The Rosenheim Office

What is on the record

In the autumn of 1967 a law office in Rosenheim, in southern Bavaria, began to come apart. No one in it could say how.

Lights swung on their fittings. Bulbs exploded. Fluorescent tubes worked loose from their holders. A heavy filing cabinet was said to have moved. Copier fluid leaked. Paintings turned on their hooks. And then there were the telephones. In 1967 they were rented from the state post office, and the post office billed each call. The phones made hundreds of calls to the speaking clock. Far more often than a human hand could have dialled them. The bills came to prove it.

This is what lifts the case out of the usual. The gear that went wrong was owned by someone else, and someone else kept the readings. The electricity supplier put recorders on the line. It found jumps and surges it could not explain. The post office looked into the calls. The police came. The firm brought in its own electricians, then the supplier's. Then a new power line. Then its own generator. The trouble went on.

Then the parapsychologist Hans Bender came from Freiburg. A parapsychologist is someone who studies claims of ghosts and powers of the mind. He brought two physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha. The case became famous.

What the investigators said

Bender's account was that the physicists were sure that plain causes were used up. Some unknown form of energy was at work. He said the events came only in office hours, and only when one 19-year-old employee was in the building. They went where she went. Lamps swung as she walked under them. A filing cabinet moved when she was near it. A hanging picture was caught on film turning on its hook.

He had a word for this. Not a spirit in the building. He thought it came out of a person under strain. A tension in a young woman in a job she hated, let out as damage to the room around her. The woman was named in the press. She was photographed. Reporters trailed her. She was 19.

What was found when anyone looked

The other half of the record is less quoted, and it has to be said.

Critics who went over the office found nylon threads tied to office fittings. To overhead lights and wall plates. Pulled, they would produce some of the effects. The physicist John Taylor looked at the case later. His finding was that what went on in Rosenheim was a mix of expectation, hallucination and trickery. The trouble stopped when the young woman left the firm. She married, and went on with a life she had never asked to have broken into.

And the meter charts stay where they are. The surges were logged by a supply company with no stake in ghosts. The calls were billed by a post office with less. No one has given an account that explains those two things, and the threads, and the timing, all at once. Bender is not a neutral witness. Neither are the critics who came hoping to find a thread. Both found what they came to find.

What is left

A 19-year-old who had a very bad autumn, and was famous for it before she could stop it.

Behind her, a set of records no one has fully closed. The jumps on the supply. The hundreds of calls to the clock. An office that emptied itself of light bulbs for months. And then, when one employee left, never did it again.