Walter von Lucadou (b. 1945, physicist and psychologist) has been the head of the Parapsychological Counselling Service in Freiburg since the late 1980s and is the most important student and practical successor of Hans Bender. Unlike Bender, who became known above all for his public-academic presence, Lucadou has over the decades developed a quality that makes him unmistakable in the German-language media landscape: he tells cases. In TV appearances, lectures and his books Psyche und Chaos (1995) and Spuk! (2018), the same kinds of stories keep coming up – anonymised, because they come from his counselling practice, but unmistakable in their narrative pattern. Ten of them follow.
What comes in at the counselling service
The Freiburg counselling service, which Lucadou founded as an independent institution in 1989, offers free telephone and personal consultation to people who cannot cope with unusual experiences. Between two and four thousand calls and enquiries arrive per year – haunting experiences, precognitive dreams, voices, apparitions, "signs" from the deceased, technical anomalies around particular people. Lucadou and his small team take notes, ask follow-up questions, look for patterns, and visit on site when needed.
The following stories are drawn from his lectures, books and TV appearances over the past decades. They are, as is usual with counselling cases, anonymised; the narrative patterns however are Lucadou-typical and recur.
Haunting cases
The bowling alley that played itself at night
The tenant of a bowling-alley facility calls Freiburg. For weeks, at night, when the alley is long since locked and empty, the thing that should not happen has been happening: the fully automated pin-setting machines start by themselves. Motors run, set mechanisms clack, lights blink, the electronic score panel adds up scores – although no one is there. The maintenance technicians from the equipment company can find no technical fault. The tenant is slowly becoming desperate; the electricity bill alone is mounting.
Lucadou drives out, listens, looks around. Instead of looking for physical explanations of the electronic anomalies, he asks about the people: who is here regularly alone in the evening? It turns out that a young cleaning lady cleans the alley at night, completely on her own, in a life crisis she herself is not consciously aware of – but does not show to anyone. When Lucadou gently starts a conversation with her and she receives psychological support, the "haunting" at the bowling alley stops from one day to the next.
The operating-room monitors
A chief physician at a clinic turns to Lucadou. In one particular operating room at his hospital the high-tech monitors regularly go crazy: heart-rate displays flicker, ECG values jump wildly, the anaesthesia computer reports shifting, implausible readings. But: only when one particular, highly respected surgeon enters the room. The medical company's service technicians replace equipment, cables, screens. To no avail. The surgeon is desperate; he fears for his reputation.
Lucadou sits down with the surgeon. A short time earlier the surgeon had made a treatment error which had been benign for the patient but had not let go of him inwardly. He was highly competent and highly respected – but at the same time was panic-stricken about failing in exactly that way again. A connection between this internal pressure and the equipment cannot be "technically" proven. But when the psychological situation is relieved, the devices calm down.
Both cases belong in the same class as the most famous German haunting case of all: the law office in Rosenheim 1967/68, in which the 19-year-old apprentice Annemarie Schaberl was identified as the focus person – an investigation led by Lucadou's teacher Hans Bender (extensively in our Bender portrait). With Lucadou the pattern is always the same: young person + conflict + technical environment + violent phenomena + resolution as soon as the conflict is relieved.
The pictures that jumped off the wall
An elderly lady calls Freiburg in desperation. In her living room one framed ancestral painting and family photograph after another keeps falling off the walls. The eerie thing: the hooks stay firmly in the wall, the cords from which the pictures hang are not torn. It is as if an invisible hand simply lifts the pictures off the hook and drops them to the floor.
Lucadou drives out and examines the family dynamics. The lady has recently come to live under one roof with her grown-up daughter. The daughter has just gone through a divorce, feels herself a failure, and is constantly criticised in subtle ways by the dominant mother. The daughter swallows all the resentment so as not to provoke open argument. Once in counselling the conflict is named and the pressure cooker is let off, the pictures stop coming down. Lucadou likes to use this case to illustrate a central thesis of the Freiburg practice: poltergeist phenomena are almost always linked to suppressed, often intergenerational psychosocial tensions. The symbolism of the case – of all things the ancestor pictures fall – is not lost on Lucadou either.
