In 1797, reports of nocturnal knocking at a forester’s house in Tegel attracted the attention of Berlin investigators. Their account describes sounds they heard themselves, ordinary objects with which they reproduced the principal noises, and the practical difficulties that prevented them from catching whoever was responsible. Later, the episode became a more elaborate ghost story associated with a castle and with Goethe’s Faust.
The contemporary report supports a possible explanation by human agency. Its authors considered the matter resolved, but they did not identify a culprit, and their own protocol leaves some later door-knocking unexamined. Preserving those limits gives a more accurate account than either an unexplained supernatural mystery or a story of a trickster caught in the act.
The house and the first inquiry
The original article appeared in the Berlinische Blätter on 8 November 1797, pages 161–179. It places the disturbance in the service house of the senior forester Schulz at Tegel. It does not introduce the scene as a haunting of Schloss Tegel. The distinction matters because the later literary version changes both the setting and the range of phenomena.
On 12 September, von Burgsdorff brought an account of the noises to the Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde in Berlin. He said that he had heard them without discovering their origin. The account focused attention on a stone-paved corridor and an iron-clad chest. The noises reportedly occurred especially on moonlit nights, although not on every such night.
The investigators were sceptical before visiting. Their published introduction treats deception as the likely problem and explains their concern about the effect of ghost stories on public opinion. This is part of the source’s standpoint, not a reason to discard it. It means that their observations and their confidence in an interpretation should be considered separately.
A first party went to Tegel on 13 September. Arriving late, they inspected the arrangements by artificial light and waited in the room at the end of the corridor. After a low sound resembling distant wind came a heavy blow. Meierotto tried to reach the corridor immediately but was delayed by an unfamiliar door mechanism. When the party entered, everything was quiet. Sitting on the chest in darkness did not produce another episode.
The report therefore does not describe an observer watching an impossible action continuously. A noise was heard outside the occupied room, followed by a delay before the corridor could be inspected. That interval was central to the investigators’ eventual interpretation.
The second visit and its changed plan
Another visit followed on 2 October. The six names attached to its protocol are Cöler, Herbst, Karsten, Klaproth, Otto and Zöllner. They brought two attendants to watch outside and intended to make more effective arrangements for detecting the source. On the way, however, they learned that their arrival was expected. They consequently decided initially to listen and examine the character of the sounds.
This change is a useful detail. The published account was not a claim that an unexpected, fully controlled inspection had eliminated every ordinary opportunity. The party knew that anyone making the disturbance might know of the visit. The household also said that the noises could stop if someone moved into the corridor too soon.
The October protocol records a sequence beginning around a quarter past ten: hollow sounds, apparent tapping or striking on the paving, a rustling noise and a stronger blow apparently involving the iron covering of the chest. Five observers then went into the dark corridor and occupied its exits, the loft access and the stairway. The sound changed to knocks attributed to particular doors elsewhere in the house.
After a period of silence, the party brought light and looked where the circumstances permitted. They found nobody. On the chest, however, lay a garden line wound around a wooden crosspiece, with an attached peg. Two observers said they had inspected the chest on entering and had not seen it there; others had not been able to examine it properly because the light was inadequate.
Reproducing the noises
Tests with the garden-line equipment reproduced the tapping, striking and rustling previously heard from the waiting room. Moving the unwound line over the chest’s lid supplied the apparent paper-like rustle. A damp thumb on a door reproduced the hollow vibration, including the associated trembling of the window. These were demonstrations of ordinary ways to obtain the sounds, not merely suggestions that something ordinary might exist.
The authors inferred that the equipment had been left when the noise-maker was interrupted. They regarded the match between the original and reproduced sounds as decisive against a ghostly origin. The discovered object and the successful demonstrations are reported observations; the account of someone abandoning a tool while escaping remains their reconstruction.
The protocol makes another qualification that brief summaries can lose. The later knocking at doors was not fully investigated from inside the relevant parts of the house. Attendants outside had heard it but seen nobody. The authors said that circumstances prevented the internal examination. Their later commentary suggested more than one person might have been involved, but did not document the participants or their actions.
That distinction places a sensible boundary around the result. Reproducing a principal sequence is strong evidence that its sound does not require an extraordinary source. It does not provide the missing observation of who made it on the earlier occasion, nor independently identify the cause of each separate noise in an extended series.
What was, and was not, established
The investigators excluded Schulz and the other men who had been in the room with them as makers of the initial sounds. They suspected someone familiar with the house, possibly an inhabitant or someone entering from the yard. Among their reasons was the behaviour of dogs that seemed undisturbed or appeared to want to follow a familiar person. This was circumstantial reasoning, not an identification. The article supplies no confession and records no culprit being seized.
It also explains why a quick interception was difficult. The doorway was crowded, opened slowly and obstructed the view into the corridor as it swung. The authors thought that a person who knew the building could have withdrawn before they saw him. Such an escape was possible within their account; it was not an event they directly witnessed.
A rumour that the disturbance had continued for five years received a further qualification. People in the house distinguished a longstanding reputation from the current kind of noise, which they said had been heard only for a couple of months. The verified visits belong to 1797. The older rumour does not justify inventing a precise incident span beginning five years earlier.
From investigation to legend
Bechstein’s later Deutsches Sagenbuch version, reviewed here in a 1930 edition, opens with a reference to Faust and places the ghost in a hunting lodge or castle. It adds hot stones, whip-like sounds, interference with fire and food, and visible apparitions of changing appearance. Its closing jokes concern Nicolai and the possibility of banishing the spirit into a lake or a critical journal.
This is evidence of the story’s literary afterlife, not a new eyewitness record of the 1797 investigation. The added apparition claims should not be silently inserted into the signed protocol. Equally, the investigators’ sound experiments do not amount to tests of every later folkloric embellishment. The two texts answer different historical questions: what the visiting party reported, and what a later collection made of the story.
Assessment and location
The outcome remains possibly explained: the contemporary investigators demonstrated ordinary reproductions and argued for human action, while leaving the maker unidentified and some door-knocking incompletely examined. Their own confidence is stated openly, alongside the documented limits that prevent a claim of a complete, witnessed reconstruction.
The approximate map reference is 52.583, 13.283, rounded from sourced Tegel locality coordinates. It represents the broad Berlin-Tegel area, not the former forester’s room, a private address or a castle entrance. No access to the historical domestic setting is asserted.
The photograph shows modern waterfront buildings at Tegel’s Humboldt Island in October 2015. It supplies locality context and does not depict the 1797 house or demonstrate where the noises occurred. The castle in the later literary version is not offered here as a verified haunted visitor venue.
Sources and further reading
Th. Voekler, 23 October 2015: exact Tegel waterfront photograph and CC BY-SA 3.0 rights