Chopper (ghost)

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The Chopper case ranks among the best-known German poltergeist incident in the post-war history of Bavaria. It began in the spring of 1981 with mysterious telephone calls to the dental practice of Kurt Bachseitz in the small town of Neutraubling near Regensburg, and by the spring of 1982 had grown into a months-long media spectacle that attracted attention nationwide and abroad. After extensive technical investigations by the German Federal Post Office, as well as initial police inquiries into the calls, had failed to produce a conclusive result, the case took a new turn: the mysterious voice, now calling itself "Chopper/Tschopperl," no longer confined itself to the telephone but now also seemed to make itself heard freely in the room – whereupon the media began to take notice of the case. At this stage, the Freiburg parapsychologist Hans Bender became involved at the request of the criminal police and the media; he was director of the Freiburg Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene (IGPP), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). This development, in a sense, lent the case a certain scholarly cachet and drew still greater attention to it. In March 1982 the public prosecutor's office and the police declared the case solved: on the basis of partial confessions by those involved – confessions that were, however, riddled with numerous contradictions and inconsistencies – the investigators stated that the entire affair had been a hoax staged in its entirety by Bachseitz, his wife, and the dental assistant Claudia Judenmann. What remained unresolved, however, was the point at which the deception had actually begun, and whether the mysterious calls dating back to 1981 had already formed part of the staged affair. All three of those involved were ultimately sentenced to substantial fines.