The bed that caught fire on its own
A young couple gets in touch because unexplained fires keep breaking out in their flat. It begins harmlessly with smouldering towels in the bathroom and culminates in the bedclothes in the bedroom suddenly catching fire, although no one had been smoking and no one was in the room. The fire brigade is at a loss and already suspects arson by one of the partners.
Lucadou establishes during his investigation that the fires always happen in the vicinity of the woman's 14-year-old son from her first marriage. The boy is in the middle of an extremely rebellious puberty, feels pushed to the margins by the new stepfather, and suffers from massive, inarticulate fits of rage. Once the family accepts psychotherapeutic support and the boy is granted a place of his own within the new family structure, the fires stop. The case belongs to the rarer kind in which the phenomenology actually releases physical energy – heat, occasionally electrical discharges – and can therefore become dangerous. In such cases Lucadou stresses that responsible counselling always works in parallel with the fire brigade and, where necessary, with clinical psychologists.
The grandfather clock on the night of the death
A man calls the day after his father's death. The old grandfather clock that had belonged to his father – a massive piece with pendulum and chimes, defective for years and demonstrably beyond repair – had begun to strike in the night just past. Several times, at full volume. Afterwards it stood still again, exactly as defective as before. In the morning the call comes from the hospital: the father died in the night – at exactly the hour at which the grandfather clock had struck.
Such "dying signs" – stopped clocks that suddenly start running, or vice versa, pictures that fall, lamps that burn out at the same moment – are among the most frequent reasons people call the Freiburg counselling service. Over the decades Lucadou has recorded hundreds of such reports. The pattern is constant: close emotional bond between the dying person and the (often sleeping, unsuspecting) recipient; a single, clearly time-stamped event; no further phenomenon afterwards.
Precognitive dreams
The burning cradle
A young mother wakes in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. She has just dreamed that the cradle of her infant in the next room is on fire. The dream was not "just" a nightmare – it was so immediate that she felt the heat on her skin and thought she smelled smoke. She runs in panic into the next room. The baby is sleeping peacefully. But: the electric heat lamp above the cradle is humming suspiciously, the wires inside are already glowing red, the plastic casing is beginning to melt. A few minutes later the device would have burst into flames.
Lucadou tells this story regularly to draw attention to a feature of precognitive dreams that recurs in his data: precognitive dreams usually announce acute dangers concerning close attachment figures. They are rarely neutral. They typically have a protective function, and they come at a moment when intervention is still possible.
The car accident no one can explain
A woman in her forties describes in Freiburg a dream she could not let go of: she sees a country road, a sharp bend, a red sports car that loses control and goes into the ditch; the driver lies injured by the roadside. She does not know the driver, but she sees his face precisely.
Two days later she drives a road unfamiliar to her, which she has to take because of a family event. Suddenly a red sports car overtakes her. She recognises the bend from her dream. The car ahead of her loses control and overturns. When she gets out to help, she looks into the face of the injured man – the face she had seen two nights earlier in her dream.
Lucadou tells this case to illustrate a second feature of precognitive dreams often observed in his material: they often concern future self-perceptions, not abstract events. The woman did not see "the accident", she saw her own seeing of the accident. The dream is not the transmission of an event, but the anticipation of a later own experience. That is methodologically interesting, because it replaces an older idea of "telepathy across time" with a more subtle description.
The stranger's hand and the breakdown
A man dreams at night that he breaks down on a lonely country road in the middle of a forest. In the dream he gets out, opens the bonnet and stares at the engine helplessly – he knows nothing about cars. Suddenly an unfamiliar, tattooed hand appears out of nowhere, reaches with assurance for one particular blue cable, presses it firmly into place, and the engine runs again. The dream is so intense that he remembers the tattoo pattern exactly.
