What role does the Paranormal play in missing people and unexplained disappearances?

1722: ‘A curious & true diary about a ghost or poltergeist, which has shown his apish antics in such strange ways, by the ruining of windows, doors & furniture, & has shown finally his powers of strangulation!’

Vol.24 of the 1930’s American Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, featured a case of a farming family living in a small rural location of Sandfeldt in East Germany, in 1722.

It seems they became terrorized by what could only be described at the time as either a poltergeist or a ghost.

The Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology, of Freiburg, Germany, also looked into the relatively unknown case. Occurring at the Dutzow farmhouse, 27 witnesses, as Archived in the University Library of Hamburg, described the array of strange and disturbing incidents that took place.

The incidents took place in the farmhouse of Hans Jochim Dunckelmann. The report is written in the form of a diary by the farm administrator, Heinrich Georg HaeneIl. He had been given orders to make such a report by the head of the aristocratic farming estate of Dutzow, to which the farms and village of Sandfeld belonged to at the time. The order was made so as to document and investigate the curious occurrences at the farm. A total of twenty-seven witnesses were called during the investigation and their names given in the report.

There were the usual banging sounds at night, crashing of doors, smashing of kitchen crockery, fleeting black shadows, but what was most disturbing for the family at the time, was that an invisible entity seemed able to literally lift their children up in the air and leave them dangling, mid-air, or, even more baffling, it could make the children completely disappear.

The children would emerge, sometime later, in a completely different location on the farmland. The case was not based on folklore or made-up stories; it appears to have been researched and well-documented at the time. Witnesses who saw these incidents occur at first-hand, were documented, and these included not only the parents, but also farm workers and neighbours. No rational explanation for the disappearances of the children and their reappearances in the fields or woods, could be given.

Another incident described by the Society for Psychical Research occurred in the 1928, this time in the Poon district of India. It was recorded by a well-known historian of the time. The story revolves around events in the household of a Dr. Ketkar. The young sons of the Doctor were suffering from “poltergeist persecution” and being teleported.

In April of that year, the boy’s governess wrote a letter to her relatives describing what was taking place. She describes how she witnessed the youngest boy re-materializing in front of her very eyes, after he had disappeared some time earlier. She described how his body appeared to her, as though his posture seemed to indicate that he had been gripped tightly around the waist and carried off.

When he re-materialized in front of her, he appeared to be bent forward with both of his arms hanging up and away from his sides. The young boy himself would say that he felt as though, when these incidents occurred, he was being lifted up and transported by someone. Whoever or whatever it was, they were invisible….

These strange cases are featured in this video: What role does the paranormal play in Unexplained Disappearances and Missing People…?