The White Lady of the Belchen Tunnel

The Belchen Tunnel carries the A2 motorway, once the N2, from Basel toward Chiasso. Its twin tubes run 3,180 metres between Eptingen in Basel-Landschaft and Hägendorf in Solothurn. Locals call it the Bölchentunnel.

June 1980. The first written accounts described a man who was picked up as a hitchhiker. Despite the car's high speed, he suddenly was no longer in the back seat. By late 1980, drivers were reporting a distressed woman dressed in white who appeared out of nowhere, before or inside the tunnel. Sometimes she spoke to them.

6 January 1981. The tabloid Blick reported on the apparitions, and the other media took up the story. The Basel-Landschaft police received many calls, and dozens had to be logged. Officer Armin Gyger took many of them and put them down to imagination. In 1981 the Bölchengespenst, the Belchen ghost, became a popular theme at Fasnacht, the Basel carnival.

September 1983. Two young women from Basel were driving south toward Solothurn. Some sources call them lawyers, others law students. On the hard shoulder on the Eptingen side, just before the north portal, they picked up a hitchhiker. She was a middle-aged woman, inconspicuously dressed, awkward, pale, and apparently unwell.

Asked how she was, she answered in Swiss German dialect: "Nei, leider nid. Es goht gar nid guet." The words meant that she was not well, and some tellings add a warning that something terrible, something truly dreadful, was going to happen. Then the back seat was empty, though accounts differ on whether she vanished in the middle of the tunnel or was gone by the far end. The car had not stopped again.

Between seven and eight that evening, the women reached the restaurant Zur Spanischen in Härkingen, shaking and crying. Innkeepers Marie-Theres and Paul Burkhardt saw them arrive, and the women called the police from the restaurant. In one account, the police laughed, and the women later drove back to Basel over the Hauenstein pass rather than through the tunnel. "Das waren normale Frauen," Paul Burkhardt said in 2015, meaning, "They were normal women." In 2021, the couple said they would never forget that evening.

In 2008 Michael Rockenbach and Philipp Loser of the Basler Zeitung traced the two women. They confirmed that the women existed, went to the restaurant and called the police. The paper withheld their names. One did not want to dig it all up again.

No photograph, recording or physical trace exists. The debate has run in several directions. Parapsychologist Matthias Güldenstein, a co-founder of PSI-Zentrum Basel, saw a place-bound haunting, possibly the spirit of an accident victim unable to find peace. Psychiatrist Jakob Bösch suggested expanded perception. Psychiatrist Alexander Zimmer proposed an inner projection shared by two emotionally close people.

Folklorists point to the vanishing hitchhiker, a story type told worldwide. Walter Leimgruber of the University of Basel treated the case in 2013 as a modern legend built on older traditions. One detail sharpens the question. The Basler Zeitung reported that the 1983 hitchhiker wore dark clothing, not white. The name White Lady came from the earlier wave.

Elisabeth Pfluger recorded the 1983 account in the Solothurner Kalender of 1985. She later wrote the 2012 short film Di wyssi Frou. A folk band wrote a schottische about the ghost. Comedian Beat Schlatter went ghost hunting there for Radio SRF 1 in 2015 and saw nothing. Reports grew rarer after the late 1980s, but they kept coming back.