The Resau Poltergeist (Der Spuk von Resau)

Resau is a hamlet in the woods belonging to Bliesendorf, in what was then the Potsdam district. Today it is part of Werder (Havel), in Brandenburg. In 1888 the farmer Böttcher lived there with his family and a farmhand named Karl Wolter. Sources disagree on the boy's age. A Kladderadatsch caption gives 15. The chronicler Hugo Friedländer calls him a seventeen-year-old farm lad.

Late 1888. At dusk, things began to fly. In the words of a 2023 retelling, it suddenly rained potatoes in the Böttcher house, and now and then a frying pan too. Pots flew, along with a funnel, ham bones, plates, glasses, clothing and food. Windowpanes shattered, and the cows were pelted with small stones.

It happened every evening. Nobody was ever seen throwing a thing. Friedländer wrote that the projectiles came flying in such a way that no cause could be made out, and that a terrible fright seized the villagers. The witnesses were mostly older people, and those who were struck were horrified.

The local clergyman, Pastor Dr. Müller, came to offer spiritual help. He watched closely and described the strange flight paths of the projectiles. Then, by Friedländer's account, a frying pan whizzed through the air and hit him quite hard in the back. Some retellings make it a potato.

For several weeks the affair occupied police, officials and spiritualists from Berlin. The Berlin lawyer Dr. Egbert Müller, known as "Geister-Müller", swore that Wolter was a genuine medium.

One detail kept surfacing. While everyone else was horrified, Wolter laughed. He was said to have laughed at the reactions. He was also always at the spot the objects flew from. Friedländer says the pastor quickly worked out that the boy was throwing them himself.

In January 1889 the district court at Werder convicted Wolter of grober Unfug, gross mischief. The sentence was 14 days' imprisonment and four weeks' detention. Nothing was proven directly and Wolter never confessed. But the court heard that as a schoolboy he had stood out for very skilful throwing with a barely noticeable movement of the hand. It ruled that a ghost was a scientifically inadmissible hypothesis. His appeal was rejected.

Not everyone accepted the verdict. Egbert Müller published Enthüllung des Spukes von Resau, which reached a third edition in 1889. A pamphlet by "Puls", a retired court assessor, reached a defiant conclusion. "Es spukt doch!" It is haunted after all.

The satirical weekly Kladderadatsch answered with cartoons, including one by Gustav Brandt in March 1889, and later mocked Müller himself. Once Wolter left Resau, the disturbances stopped. In April 1889 the conjurer and court magician Karl Rößner hired him as a stage assistant for his sleight of hand. Other accounts say he went to Hamburg to go to sea like his father.

Richard Hennig revisited the case in 1906 and, like Friedländer, presented it as a prank on superstitious villagers. Friedländer used it as an example of earlier gullibility in his account of the medium Anna Rothe. The exact start date has never been pinned down, and no picture of the flying objects survives. What remains is a court ruling, a handful of pamphlets, and a farmhand who denied causing it.