Paranormal Case Files: Germany: 19 Cases with a Paper Trail

On July 24, 1628, the mayor of Bamberg wrote to his daughter from a cell. The building he was locked up in had gone up the year before, with public money, while he held office.

The letter survives. It is in the same library and the same collection as the record in which he confessed to flying on a great black dog with wings, twelve shelfmark numbers apart.

This book brings together nineteen German cases of phenomena nobody has fully explained, and it has one condition of entry: that a file exists. A criminal investigation, a decree of the Holy Office, the report two engineers from the electricity company wrote after five weeks measuring the current in a lawyer’s office.

Of a White Lady you can write a blog post. Of a file you can write a book.

Every chapter also carries the boring explanation: the proven fraud, the nylon thread, the water table, the firing exercise. In some cases it wins outright. In others it does not, and there they still are.

The last case is solved, and it is at the end on purpose.