The Stans Poltergeist: Melchior Joller's Haunted House at Spichermatt

Stans, in the Canton of Nidwalden, near Lake Lucerne. On the edge of town, at Spichermatt, stood a stately farmhouse built in 1798. In the early 1860s it was home to Melchior Joller. He was a lawyer and journalist who had founded the Nidwaldner Wochenblatt in 1844. He had sat as a liberal National Councillor from 1857 until he lost his seat in 1860. He shared the house with his wife Karoline, their seven children and their maids.

Autumn 1860. A maid heard knocking on her bedhead. Joller's wife and their daughter Melanie heard knocking on a bedroom table. Then June 1861. Their son Oscar, nine years old, saw a white shape with no form in the kitchen. He fainted.

15 August 1862. Joller was away. Doors opened again and again. They were found "all open again. Including those doors that had been bolted." A pebble the size of a fist fell between Melanie and Alfred. Within days Joller heard it himself. Ten to twelve blows that "speeded up towards the end, as if someone was tapping nervously on a door." Others came "as powerful as a wooden mallet might make when swung with all the strength." There were footsteps and sobbing. A sad voice, with strings, played the music of Camille's prayer from the opera Zampa.

Then the house itself seemed to move. A heavy walnut table turned over. A chair "travelled some one and a half yards from its place and then suddenly, and without the slightest noise, tipped over." An axe, a sickle and a harness turned up in the chimney. Blue flames came down it in the shape of a sugar-loaf. At a window stood a pale figure, its head bent as if in sorrow. Ice-cold fingers touched faces and throats. Joller felt sharp, cold dog's claws on his face.

16 September, about eight in the morning. Joller watched an apple. It "hastened with two or three jumps towards the corridor," jumped back into the corner, then lay quietly on the floor. On 6 October, five witnesses saw the figure of a sad-looking woman.

On 25 August the government appointed a three-man commission: W. Zelger, L. Wursch and Police Inspector Jann. Jann confirmed the extraordinary noise himself. The commission suggested electrostatic generators, galvanism, volcanic activity, or a current through the asphalt terrace. Joller rejected every one. Knocking on the cellar ceiling, he found, shook the whole house. The disturbances stayed in one place. The commission closed on 1 September. It found no evidence of fraud. Episcopal Commissioner Niederberger concluded the phenomena were "neither mere hallucination, nor someone playing at ghosts."

The press was crueller. Rumours tied the events to a visiting actor named Stöbe and claimed Joller's son had "learned sorcery from the gypsy." Joller lost clients. He wrote: "One thing I could not endure: the anonymous attacks in newspapers, the cowardly rumors, the ridicule." On 22 October 1862 the family left for Zurich. The house stayed closed until spring 1863. Once it was rented out, the phenomena stopped. Joller published his account that year. He died in Rome in 1865, aged 47, poor, a soldier in the papal Zouaves.

Later retellings blamed his grandmother, Veronika Gut, who had fought the French in 1798 and is said to have been angered by her grandson's liberal views. Joller's pamphlet makes no such claim. Fanny Moser included it in her book Spuk, and Eberhard Bauer discusses it as a classic case of recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, the research term for poltergeist activity. Later studies could not clarify what happened. The house was demolished in February 2010, after 212 years. Its iron key survives in the Nidwaldner Museum.