Three weeks later the man actually drives through a remote forested stretch. Sure enough the engine cuts out. He pulls over, gets out, opens the bonnet – exactly as in the dream – and stares helplessly at the engine. At that moment an old van pulls up behind him. A friendly mechanic gets out, says "let me have a look" – and as he reaches into the engine bay, the man sees the unmistakable tattoo on his forearm. The mechanic presses a loose blue ignition cable firmly into place, and the car starts again.
Lucadou tells this case because it makes vivid what he finds theoretically awkward about precognitive dreams: the dream supplies a concrete technical solution for which the man's waking rational mind has no basis whatsoever. The dreamer knows nothing about ignition cables and has never seen the mechanic he will meet weeks later. Yet the whole scenario is there in advance – including a detail (the tattoo) that has no practical function but a clear function for recognition at the moment of the actual encounter.
The dream of the missed flight
A businessman who flies extensively for work dreams, the night before an important Asia trip, that his alarm clock does not go off. In the dream he rushes drenched in sweat to the airport, sees the plane just taking off, and realises he has left his most important briefcase with the contracts at home. The dream feels so real that he wakes in panic. He checks his alarm clock at once – it is set correctly. The next morning everything goes to plan. He is already relieved: just an ordinary anxiety dream.
But at the airport there is total chaos: the flight is delayed six hours because of a technical fault in the engine. When he goes to use the waiting time to look at his papers, the blow strikes: the briefcase with the contracts is still standing in the hallway at home. He has time enough to take a taxi back and fetch it.
Lucadou tells this case to show a third feature of precognitive dreams: they do not always announce catastrophes. Often they are small, almost banal rescues of everyday life – and they reveal a peculiar structure of the sense of time. In the dream two events fuse that in reality are separate: the alarm failing (which does not occur) and the briefcase being forgotten (which does). The emotional substance – panic at the loss – is correctly anticipated; the causal details lie in a different order than the one that ends up actually occurring. Lucadou likes to use this as evidence that precognitive dreams are not little films from the future, but rather emotional approximations that consciousness then casts into a narrative form.
Aberfan 1966 – the most famous precognitive cluster
When Lucadou explains precognitive dreams he almost always comes round to a historical case far beyond his own material: the Welsh mining village of Aberfan. On the morning of 21 October 1966 a water-saturated coal tip slid down the hillside and buried Pantglas Junior School. 144 people died, of them 116 children.
The English psychiatrist Dr. John Barker travelled to Aberfan after the disaster and collected reports from people who had dreamt or sensed in advance what would happen. Over seventy such reports were recorded and where possible verified in time (people to whom the dreamer had told the dream before the event). The perhaps most moving case: nine-year-old Eryl Mai Jones, who on the morning of 21 October told her mother she had dreamed that "something black came down over the school"; she was not afraid to die. She died a few hours later in the slide. Barker published the case in 1967 in the Journal of the SPR; it gave rise to the British Premonitions Bureau.
For Lucadou, Aberfan is one of the methodologically most important historical arguments that precognitive dreams cluster before great events – a finding that has since recurred with 9/11, the 2004 tsunami and other disasters.
State funding cut – the court rules for the counselling service
For more than three decades the Freiburg counselling service was funded by the state of Baden-Württemberg through its sponsoring body, the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Parapsychologie (WGFP, Scientific Society for the Advancement of Parapsychology); most recently with around €83,000 per year. In spring 2019 an inter-ministerial working group recommended that the service be redirected toward counselling on sects and psycho-groups. Lucadou refused: enquiries about "new religious groups" had always made up only around two per cent of the practice, so the redirection would in effect have repurposed the service away from what it actually did. At the end of 2019 the Ministry of Culture discontinued the funding.
It did not end with the withdrawal. In March 2021 the state demanded that the bulk of the grants awarded for 2013–2019 be paid back – a total of €247,600 – on the grounds that the original funding purpose (sect counselling) had not been fulfilled and that the association had accumulated reserves. The WGFP sued at the Verwaltungsgericht Freiburg (Administrative Court Freiburg). On 3 July 2023 the court upheld the lawsuit in full and quashed all the repayment notices: the WGFP, the court found, had been entitled to rely in good faith on the once-awarded grants, especially since the money had long since been spent on operating costs. The ministry filed no appeal; the ruling has been legally binding since 3 October 2023.
