In my early 20s I was stationed in Germany and met what we nowadays refer to as “paranormal investigators.” Back then they were not called ghost hunters, but dungeon crawlers. My friend Pete Foster and I were very eager to join the group, and given the fact that I was good with an SLR camera and Pete had a background in construction, we were considered welcome additions. We visited every castle, manor, priory, cemetery, or abandoned church we could get permission to get into in Germany, France, and Switzerland. I learned a lot, and had a lot of funny experiences.
The one experience I found to be the funniest was a manor to the south of Nuremberg. We were told that a very wealthy old man had built the home, and in his decline and been bedridden with cancer and unable to take care of himself. He was frequently in pain and often screamed and moaned so loudly that the entire household could hear him. This drove away most of the family and staff and left him alone with his sister and one housekeeper. The story goes that he died in great agony during a thunderstorm, and since that time he was known to return to the house during any bad storm. The story was that his moans could once more be heard all over the house.
My little group was from Bamberg, and was known as the Geister Jagers. We didn’t charge anything for checking into things, but paid our own expenses to the locations we investigated. It got chuckles from the American citizens in the community, but the towns’ people took us pretty seriously.
It was because of this that we were contacted by the owner of the manor. This was the surviving sister who now lived in Nuremberg and not in the house itself.
I should say here that during the spring and early summer months in Nuremberg thunderstorms were fairly frequent. You can imagine that with these strange sounds coming every couple of days the sister was at her wits end. We agreed to come out during a weekend in early April to check things out.
We arrived about 6:00 PM and were met by the grounds keeper. We were let in and set up our “camp” of sorts in the main parlor. I think that everybody was pretty impressed. This was indeed a manor, and had the looks, style, and antiques to prove it.
We spent the greater part of the evening roaming through the house with candles, cameras with high speed film, and portable reel to reel recorders. We found nothing. We checked every floor and every room without event. We at last settled down to watching and listening in shifts. There were five of us, and over all we spent a very long and boring night.
The morning was no better. We breakfasted in the kitchen and cleaned up and patrolled the house again. Again we found nothing. We played back the recordings we had and heard nothing. We were beginning to think we had come all this way for nothing when one of the girls in the group announced that there was a storm coming.
We rushed to the window and looked out over the long view across the river and watched the dark clouds rolling in our direction. The wind was rising, and as we watched the lightning flashed over the trees. We didn’t have to be told to get into our positions.
I was stationed on one end of the hall on the third floor, and Pete was on the other. The two women were in the second floor hallway, and our group leader Marc was in the front entry way. We were all listening intently when we heard the first low moan.
It wasn’t clear at first, and it seemed to come and go in a crazy fashion. Then it would build, low and long and clear until the hair was standing on the back of my neck. Abruptly it fell away to nothing. We listened for several minutes, and nothing.
Thunder sounded right overhead and we all jumped. Right on the heels of the thunder came the moan. It was so loud the house seemed to vibrate. We began shouting to each other over the sound of it trying to locate the source. Mark was certain it was on the first floor, the girls were sure it was on the second, and Pete and I heard it clearly behind the door of the main bedroom on the third floor.
We pushed open the bedroom door to find it empty, but the moan was load and echoing on the high ceiling. We walked in, and as we approached the fireplace Pete got a strange look on his face. He broke into a wild laugh and turned around toward the back wall.
In Germany, many of the homes built with more than one floor have what we call skylights, but they usually open and allow access to the roof. Pete was pushing a chair below the skylight and grinning like a “jackass eatin’ saw briers.” Over the noise I shouted at him to ask what he was doing. “Back in a minute!” was all he answered.
The rest of the group clamored in as Pete was disappearing through the skylight. I explained what he had just told me, while the girls shouted for him to come back before he was struck by lightning. Through all of this the moaning had continued without stopping, and now suddenly stopped.
We heard Pete scrambling on the roof, and a moment later he was dropping back through the hole. “I got him!” he grinned. “Got what?” we chorused. He reached into his back pocket and produced a flippy beer bottle. We stared in disbelief and then all burst out laughing when Pete brought the bottle to his lips and blew across it to make a much softer version of the moan we had been hearing.
We eventually called the owner of the home and asked her to drive up to meet us. She arrived in about an hour and we all sat down to explain what we had been able to figure out.
In Germany the bricklayers union is a bit different from what we are used to. There, in the rural areas, they were allowed beer breaks two or three times a day. It is not an uncommon sight to see them sitting in the middle of their work and sipping a beer and enjoying a cigarette. The most common beers are those in the refillable “flippy” top bottles.
In America, we are used to the idea of the old fashioned Milk Man making early morning deliveries. In the rural areas from the 1940s to the late 1970s there were local beer distributors who would collect the flip top bottles every morning and leave fresh full bottles in time for the workers to pick them up as they headed off to work.
Pete had noticed that the sound of the moan rose and fell with the strength of the wind, and also figured out that he heard it loudest near the fireplace. The one thing none of us had noticed was that the fireplace in the bedroom shared a common chimney with the fireplaces on the first and second floor. That was true for the other 6 fireplaces in the home, but the moan only came from the center of the house.
Pete had scrambled out on the roof to and looked down into the chimney. There, neat as a pin, was a beer bottle shoved into the space where half a brick would be needed in the chimney lining. The top of the bottle had sat just below the top of the chimney. The rising wind had blown over the bottle and the chimney had amplified the sound throughout the house.
The funniest part of the story was that when we explained all this to the owner she had us put the bottle back where we found it. I think she felt that the idea of the manor without the ghost took away from the atmosphere and history of the home.
We left the bottle there, and to my knowledge it remains. We saw a great many things in other places and found some we could not explain, but this by far was one of our best outings.
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