The Bremen porcelain-shop poltergeist (Heiner Scholz), 1965

Bremen, West Germany. 1965. In the Vahr district, Johann Surowitz and his wife ran a shop. Accounts describe it as a delicatessen and porcelain shop, or as a store selling groceries, household goods and porcelain. Among the staff was a young apprentice, Heinrich "Heiner" Scholz. The sources give his age as 14 or 15.

Then the stock began to break. Preserving jars. Vases. Bowls. Schnapps glasses. All seemingly without reason. Witnesses said plates, cups and vases literally leapt off the shelves. Coffee pots flew through the air. Glasses broke while still in their original boxes.

The police came. So did the fire brigade and the building authority. They checked the building. While firefighters and police were searching the basement, a stack of glass coasters was scattered across the entire room with a throwing motion. The damage reached about 5,000 DM. And one pattern held. The breakages clustered around the apprentice.

Parapsychologist Hans Bender came from the IGPP, his institute in Freiburg. He judged the events genuine recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, or RSPK. As physicist Werner Schiebeler later put it, Bender saw a psychokinetic phenomenon triggered by agitation, pushing the boy's natural "destructive drive" from the normal into the paranormal.

Bender took Scholz to Freiburg for laboratory experiments and found him an electrician's apprenticeship there. March 1966. At the electrician's firm, cables were being installed. The foreman noticed that screws were coming loose as soon as the hooks had been installed.

Spring 1978. Herbert Schäfer, criminal director at the Bremen Landeskriminalamt, first asked Surowitz for a written waiver of his damage claims. Then Scholz talked. He said he had produced all of it himself, in the shop and in Bender's Freiburg lab tests. He confessed publicly, including on television. "When Mr S. was gone, I set the tape recorder to record and then threw shards and crockery at the wall."

His motive, he said, was partly fun. Partly resentment, because his boss humiliated him over mistakes. "When I think back on the mischief I got up to back then, I still have to laugh today."

Bender called the confession a lie and kept believing in the boy's abilities. His assistants produced expert reports, Gutachten, arguing that some of the tricks Scholz described were physically impossible. Bender published a detailed reply in the Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie. The sceptics of the GWUP say he even folded the confession into his RSPK model. Schiebeler called the confession "freely invented" and Schäfer a "fanatical opponent" of Bender. In 1994 Schäfer set out his side in the book Poltergeister und Professoren.

An NSA document, "Facts and Speculations on ESP and the SIGINT Threat", now held in the CIA reading room, remembers the "Bremen Case" as a boy who, witnesses claimed, could cause objects to move without touching them.

One study of German parapsychology calls it the "Poltergeist in the china shop". It stands beside Bender's most famous case, the Rosenheim poltergeist, and the GWUP pairs it with Chopper, the "talking" poltergeist of Neutraubling in 1982. In 2024 the podcast Geisterjäger returned to the story.