What is remarkable about the whole affair is less the ruling – which was unambiguous on the merits – than the orders of magnitude involved. German research funding for the scientific investigation of unusual human experiences – a field in which Freiburg alone has gathered hundreds of thousands of case reports from the German-speaking countries over decades – is already only a fraction of what comparable clinical-psychological counselling services receive. Cutting this small grant and then demanding it back – while thousands of distressed callers continue to ring Freiburg every year – is a striking move even on the most sober reading. The counselling service has since operated largely on a voluntary basis, financed by donations.
The timing is not uninteresting. A few months earlier, in 2018, Etzel Cardeña's review article had appeared in American Psychologist – the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association – with the sober conclusion that the experimental evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines. Cardeña later said in public that, of his more than three hundred academic publications, this one paper was the most difficult to publish in his entire career. In spring 2019, in the very first year after this unusually visible re-emergence of the field in an APA journal, the inter-ministerial working group in Baden-Württemberg recommended that the Freiburg service be "reoriented". A direct causal link would be over-reading. But the pattern – not refutation, but a quiet institutional wind-down on grounds the administrative court later found legally untenable – fits into a longer story we have traced elsewhere: from the Witchcraft Act used against Helen Duncan in 1944, via the closure of the CIA Stargate program in 1995, to Cardeña's publication resistance in 2018. Not a plan, but a recurring picture.
What Lucadou does systematically
Lucadou is not a "ghost hunter". He sees himself as a psychologist and physicist who treats unusual experiences with the same methodological means as any other clinical-psychological material: listening, documenting, looking for patterns, normalising where possible, providing supportive counselling where the burden on those concerned demands it. His theoretical framework – the "Model of Pragmatic Information" – is here only marginally important. More important is the practical finding: unusual experiences occur regularly in German-speaking households, they appear in clearly recognisable patterns, and they are in most cases something a psychologist can accompany.
Lucadou thereby directly continues the work of Hans Bender, in a form that has shaped the public face of serious German-language psi research in the 21st century. Anyone who hears the stories told in a Lucadou lecture has, afterwards, a different relationship to the question: do such phenomena exist? The answer is always the same: they occur, and it is the task of science to take them seriously, not to explain them away.
Sources
- Walter von Lucadou: Psyche und Chaos. Theorien der Parapsychologie. Insel, Frankfurt 1995 (several editions).
- Walter von Lucadou: Spuk! Phänomene, die wir nicht erklären können. Komplett-Media, Grünwald 2018.
- Walter von Lucadou: Hans in Luck. The Currency of Evidence in Parapsychology. Journal of Parapsychology 70/1, 2006.
- Walter von Lucadou: The Model of Pragmatic Information (MPI). European Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. 11 (1995).
- John Barker: Premonitions of the Aberfan Disaster. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 44, 1967 – the original Aberfan collection.
- Parapsychological Counselling Service Freiburg – website and annual reports (parapsychologische-beratungsstelle.de).
- Stuttgarter Zeitung: "Parapsychologische Beratungsstelle: 'Geisterjäger' klagt erfolgreich gegen das Land", report on the ruling of the Administrative Court Freiburg of 3 July 2023 – annual grant approximately €80,000, withdrawal at the end of 2019.
- chilli Freiburg Stadtmagazin: "Geisterjäger geht vor Gericht: Parapsychologische Beratungsstelle soll 250.000 Euro zurückzahlen" – background to the reclaim of the WGFP funding 2013–2019.
- Grenzwissenschaft-Aktuell: "Verwaltungsgericht bestätigt Klage der Parapsychologischen Beratungsstelle gegen Ministerium für Kultus, Jugend und Sport von Baden-Württemberg" (October 2023) – ruling legally binding since 3 October 2023.
- Numerous Walter von Lucadou lectures on YouTube (events from Telepolis, GfG, universities and private organisers).