by Hans Holzer
Between November 12, 1960, and August 20, 1961, no less than 104 separate entries were made by him in his “diary of a poltergeist.” They were brief, to the point, and without any attempt at a rational explanation. That he left for others to ponder over. His first entry dates from November 12, 1960:
November 12, 6 p.m. The large metal milk can has moved 3 yards to the west. At the same time, stones are thrown against the window—no one there.
November 13, 6 p.m. The milk container with 18 liter milk in it has disappeared. We find it again at a far corner of the stables.
November 14, 6 p.m. Neighbor Eichenberger’s umbrella stand disappears and the scraper, usually at the staircase, is found outside against the wall.
Same day, half an hour later. Two boots disappear from the stables and are later found in the feeding area behind the potato rack. Mrs. Eichenberger, the neighbor, brings our pig bucket which she found in the cellar next to their umbrella stand! My wife had fed the pigs barely ten minutes before and left the pig bucket in the stables. How did it get to the cellar?
Every day now, something disappears, moves from its accustomed spot and reappears at a strange place. Such things as milking accessories, very necessary in the daily work of a farmer, are not where they should be and this interrupts the normal life on the farm.
Two bicycles are suddenly without air in their tires. Another inconvenience, since the Swiss use bikes extensively. Most of these events take place around 6 or 7 P.M. Leuthold examined all possibilities of pranksters. His own family and household were always accounted for at the critical times. The village is small and strangers lurking about could not escape attention, certainly not that often.
As I carefully examined the written notes of poltergeistic or other uncanny activities in the Leuthold house, I realized that it was certainly worth looking into. Consequently, I telephoned the farmer and we arranged for a visit the following afternoon. The Swiss television network had evinced great interest in my work, although they had never heard of the Maschwanden case, or, for that matter of any other psychic investigation. It took an American to bring the entire area to their attention and reluctantly Jacob Fischer, the production head, agreed to send a crew with me.
“But we won’t pay for this, you understand,” he added with careful Swiss frugality.
The next afternoon, my wife and I joined two news-reel reporters, one handling the camera and the other the sound equipment, in a station wagon. We rode along the outskirts of Zurich, over a couple of hills and out into the open country to the west of the city. It took us more than an hour to get to Maschwanden, a village very few people, especially Americans, ever visit. When we reached the Leuthold farmhouse, we were expected. While the television people started to set up their equipment, I lost no time asking Paul Leuthold about the most memorable incident in the haunting of his house.
“My wife and I were inside the house. Suddenly, there was a knock at the door which sounded as if it was made by a hard object. My wife was in the kitchen. She left her work and went to look outside. There was no one outside. Shortly after, there was another knock. The maid was downstairs in her room and she didn’t see anyone either. My wife went back to her work. Soon there was a third set of knocks. This time, she was alerted and kept close to the door. As soon as she heard the knocking, she jumped outside.”
“Did she see anything or anyone?” I asked.
“She saw a piece of wood, about a yard in length, hitting the ground from a height of about a foot.”
“You mean a piece of wood moving through the air by itself?”
“Yes. The wooden stick was there in the air, all by itself. Nobody could have thrown it and run away. It was plain daylight, too.”
I examined the wooden stick. It was a heavy piece of wood, weighing perhaps half a pound.
“How did the whole thing get started, Mr. Leuthold?” I asked, and he brought his diary and showed me an entry:
November 18, 5:15 p.m. The cover of the milk can is found inside the barn, on the grassy floor. Fifteen minutes earlier I had left it in place in the stable.
“The next day,” he added, “the cover was again found in the ash can.”
“Charming,” I said. “May I see the book?”
The entries followed each other in the orderly, clinical manner of a medical history. Only, the patient was invisible.
November 19, 5 a.m. I plug in the motor of the cider press and leave it to do my milking chores. Suddenly, there is a singe boot in the middle of the barn. The milking pail floats in the water trough. I decide to check on the cider press. I hear the motor sputtering as I reach the cellar. I find the plug pulled out and the cable pulled back about four yards.
