The office was the law practice of Sigmund Adam in Rosenheim, Bavaria. The trouble started in the summer of 1967 with the telephones. Adam picked up a ringing line and found it dead. The same day a call he was on was cut. All four sets on the Siemens system rang at once. At the end of the month the bill was far too high. The time-of-day number, 0119, was being dialed from the office again and again, and the staff said they were not doing it. In October the post office changed every set and put a charge meter on the line. The reviewers said they could not account for what the meter did. On the first day it logged a call the people in the office said had never been made. The next day it logged forty-two calls to the time service in a quarter of an hour. On later days the same number was taken forty to fifty times in a row. On 19 October, between 5:35 and 5:55 in the evening, the tax adviser Dr. Schmidt was in the office and said nobody was on a phone. The meter logged about twenty calls to 0119 in that span. Adam filed a complaint against persons unknown.

The lights came next. Fluorescent tubes on a ceiling about two and a half meters up went out with a bang. An electrician found them turned ninety degrees in the holders, so the contacts no longer met. New tubes were put in and, with people watching, turned in the holders again. Bulbs burst. Fuses threw themselves. Fluid from the photocopier was sprayed in the room. Drawers opened. Pictures turned on their hooks. Adam asked the municipal works, the Stadtwerke, to look at the supply. Paul Brunner of their test office started on 16 November and installed sealed recorders of voltage and current. On 21 November the charts showed three full-scale swings, and a bulb burst in the outer office. The same day there were six more swings with nothing else seen. The pens were marked up to about fifty amps. On 30 November the lamps in the rooms began to swing. The Stadtwerke men saw that themselves.

Hans Bender, of the Freiburg Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene, arrived on 1 December with two colleagues. Newspapers and television had already been in. He reported that the effects came during office hours, and most strongly when two young clerks were there: Annemarie Schaberl, nineteen, an apprentice in the office, and Gustel H., seventeen. The charts moved when the office was working. Within a short time he treated Annemarie as the person the effects followed. He said the overhead lamps swung when she walked the corridor. He had her unhappiness, including a broken engagement, as the reason the effects took the form they did. She told him she had no such power.

On 6, 7, and 8 December, Dr. Friedbert Karger and the physicist Gerhard Zicha, of the Institute for Plasma Physics at Garching, put oscillographs on the office supply. They checked changes on the public mains, capacitor discharge, static charge, magnetic fields, sound above and below the hearing range, vibration, loose contacts in their own gear, and the chance that someone was working the recorder by hand. Their paper, in the same 1968 journal as Bender’s, says deflections still appeared on the recorder after those checks. They wrote that they could not describe what they had recorded with the physics they had, that the forces were short and not regular, and that the effects, including the telephone calls, looked mechanical rather than electrical. They also wrote that they usually saw the ink after it was on the paper, not the pen as it moved, except for some pulses of about a second, and that a glass cover and a stop on the recorder made a thread on that particular machine unlikely while they stood half a meter from it. They did not claim to have watched every bulb, every picture, and every call.

Bender filmed lamps swinging. A picture turning was a harder shot. He first said pictures had gone as far as a full turn. A later tape, made by Adam’s son with a technician from the power investigation present, is the one Bender describes as a picture turning about 320 degrees, close enough that Paul Brunner was about a meter away and the hanging wire wrapped on the hook. A later reading of the Ampex film, cited against Bender, puts that turn nearer 120 degrees.

From 5 to 17 January 1968 Annemarie was told to stay home. She kept coming in. Bender’s account of those days, in front of the physicist P. Büchel, has drawers opening, pictures and a calendar falling, and a filing cabinet of three and a half hundredweight, about 175 kilograms, shifted about thirty centimeters out from the wall. She and Gustel complained of pressure in the ears and reddened skin. Bender took Annemarie to Freiburg for tests. He said telepathy trials with her succeeded and that trials in which she was asked to move objects did not. He does not give the scores.

She left the firm in January 1968. The office went quiet. Bender wrote that short effects followed at her family’s home and, probably, at another law office where she meant to finish her training. The German accounts that answer him say nothing of the kind happened at the new workplace. She has gone on saying she cannot explain the weeks in Adam’s office and that she has no special power.

In 1969 the Viennese conjuror Albin Neumann, under the name Allan, with Herbert Schiff and Gert Gunther Kramer, published Falsche Geister – Echte Schwindler. They wrote that they found nylon thread on a swinging lamp, on a gas pipe, and on the wire frame of a wall plate that had been said to jump, and that the threads would produce the movements. Behind a cupboard they found a rubber truncheon. The household help, they said, confirmed that the bangs were made by striking the wall with it, and that the black marks on the wall could be made the same way. Adam said the truncheon was his, for self-defense. They also suggested an X-ray machine elsewhere in the building, deliberate short circuits, and fluid flicked onto hot bulbs. Adam asked the court to stop the book. The injunction was refused. Die Zeit reported the fight on 10 April 1970. Bender’s published report does not mention a later claim, made by Herbert Schäfer among others, that a policeman caught Annemarie in one piece of trickery. That catch, if it happened, is one incident. It is not the meter from October or the charts from November. Those were written down before Bender arrived, and they are what the argument is still about.