The Dibbesdorf Rapping Spirit (Klopfgeist zu Dibbesdorf)

Dibbesdorf is a village about an hour from Braunschweig, now part of the city. In German the case is the Klopfgeist zu Dibbesdorf. Locally it was the "Kloppeding". It is a story about a sound. No source mentions apparitions, lights or moving objects, only knocking.

December 2, 1767. Six in the evening. The maids had gathered, as usual, in the living room of Anton Kettelhut, a smallholder. Suddenly a dull knocking like a hammer sounded from one corner of the room. It seemed to come from below the floor.

Anton suspected his servant, then a rat, and searched the walls, ceiling and floor. No rats. The maids left for the nearby farm of Ludwig Kettelhut. The knocking followed them. About a hundred feet away it began again, with increased intensity and strength.

Then it began to answer. Questions were asked and the raps counted. Thirty-six raps were heard, and the buttons in question were counted. Exactly 36. A sum of coins drew 681 raps.

When a list of towns was read for a stranger's birthplace, it rapped at Hettin. It gave the number and colour of horses, and how much ribbon a shopkeeper had sold. Every day the curious came on foot, on horseback and by carriage. Kardec's text speaks of "hundreds" daily, from Braunschweig and abroad, and police had to organise them. Duke Karl I of Brunswick and his brother Ferdinand, the famous victor of Krefeld and Minden, rode out to hear it.

The village official Hennig Fricke reported the case. On January 6, 1768, the Justizamtmann of Amt Campen inspected. Walls, floors and cupboards were searched, and the household was put under oath. Then a ducal commission tried an odd hypothesis.

An underground spring. A borehole about 8 feet deep struck a powerful jet of water and flooded the room. The knocking carried on. Next came a confession.

A young servant girl, barely out of childhood, was threatened and promised into accusing the housewife. Anton Kettelhut and his wife were jailed for about three months, despite protesting their innocence. The knocking continued without them. They were released with no compensation. One account says the family had to close their inn and became poor.

In March 1768 the knocking left Dibbesdorf. Soon after, it surfaced in the neighbouring villages of Essehof and Lehre. Writing in Die Gartenlaube in 1898, O. Hohnstein pointed to the farmhand the commission had once suspected. He left Dibbesdorf at the same time, and took work first in Essehof, then in Lehre. Newspapers of the time suggested the family were charlatans drawing customers to their inn. No official cause was found. One legal investigator reportedly admitted they were nearly at their wits' end.

Justinus Kerner told the story, and Kardec reprinted it in the Revue Spirite in August 1858, dating it to 1761. German sources give 1767. Both men saw spirit communication, an early form of the intelligent raps later made famous by the Fox sisters in 1848. Barrie Colvin, in the SPR Psi Encyclopedia, notes the underground water theory was first described here. G. W. Lambert later developed it. In 1961, vibration tests by Gauld and Cornell essentially disproved it. Kerner's closing line still stands. "Future will perhaps teach us about that."