That day was a particularly busy one for the ghost. At 7:30 A.M. Leuthold finished his first meal and returned to the stables.
I turn the light on and fetch a container full of unthrashed corn, which I place inside the barn, in front of the door leading to the stables. Elfi, the maid, is busy washing milking equipment at a considerable distance in the feed kitchen. I leave for a moment to go to the bathroom, when I return, I find the light turned out and the container of unthrashed corn gone. I find it upside down, in the middle of the barn, and next to it, a broom, which had not been there before either.
But that wasn’t the end of it by a long shot, that busy morning. Half an hour later Mrs. Leuthold appeared in the barn and asked where his watch was.
“Where it always is,” Leuthold replied, somewhat cross, “on the window latch where I always hang it when I clean the cattle.”
Not so, his wife replied, and dangled the watch and chain before his eyes. She had just found them in front of the stables on top of a milk can.
That very evening one of their cows was due to give birth. Consequently it was necessary to have all the help available present for the occasion. But the poltergeist was among them.
9 p.m. The following are present to help with the birth: schoolteacher Strickler, Max Studer junior, Werner Siedler, my wife, Elfi the maid, my son Paul and myself are in the stables. The spout of the milking machine disappears under our eyes! We search and finally find it tucked away in the aluminum shelf that holds the rubber nipples. My wife sends Elfi to lock the house while we are all over here. The maid returns, the key is gone. Later we find it on the window sill outside. We had left it in the lock on the inside.
By midnight it was all over. The calf had come and the Leutholds went to bed. But the uncanny phenomena did not cease. From the direction of the pigsty there was a loud whistling sound. It changed direction from time to time. There are people in front of the house still up, who hear it too. Elfi, the maid, complains about the noises. The moment she is out of the house, the whistling stops. By 2 A.M., all is finally quiet.
I asked Mr. Leuthold to show me the ash can in which the milk bottle cover was found and the potato bin where it showed up next. The lid of the potato bin weighs perhaps twenty pounds. Anyone placing the aluminum cover of the milk can inside it must have had considerable strength. Two people had to pull it to open it.
All was quiet now for a few days. Then the mysterious events started up again.
December 1, 6:30 p.m. I open the door to the stables to do my milking chores. Everything is normal. My wife arrives a few moments later and opens the same door. This time a hay fork is leaning against it from the outside. “Where is the plate for the cat?” my wife wants to know. “Next to the milk can, as always,” I reply. It isn’t. My wife finds the plate on top of the refuse. The light goes on and off by itself.
Flickering lights going on and off by their own volition are old stuff with hauntings. In the Rockland County Ghost case in Ghost Hunter I reported similar happenings which drove to distraction a certain Broadway composer then guesting at the Danton Walker home.
Evidently, the Swiss ghost had discovered the usefulness of the lights in the stables, for a series of incidents involving the electric installations now followed.
December 2, 5:1
5 a.m. The light goes out by itself for a short time. The plate for the cat disappears again and is discovered on top of the refuse, like yesterday. I put it back on the refuse. Suddenly, the light goes on by itself in the barn. There is no one there who could have turned it on.
That day turned out rather significantly for the Leutholds, since it brought the first visual phenomena to their tranquil midst. The incident with the knocks at the door and the subsequent discovery by Mrs. Leuthold of the stick of wood suspended in the air, described earlier, took place that day around 10:15 A.M.
Saturdays are usually quiet periods in the small towns and villages of Switzerland. But not this time. Leuthold’s diary continues:
December 3, 7:35 a.m. Suddenly the light in the barn goes on. I go to check on it and notice that the light is also on in the hayloft. I turn out both lights and go to the stables. Just then, I clearly hear knocking in the hayloft. I go up to look, but there is nobody there. Since it is getting lighter outside, I turn off the light in the stables, but suddenly it is on again. I am busy distributing the fertilizer. I go inside, turn the light off again. Shortly afterwards it is burning once more. Werner Frei, a tractor driver, was passing by at that time. He saw the light. There was, of course, nobody about who could have done it.
