The Scherfede Water Poltergeist, Warburg, Westphalia (1972-73)

Scherfede is a village that now belongs to the town of Warburg, in the Höxter district of North Rhine-Westphalia. In 1972 and 1973, it became the setting for one of the strangest cases in the files of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg, the IGPP.

Hans Bender, then head of the institute, wrote it up in 1974 for New Directions in Parapsychology, edited by J. Beloff. It sat beside a second case, Pursruck in 1970 and 1971. "In both of these the role of poltergeist focus seems to have been filled by a pubescent girl." The editor called a water poltergeist a very great rarity, with only a few earlier cases, mostly from late 19th century America.

Several houses were affected. Small puddles appeared first in the bathroom. Then the kitchen. Then other rooms. A 1994 feature in the taz newspaper set the scene. Villagers stood in front of their terraced houses holding buckets. For three days, water had flowed "in Kaskaden über die Stufen ihrer Häuser", in cascades over the steps of their houses. Nobody knew where it came from. Sometimes a damp patch formed on a ceiling and thick drops fell from it. Sometimes the water seemed to rise up through the floor.

Carpets were soaked. Parquet floors warped. In desperation, residents drilled holes in their own ceilings to find the source. One woman spread a plastic sheet over her marriage bed, because she kept waking at night to find the bed dripping. "Es ist kein schönes Gefühl," she said. It is not a nice feeling.

A firefighter set out to catch whoever was responsible. He sat in a kitchen for hours, watching the window and the door. He turned away for a moment. Platsch. A puddle on the floor. The villagers had their own theory. The floods happened when 13-year-old "Kerstin" was nearby. After she walked down a staircase, water would run down the steps.

Plumbers checked the water pipes and the heating pipes. No leak. Building technicians, geologists and hydrologists searched for days. No cause. The parapsychologists arrived only after the last flood was some days past. The taz feature credits the work to the Freiburg team of Walter von Lucadou, physicist and psychologist. They noticed that Kerstin liked to use the toilet in other people's houses, and that puddles sometimes formed while she was there.

Bender recorded that a little girl was eventually identified as the "water poltergeist agent" for several houses. The last house affected stood about 300 metres from her home. Whether the taz account and Bender's case describe the very same episode has never been settled in print.

Lucadou's reading was psychological. A person in crisis, here a girl in a difficult phase of puberty, unconsciously uses psychokinesis to draw attention to a problem. The Freiburg counselling centre later cited Scherfede as a textbook example, noting that a defective water pipe is not "beobachterscheu", observer-shy. Like the firefighter's puddle, the water seemed to wait until nobody was looking.

Sceptics read the same details differently. The events clustered around one child. Puddles formed when she visited other homes. The watcher saw nothing until he looked away. The investigators never saw the water themselves. Yet no confession, exposure or trick is on record. Critics such as Joe Nickell and Piet Hein Hoebens questioned Bender's poltergeist work in general, but nobody has published a critique of Scherfede itself.

The case was never cleared up. In the words of taz, the water could not be rationalised away. It remains a rare entry in the poltergeist literature, filed beside Pursruck and Bender's best known case, Rosenheim.