The Bremen Spuk Poltergeist
A Bremen porcelain shop became the subject of Hans Bender's most contested investigation — phenomena initially declared genuine, later confessed by the apprentice focus person Heinrich Scholz as deliberate manipulation. The case is a foundational lesson in poltergeist methodology.
In 1965, two years before the more famous Rosenheim case, the German parapsychologist Hans Bender — director of the Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene at Freiburg — was called to investigate a series of disturbances at a Bremen porcelain shop. The disturbances followed the standard poltergeist pattern: objects moving without apparent cause, ceramic items shattering, and the activity localised around a single individual, in this case an apprentice named Heinrich Scholz.
Bender investigated the Bremen case in line with the methodology he was developing for what he termed “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis” — a hypothesis that poltergeist phenomena were caused by unconscious psychokinetic capability in an emotionally distressed adolescent. Bender brought Scholz back to the Freiburg laboratory for controlled observation. The phenomena reportedly continued in the laboratory setting, with objects moving in front of multiple investigators. Bender published the case as a confirmed instance of recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis and the Bremen Spuk became, alongside Rosenheim, one of the foundational cases in the German parapsychological literature.
In 1978, detective director Herbert Schäfer of the State Criminal Police Office in Bremen reopened the case at his own initiative as part of his broader scepticism of paranormal claims. Schäfer obtained from Scholz — by then in his thirties and no longer the focus person of investigative attention — a detailed confession to all of the phenomena in the original Bremen shop and to subsequent manipulations in the Freiburg laboratory. Scholz explained the mechanisms he had used, which were largely conventional: hidden hand movements, prepared objects, and exploitation of the investigators’ confirmation bias. The Bremen confession was widely reported in the German press and became a central piece of evidence in the subsequent reassessment of Bender’s broader investigative practice.
The Bremen case retains its place in the poltergeist literature for two reasons. First, as a documented case of fraud uncovered after the fact, it serves as a methodological warning to subsequent investigators about the importance of controlled observation and continuous chain-of-custody for any object alleged to have moved anomalously. Second, the case raises the harder methodological question of how an investigator of Bender’s professional standing — who had operated as a parapsychologist for two decades and was attentive to the possibility of fraud — could have been deceived by an apprentice in his own laboratory. The Bremen case is taught in the European parapsychology curriculum as a warning rather than a confirmation.
Subsequent reanalysis of the Rosenheim case (1967), which Bender also declared genuine and which involved the secretary Annemarie Schaberl, has applied lessons from the Bremen confession but has not produced an analogous confession from Schaberl, who has consistently maintained the phenomena were real. The contrast between the two cases — Bremen confessed, Rosenheim contested — has structured the field’s discussion of focus-person poltergeists since the 1980s.
The Bremen case is now in the Hans Bender archive of the Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene, with the Schäfer confession documents preserved separately in the Bremen State Criminal Police Office records.
Documentation
- Hans Bender original investigation report, 1965
- Heinrich Scholz confession to Detective Director Herbert Schäfer, 1978
- Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene archives
- Bremen State Criminal Police Office records
- Witnesses: 6 named (porcelain shop staff plus Freiburg laboratory observers)