The Möttlingen Haunting and the Possession of Gottliebin Dittus

Möttlingen sat in the Black Forest above Calw, in Württemberg. A Pietist village. Gottliebin Dittus, born in 1815, lived there with her siblings. They were poor orphans. Their parents and several brothers and sisters had died shortly before 1841. One account says the knocking began after Gottliebin moved, in February 1841, into a newly bought house on Brunnengasse.

The sounds came first. Knocking. Banging. A shuffling that seemed to fill the building. Loud blows came again and again from the floor near Gottliebin's bed.

Then the figure. Gottliebin kept seeing a woman holding a dead child. A transparent figure, seen only by her. It always stood at a certain spot before her bed, and it would move toward her. "I just want to find rest," it said. Or: "Give me a paper, and I won't come again." Pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt heard of the trouble in April 1842. From her description he recognised a local widow who had died two years before.

June 1842. Blumhardt came to the house at about 10 pm. With him were Kraushaar, a carpet manufacturer known for his level-headedness and described in one account as the mayor, half a dozen village councillors, and Mose Stanger, a young relative of Gottliebin. They posted themselves in pairs in and around the house.

The banging started at once. Within three hours they recorded 25 thumps, powerful enough to lift a chair, make plaster dust fall from the ceiling and windows rattle. The bedroom was loudest when the men gathered in the sitting room. At about 1 am Gottliebin heard an approaching apparition, shuffling along the floor. Blumhardt stopped the inspection. Afterwards she said she had seen the woman with the dead child again.

Gottliebin's fits grew worse. Blumhardt watched a convulsion with foam at the mouth. Dr. Späth, a physician he brought as a witness, could not explain them. She spoke in voices not her own. She felt burning hands around her throat, and blisters were found on her neck the next morning. People reported nails, glass, wire and bone coming out of her skin without leaving wounds. On 8 February 1843 she was said to have seen an earthquake in the West Indies, later confirmed by newspapers.

Her brother Hansjörg and sister Katharina were drawn in at the climax. Voices claimed "We are 1,067." Then, in late December 1843, came the cry. "Jesus ist Sieger!" Jesus is Victor. One account gives it to Katharina, another to Gottliebin. Blumhardt had refused exorcism formulas throughout. He relied on prayer.

Blumhardt saw a demonic attack, not natural illness. In 1949/50 the psychiatrist Walter Schulte proposed hysteria or dissociation, while admitting the case reached "the limits of medical explicability." Historian Dieter Ising accepts that hysteria may explain the voices. The objects, he says, remain unexplained, and contemporary sources do not suggest fraud. They can no longer be tested. Blumhardt kept them at first, then destroyed them.

Blumhardt's case history appeared in 1850 as Blumhardt's Battle. A repentance and revival movement spread through Möttlingen. Gottliebin led the village kindergarten from 1844, later worked at Bad Boll, married Theodor Brodersen in 1855 and died on 26 January 1872. The words "Jesus is Victor" went on to influence Karl Barth. The Dittus house still stands. It is now the Blumhardt Museum.