call recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK).

Resolution

Anne-Marie Schneider left the law office. When she departed, the phenomena at Sigmund Adam’s office ceased. However, disturbances reportedly followed her to subsequent places of employment, though never as dramatically as in Rosenheim.

The investigators filed their reports. Karger and Zicha published their findings in a physics journal, acknowledging that they had observed phenomena they could not explain through conventional physics. Bender incorporated the case into his ongoing research on poltergeist phenomena.

Assessment

The Rosenheim case is considered one of the strongest poltergeist cases on record because of the quality of the investigators and documentation. Physicists from major institutions examined the phenomena and found no conventional explanation. The events were witnessed by multiple independent observers including police.

Skeptics have suggested that Anne-Marie Schneider could have been perpetrating fraud, though no one ever caught her doing so, and the phenomena included events that would have been difficult to fake—such as the phone calls recorded by post office monitoring equipment when no one was near the phones.

The case demonstrates the typical poltergeist pattern: a young person under stress, escalating phenomena, investigation that fails to find normal causes, and resolution when the focus person leaves. Whether this pattern reflects a genuine paranormal phenomenon or a common mode of fraud and misperception remains debated.

What is certain is that something unusual happened in Rosenheim in 1967—unusual enough that German physicists could not explain it.