The Großerlach Poltergeist

Spring 1916. Germany was at war. In Großerlach, in the Oberamt of Backnang, Rosine Kleinknecht was 35 and a widow. Her husband Wilhelm, a postman and farmer, had been killed as a Landwehr soldier on the Western Front on 2 November 1915. She kept the farm, built around 1740, with her three young daughters. Her nephew Adolf Nothdurft, 14, helped with the livestock.

Sunday, 30 April 1916. Early morning. The cattle were loose. Their ropes and chains had been knotted several times. They came undone anyway, "wie von Geisterhand", as if by a ghostly hand. Then the neck chains began to turn inward until they knotted into a tight tangle. The animals seemed to be strangling. They were sweating heavily.

One witness later gave sworn testimony about a calf. "Ich sah ganz genau auf die Kette am Halse des Kalbes." I looked very closely at the chain on the calf's neck. "Der Querriegel war bereits mit der Hälfte durch den Ring geschlüpft." The crossbar had already slipped halfway through the ring.

2 May. It came indoors. A log began to dance on the kitchen stove. It was thrown out of the window. It came back like lightning. Five full milk pots fell from a shelf and broke. Firewood, jugs, plates, pans and water buckets flew through the air. A water tub moved towards the door by itself. A pram rolled down the attic stairs, more than once. The doors came off their hinges.

A milk jug flew out at a witness at the stable entrance. A neighbour was struck. An official's hat was knocked off from behind, with no one standing there. A farmer who tried to intervene was hurt. One forum account adds that a child saw a black billy goat with green eyes beside her mother's bed.

Neighbours and farmers came. So did the Schultheiß, the teacher, the Amtsdiener and district officials. Their statements appeared in the Zentralblatt für Okkultismus. Despite the war, the case made headlines across the German Empire, and Johannes Illig published Der Spuk in Grosserlach that same year. The accounts disagree on the end. One gives 15 May. Another describes a pause, then fresh activity in stable and house from 15 May.

July 1916. Three members of Tübingen University's philosophy faculty arrived: Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich, Gustaf Deuchler and Theodor Haering. The activity had stopped. The family had left. They questioned witnesses and inspected the site. They had not ruled out abnormal events from the outset, they wrote, but reached the definite conviction that there was no basis for such an assumption here.

Suspicion had already fallen on the nephew. The Zentralblatt noted that the settlement of Wilhelm's estate was scheduled for 15 May. Four positions were debated: fraud by the widow, a prank by the nephew, genuine activity centred on the boy, later called RSPK by parapsychologists, or mass hysteria.

The house was demolished to widen the road. A drugstore stands there now. Yet the municipality keeps the Großerlach poltergeist alive, and its verdict is not the professors'. The mysterious events, it says, have neither recurred nor been explained. Popular accounts rank the village among the top ten haunted places in the world. It shares Württemberg soil with the Maid of Orlach case of the 1830s.