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. Six 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 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.
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.
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).
- Numerous Walter von Lucadou lectures on YouTube (events from Telepolis, GfG, universities and private organisers).