Few works in German-language parapsychology are as systematic, sober and data-rich as the Steckbrief des Spuks (Wanted: The Poltergeist) by Gisela Huesmann and Friederike Schriever. The two researchers worked at the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) in Freiburg under Hans Bender, who shaped poltergeist research in the German-speaking world for decades. In 1989, they published a quantitative-statistical analysis of 253 poltergeist cases from the Freiburg institute archives covering the years 1947 to 1986 in the Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie (Vol. 31, No. 1/2, pp. 52–107). Their goal: to take the poltergeist out of the ghost-story niche and capture it purely phenomenologically and statistically. What happens when, how often, to whom, and for how long?
The Method
Huesmann and Schriever developed a purpose-built questionnaire to analyse all 253 cases in a standardised manner. Each case was coded according to the same criteria: type and frequency of reported phenomena, identifiability of a focal person, their age, gender and psychological profile, the family situation, the quality of witnesses, the duration of events and the quality of documentation by the IGPP team. The result is not a book of stories but an empirical fingerprint of the phenomenon.
The Statistical Fingerprint
Clear patterns emerged from the 253 cases. The numbers are sobering for anyone who believes in the Hollywood image of the poltergeist — and fascinating for anyone asking about the actual regularities:
- 91% acoustic phenomena — knocking, banging, footsteps, scratching. By far the most common feature. Poltergeist activity is above all something you hear.
- 70% object movements — the classic poltergeist effect. Objects move without apparent cause, fall from shelves, fly across the room.
- 29% electrical disturbances — lights switching on and off, phones ringing with no caller, fuses blowing.
- Under 10% apparitions — the appearance of a figure, the classic ghost. Contrary to popular belief, this is the rarest type.
Three further findings contradict common clichés:
- Poltergeist activity mostly occurs during the day, not at midnight.
- The locations are ordinary homes, not old castles or abandoned houses.
- The phenomenon is mundane. It is loud, annoying, destructive and frightening — but not mysterious in the romantic sense. There is no fog, no mystical atmosphere. It is more like someone taking the kitchen apart.
The Focal Person: Puberty as Key
In the majority of cases, a clearly identifiable focal person could be determined — a single individual in whose presence the phenomena occurred and with whose arrival or departure they began or ended. This was not new in itself; Hans Bender had already applied the focal-person concept in his case investigations, and William Roll had identified a focal person in 79% of his 116 international cases (1977). A famous case with phenomena bound to persons rather than to the place is the Stans poltergeist (1862), recorded by the rationalist lawyer Melchior Joller in his own home.
Huesmann and Schriever were able to sharpen the profile demographically for the first time. Focal persons were predominantly adolescents in puberty. And they found a gender-specific age difference: for girls, the average age was 11 years; for boys, 13 years. Both values fall within the phase of hormonal change — girls earlier than boys, which is exactly mirrored in the data.
The focal persons were almost never psychotic or mentally ill. On the contrary: they were often extremely adapted, inconspicuous and tended to massively internalise conflicts. They were not the loud rebels but the quiet swallowers — those who could not or were not allowed to put their anger, fear or frustration into words.
Anomalous Ballistics
One of the most astonishing results concerns the way objects moved through space. When a person throws an object or it falls from a shelf due to vibration, it follows the classical laws of Newtonian mechanics: parabolic trajectory, high initial velocity, gravity. The Freiburg files, however, documented entirely different flight paths:
- Abnormal speeds. Objects often started unnaturally slowly, almost hovering — or accelerated mid-flight, as if an invisible force were pushing them along.
- Curved flights. Objects flew around corners or changed direction in mid-air. For a merely thrown object, this is physically impossible.
- Soft landings. Heavy, fragile objects — porcelain cups, glasses, vases — flew across the room but landed feather-light on the floor without breaking. As if someone had placed them rather than thrown them.
These observations were not isolated incidents. They appear consistently in the files and match what Roll independently documented in American cases. The trajectories are one of the reasons why the hypothesis of secret throwing by the focal person alone cannot explain all cases: a teenager can throw an ashtray — but cannot make it fly around a corner or set it down gently after a parabolic arc.
The Occlusion Effect: The Shy Phenomenon
Huesmann and Schriever encountered a paradox that Hans Bender often referred to as the occlusion effect: the actual start of the movement almost always escaped the human eye.
Witnesses repeatedly reported seeing an object mid-flight or observing its arrival. But almost no one saw the exact moment when the object left its position. Whenever a camera was pointed at a particular object, nothing happened there — instead, an ashtray flew off the sideboard behind the cameraman's back.
