Poltergeists

Beginning in late 1967, a law firm in Rosenheim, Bavaria began experiencing bizarre electrical disturbances. Light bulbs exploded in their sockets. Electrical power consumption spiked to impossible levels with nothing running. Telephone bills showed hundreds of calls to the speaking clock — calls that were placed four to six times per minute, faster than any human could dial. Fluorescent lights swung on their own. A photocopier began dispensing developing fluid onto the floor with no power connected.

The local power company and Deutsche Bundespost investigated and found nothing that could explain the phenomena. Physicists from the Max Planck Institute in Munich — including Hans Bender, Germany's most respected parapsychologist — installed recording equipment. They documented on film a pendulum clock rotating on its own, pictures swinging off walls, and drawers opening without being touched. All readings were logged by independent instruments.

Investigators noticed that every recorded disturbance coincided with the presence of a specific employee: 19-year-old Annemarie Schaberl. When Schaberl was on holiday, nothing happened. When she walked down the corridor, equipment malfunctioned in her wake. When she was distressed, activity intensified. When she resigned and left the building permanently in January 1969, all phenomena stopped.

Schaberl was not suspected of fraud — the activity was witnessed happening behind her, around corners, and in areas she had just left. Bender concluded that she was an unwitting RSPK agent — producing psychokinetic effects unconsciously under workplace stress. The Rosenheim case is considered by parapsychologists to be the most instrumentally documented poltergeist case in history.

In March 1984, the Resch family home in Columbus, Ohio became the site of intense poltergeist activity centring on 14-year-old Tina Resch. Telephones flew across rooms, picture frames hurled themselves off walls, and a heavy sofa moved across the floor with no one near it. The family contacted local media.

Columbus Dispatch photographer Fred Shannon was sent to the house and initially sceptical. He witnessed and photographed objects moving — including a telephone that flew off a counter and struck Tina while she stood with her arms folded. Shannon stated unambiguously that no person near her had touched the phone. The photographs were published nationwide.

The case attracted serious investigation from parapsychologist William Roll, who spent days documenting activity at the house. Roll had coined the term RSPK and had studied dozens of poltergeist cases. He found that Tina's emotional state correlated precisely with the frequency and intensity of the phenomena — activity spiked when she was upset or frustrated and subsided when she was calm. Roll's investigation produced over 250 documented incidents in the weeks of observation.

The case became controversial when a television crew's camera caught Tina apparently pulling a lamp off a table herself when she thought filming had stopped. Roll maintained this single lapse did not account for the full scope of witnessed activity, including events observed by police, journalists, and other adults in positions where Tina could not have caused them. The Resch case remains one of the most heavily documented RSPK cases in American history.