December 4, 8 a.m. The lights go on by themselves in the barn. Elfi is in front of the stables and asks if everything is quiet. It is now 8:30. I reply, in jest, “The ghost is gone.” Within seconds, the light is on again in the stables, although no one could have gotten in to do it.
At one time, four lights were burning simultaneously although no human agency could be held accountable for it. For weeks on end the Leutholds were harassed by the poltergeist’s game of turning the lights on.
“Finally I said one day,” Leuthold explained, “it is strange that the lights should only go on, but never off by themselves. I had hardly finished when I stood in total darkness in the stables—the light had been turned off.”
“As if the ghost were listening?” I said.
Leuthold nodded and smiled somewhat sheepishly. “But it really got worse later in the week,” he said, and showed me the entry for the eighth of December.
December 8, 7:40 a.m. Elfi goes to feed the chickens, but the pot containing the chicken feed is gone. She finally finds it in front of the barn door. Six pumpkins, used for decorative purposes, are scattered around the yard. The rabbit hutch is open and two rabbits are running around outside. The feed tray for the rabbits has disappeared. It is later discovered by my wife on a cart in the carriage house.
Evidently, the ghost had it in for the domestic animals as well as the people. The following day, matters got even worse.
December 9, 7:30 a.m. The pot with the chicken feed is gone again. The plate for the cat is again on top of the refuse heap. Elfi prepares new chicken feed in another pot, puts it down for a moment on the stairs and goes into the kitchen. When she gets back just seconds later, the new chicken feed is also gone. She comes to tell me about it. I go back with her and find the chicken feed hidden behind the stairs, covered with a burlap bag.
The Leutholds were beginning to get furious. Mrs. Leuthold decided to trap the furtive ghost. She put the chicken-feed pot onto the window sill near the house door, and tied a nylon string to it, with a small bell at the other end, putting it down in the corridor leading away from the entrance door. That way they thought they would hear any movements the pot might make.
By 9:30 A.M. the pot had moved twice in both directions, yet no human agency could be discovered!
That very afternoon the poltergeist played a new kind of trick on them. When Mrs. Leuthold entered the barn around 2 P.M., she found all sorts of boots scattered around, and in one of them four receipts for cattle, which Mr. Leuthold distinctly remembered to have placed high on a shelf that very morning. The ghost stepped up its activities in the following days, it seems. Not content with moving objects when nobody was looking, it now moved them in the presence of people.
December 10, 9:30 a.m. The light goes on by itself in the hayloft. The missing pot for chicken feed is finally found near the door of the old stables. 6:30 P.M. the light goes on in the barn, nobody is there. I put it out just as Elfi enters and tells me the milking brush is gone. We look everywhere, without success. Just then I notice the umbrella which is usually found in front of the house door hanging from the window sill of the pigsty! Elfi takes it down and replaces it next to the entrance door of the house, and we continue our search for the milking brush. Suddenly, the umbrella lies in front of us on the ground near the old stables! Three times the lights in the barn go on and I have to put them out. There is, of course, nobody in there at the time.
Whatever happened to the missing milking brush, you’ll wonder. The next morning, a Sunday too, Mrs. Leuthold was doing her chore of feeding the pigs. In one of the feed bags she felt something hard and firm that did not feel like pig’s feed. You guessed it. It was the milking brush. The Leutholds were glad to have their brush back, but their joy was marred by the disappearance of the chicken-feed pot. If it wasn’t the pigs, it was the chickens the ghost had it in for!
“I remember that morning well,” Mr. Leuthold said grimly. “I was standing in the stables around quarter to eight, when the light went out and on again and a moment later something knocked loudly in the hayloft, while at the same moment the light went on in the barn! I didn’t know where to run first to check.”
