The Pursruck poltergeist, Upper Palatinate, 1970

Pursruck is a very small village in the municipality of Freudenberg (Oberpfalz), in the Amberg-Sulzbach district of the Upper Palatinate, Bavaria. Bender placed it "40 miles east of Nuremberg". Its Catholic parish church is St. Ursula. Its priest was Rev. Jakob Wolfsteiner.

In one house lived Mr and Mrs R., their daughters Helga, 13, and Anna, 11, and the grandmother. In November 1970, the house began to make noise.

It started with tapping and bumping. It went on for about three weeks. Then it stopped.

At the end of May 1971 it came back. Tapping. Scraping. Sawing. Knocking on doors and cupboards. Once, a burst described as the "hammering of a machine gun interrupted by intense bangs". The sounds clustered around the two girls, and they were stronger when Helga and Anna were together. Small things happened too. A bedside rug rolled itself up. Cupboard doors opened. Glassware broke, put down to the vibrations. In August 1971, more phenomena were reported.

Wolfsteiner did not treat it as something to exorcise. He treated it as something to observe. On 19 June 1971 he worked with a flash camera, a tape recorder and an electric torch, and kept a written record. The "tappings appeared when the girls lay completely quiet in their beds," he wrote. He stayed convinced their body movements were not making the sounds.

Then came the hammocks. The girls were moved out of their beds and into hammocks. The sounds changed. "There is only a scratching to be heard." When a board was added, the tapping started again. Bender later read this as the phenomenon adapting to whatever surface was available.

A second priest, Father Dr. A. Heimler, a psychotherapist, tried something else. Rhythmic music and dance, to help the girls relax. The knocking seemed to follow the beat. "The poltergeist (the unconscious) reacts directly to hot rhythms," Heimler wrote.

Hans Bender, head of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg, took up the case. The institute used flash photography, tape recordings and videotape. A student from Freiburg recorded the sounds. For Bender, the priest himself was part of the story. In his words, "the changed attitude towards poltergeist phenomena became symptomatically manifest in the behaviour of the Catholic priest, Rev. Jakob Wolfsteiner". The clergy now met such cases with research, not with talk of demons.

Under stricter controls, the girls admitted to producing knocks on purpose with their toes and fingers against the bedstead. To a sceptic, that settles it. A children's prank that grew. Bender disagreed. In his account the confession did not explain the earlier phenomena: the knocks Wolfsteiner logged while the girls lay still, the rolling rug, the opening cupboards, the breaking glass. He saw recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis centred on girls at puberty, with genuine and faked effects mixed together, a pattern he treated as common. No sceptical study specific to Pursruck is known.

Bender published the case in his chapter "Modern Poltergeist Research", in New Directions in Parapsychology, edited by J. Beloff in 1974. It sits among the Freiburg cases beside Rosenheim, Thun and Schleswig. No police report and no newspaper coverage have surfaced. But the sound may survive. A track called "Spukfall Pursruck (1971)" is credited to a collection of occult voice recordings. And in 2020 the noise project Verderbnis opened its album Poltergeist with "Pursruck (1971)".