For the fraud hypothesis, this is an obvious argument: what only happens when no one is looking is suspicious. Huesmann and Schriever analysed this pattern more deeply, however. They argued that the phenomenon originates in the unconscious of the focal person. Since waking consciousness — of both the focal person and the witnesses — stabilises physical reality, the psychokinetic discharge can only break through when attention is diverted. It is not deliberate fraud but a functional condition of the phenomenon itself.
Walter von Lucadou would later embed this finding theoretically in his Model of Pragmatic Information (MPI): as soon as a system tries to control or reproducibly capture the phenomenon, it evades. Lucadou calls this the decline effect — systematic non-reproducibility as a structural feature, not as a weakness of the evidence.
The Time Structure: Bell Curve and Self-Dissolution
Poltergeist activity is a short-term phenomenon. The majority of the 253 cases lasted less than three months. Only a tiny percentage extended over years. The intensity often followed a Gaussian bell curve: it began gradually, reached a dramatic peak after several weeks — the phase in which those affected typically contacted the IGPP — and then rapidly subsided.
This time course speaks strongly against the blanket fraud hypothesis. A teenager might secretly throw objects or knock on walls for three days to attract attention. But the Freiburg files show cases in which the effects occurred under continuous police and scientific surveillance — for weeks at constant intensity, until the psychological tension of the focal person subsided.
Lucadou later formalised the time structure in his MPI model as four phases: surprise, displacement, decline, suppression. The Huesmann-Schriever data are the empirical foundation on which this theoretical framework rests.
The Psychosomatic Family Profile
The study radically dispels the image of the malevolent poltergeist haunting a house. According to Huesmann and Schriever, poltergeist activity is not an external phenomenon acting upon a family — it is a systemic family dynamic that manifests physically. The authors dissected the psychosocial environment of the focal persons and found a consistent pattern:
- Families often exhibited a climate of extreme emotional suppression, strict authority or unspoken taboos.
- The focal person was not allowed to express their aggression, grief or frustration verbally. The conflict had no channel.
- The poltergeist functioned as an external psychosomatic symptom. What the adolescent was not allowed to say, the environment said for them — in the form of knocking walls, flying plates and blown fuses.
- When the focal person received therapeutic help or the family resolved the underlying conflict, the poltergeist activity stopped immediately.
This finding is the empirical basis for Bender's thesis that RSPK is not a visitation by spirits of the dead but an unconscious psychokinetic discharge by a living person under psychological high pressure. The poltergeist is not an attack from outside — it is a cry for help from within, using the physical environment as its medium.
Apports: Objects from Nowhere
In a small but solid subset of cases, the study records a phenomenon that goes beyond object movements: apports — the sudden appearance of objects in places where they demonstrably could not have been. Objects fell from the ceiling of closed rooms, appeared in drawers that had been verified as empty and locked shortly before, or seemingly materialised in mid-air.
In some of these cases, witnesses reported that the objects — stones, coins, small everyday items — were noticeably hot to the touch, as if their molecular structure had been energetically excited by the manifestation process. An observation that fits neither the fraud hypothesis nor any conventional physical model.
What Remains
The Steckbrief des Spuks is not a ghost story. It is a sober, data-saturated document that shows what happens when you don't retell 253 cases but measure them. The profile that Huesmann and Schriever distilled has been confirmed in the decades since: poltergeist activity is tied to a focal person, that focal person is usually an adolescent in an emotional extreme situation, the phenomena are physically anomalous, temporally limited and psychologically functional.
Walter von Lucadou, who founded the Freiburg counselling centre in 1989 — the same year the study was published — built his Model of Pragmatic Information on precisely these data. The four-phase progression, the occlusion effect, the decline — all of this has its empirical anchor in the files that Huesmann and Schriever worked through.
The study is among the least known and simultaneously best evidenced works in the field. It was published in the Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie — the journal that Bender himself had co-founded — and remained there in the academic niche. An English translation under the title Wanted: The Poltergeist appeared decades later. The data themselves have never received the attention they deserve.
Sources
- Huesmann, G., Schriever, F. (1989): Steckbrief des Spuks — Darstellung und Diskussion einer Sammlung von 54 RSPK-Berichten des Freiburger Instituts für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene aus den Jahren 1947–1986. Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie, 31/1–2, 52–107.
- Roll, W. G. (1977): Poltergeists. In: B. B. Wolman (ed.), Handbook of Parapsychology, Van Nostrand Reinhold.
- Gauld, A., Cornell, A. D. (1979): Poltergeists. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Lucadou, W. von, Zahradnik, F. (2004): Predictions of the Model of Pragmatic Information about RSPK. Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association.