Those who suspected the somewhat simple maid, Elfi, to be causing these pranks did not realize that she was certainly not consciously contributing to them. She herself was the victim along with others in the house.
On the 12th of December, for instance, she put the milk cart into a corner of the barn where it usually stood. A few minutes later, however, she found it in front of the chicken house.
That same day, Paul Leuthold again came to grips with the ghost. “It was 9:15 in the morning and I walked up the stairs. Suddenly the window banged shut in the fruit-storage room ahead of me. There was no draft, no movement of air whatsoever.”
“Your wife mentioned something about the disappearing applesauce,” I said. “This sounds intriguing. What happened?”
“On December 13th,” Leuthold replied, refreshing his memory from his diary, “my wife put a dish of hot applesauce on the window sill next to the house door, to cool it off. I came home from the fields around 4:30 in the afternoon and to my amazement saw a dish of applesauce on the sill of the old stable, across the yard from the house. I went to the kitchen and asked Elfi where they had put the applesauce. ‘Why, on the kitchen window, of course.’ Silently I showed her where it now was. Shaking her head, she took it and put it back on the kitchen window sill. A few minutes later, we checked to see if it was still there. It was, but had moved about a foot away from the spot where we had placed it.”
That, however, was only the beginning. All day long “things” kept happening. Parts of the milking machine disappeared and reappeared in odd places. Lights went on and off seemingly without human hands touching the switches. These switches incidentally are large, black porcelain light switches mounted at shoulder height on the walls of the buildings, and there is no other way of turning lights on or off individually.
At 7:45 P.M., dinner time, the entire family and servants were in the main room of the house. The barns and other buildings were securely locked. Suddenly, the lights in the barn and chicken house went on by themselves. The following morning, auditory phenomena joined the long list of uncanny happenings.
December 14, 6:50 a.m. As I leave the chicken house I clearly hear a bell, striking and lingering on for about half a minute, coming from the direction of the other barn. But, of course, there was no bell there.
“This is going too far,” Mrs. Leuthold remarked to her husband. “We’ve got to do something about this.”
She took the chicken-feed pot and placed it again on the stairs from where it had disappeared some days before. Then she tied a nylon string to the
pot, with a small bell on the other end; the string she placed inside the corridor leading to the door and almost but not quite closed the door. In this manner the string could be moved freely should anyone pull on it.
The family then ate their breakfast. After ten minutes, they checked on the string. It had been pulled outside by at least a foot and was cut or torn about two inches from the pot. The pot itself stood one step below the one on which Mrs. Leuthold had placed it!
Once in a while the ghost was obliging: that same day, around 8 A.M., Elfi, the maid, took a lumber bucket to fetch some wood. As she crossed by the rabbit hutch, lights went on in the cellar, the hayloft and the chicken house. Quickly Elfi put the bucket down to investigate. When she returned to pick it up again, it was gone. It was standing in front of the wood pile, some distance away—where it was needed!
Daughter Elizabeth also had her share of experiences, Leuthold reports:
December 14, 5:30 p.m. Elizabeth is busy upstairs in the house. She hears something hit the ground outside. Immediately she runs downstairs to find the six ornamental pumpkins scattered around the yard, all the way to the pigsty. When she left the house again an hour later, she found that somehow the carpet beater and brush had found their way from inside the house to be hung on the outside of the door!
And so it went. Every day something else moved about. The chicken-feed pot, or the boots, or the milk can. The lights kept going on and off merrily. Something or someone knocks at the door, yet there is never anyone outside. Nobody can knock and run out of sight—the yard between house and barn and the village street can easily be checked for human visitors. The milk cart disappears and reappears. The washroom window is taken off its hinges and thrown on the floor. The manure rake moves from the front of the barn to the inside of the washroom. The pigsty gate is opened by unseen hands and the pigs promenade around the chicken house. Lights keep going on and off. Even Christmas did not halt the goings on.
