For years, the old Joller House that used to be in Stans was plagued by a poltergeist-like haunting that drove an entire family out of the city? What really happened within the walls where the knocking and scratching of the walls seemed to come from the other side?
Tucked away in the Swiss town of Stans, in the canton of Nidwalden, once stood an ordinary-looking residence with an extraordinary, and deeply unsettling, secret. Known today as the Joller House poltergeist, this case remains one of Switzerland’s earliest documented hauntings and one of its most mysterious ones.
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For a brief, terrifying period in the mid-19th century, the Joller House was the scene of violent, unexplained phenomena that left an entire community shaken and drove an entire family out. What happened in this house said to be haunted by a poltergeist?
The Joller Family Backstory
The central figure in this grim account was Melchior Joller (1818-1865), a seemingly respected lawyer and Nidwalden official and state archivist, known for his rationality and standing in the local government pushing for a liberal politic. He was a son of Jokob Joller, a farmer and Catholic churchwarden.
Although he is remembered as a stand up person in society, he wasn’t the most successful. He had served a single three-year term as a backbencher in the National Suisse and had run for office in Nidwalden, but was never elected. His liberal newspaper got him in trouble with the Catholic clergy. He also wrote a pamphlet Darstellung selbsterlebter mystischer Erscheinungen (Narrative of personally experienced strange phenomena) where he detailed strange things happening in his house.
In November 1842, he married Karoline Wenz and they had seven children together. The house in question was Joller’s childhood home, built by his grandmother, and he had lived there all of his life except for his years at university, and co-owned it with a sister or sisters. In 1845, he took over the house and farm that his grandmother had built. And his grandmother was no other than Veronika Gut.
Veronika Gut and her Lasting Presence in Stans
Melchior Joller has been remembered for the ghost story happening in his home, but his grandmother was remembered for her life. She was born in 1757 in Stans and was a fierce supporter for the Nidwalden resistance and Swiss cause against the French Helvetic Republic. In 1798 she was already a widow with six children, living on a farm in Spichermatt in Stans. When the conflict escalated to an invasion, she donated 600 guilders to the war chest.
After the invasion she was arrested and tried as a rebel and fined. She was also sentenced to stand in front of the local church every Sunday with a note saying: “Liar and Disturber of Peace.” She was ordered to wear a black cape for a year, a humiliating thing as respectable women wore white. But she wore it with so much pride that she was told to remove it.
The previous house had been burned down when the French invaded in September 1798. Her 17 year old son, Leonz Joller died in battle as well. In her new house in Nägeligasse in Stans, she established a patriotic party in 1813 after Napoleon lost and held secret meetings in the evenings. Although she remarried to Melchior Odermatt, she was always known by her maiden name.
Her life was filled with opinions, personal tragedies and political resistance. According to some rumors, it was also said that her spirit lingered in the house she built, and that she would come back in her afterlife with as much force that she had when alive.
The Haunting Starts in the Joller House
In 1860, Joller then 42, his wife, and their children lived in a seemingly pleasant home in Stans he had inherited from his parents, close to Lake Lucerne, unaware of the terror that would soon unfold. They had four sons, Robert (1843), Eduard (1851), Oskar (1853) and Alfred (1858) and their three daughters Emaline (1845), Melanie (1848) and Henrika (1850).
They also lived with their servants who according to Joller, were the first to notice strange things happening in the Joller House. Sleeping on the third floor in the attic, she started to hear a knocking on her bed head during the night in fall in 1860. She told Joller about it, thinking it meant someone in the house was about to die.
Joller told to shut up about these things and forgot about it until another experience a few weeks later. A knocking noise also woke up Karoline and their second daughter, Melanie, who shared a bedroom when Joller was away from home on a business trip. According to them, it was as if the knocking was trying to communicate with them and they became frightened. Then a year passed and they thought nothing of it anymore.
In June 1861, nine year old Oscar was nowhere to be found when they called for supper, and they searched for him, finding him unconscious in a room on the third floor they used to store logs. When he woke up, he claimed to have heard three knocks and went to check it out. A door flung open and a formless white shape entered and he passed out.
The following days, the boys sleeping in the bedroom on the second floor above the living room, started complaining about knocking noises. It seemed to come from the floor above them. When they told their father, he even heard something sounding like scratching on the walls, but thought it had to be a cat or a rat making the sound. In his memoir Joller also adds the detail that he had heard this noise many times before in his study, perhaps for the past two years.
That autumn, a maid said she had seen grey shapes appearing and that someone was coming up the stairs at night, walking right past her and into a living room when she was cleaning shoes on the stairs. She had also several times heard her name being called out by no one. Once she also heard something she described as “profoundly disturbing sobs.”
The maid’s stories angered Joller and Karoline told her to not talk about these things to the children, thinking she was too superstitious. 11 year old Henrika even claimed to have seen a small child shortly after when she was doing schoolwork. This frightened her so much she refused to enter the living room.
Joller decided to fire the housemaid that had claimed to see and hear the strange things that October. In his writings he claims it was because they would be able to manage the household themselves, but who knows. Was he angry about her talking about seeing ghosts to his children? Did he try to get her to quit the job because of financial problems? He instead hired a 13 year old girl to replace her, and for a time, it seemed that this had solved the problem except from the odd scratching on the walls and mysterious knocking sounds here and there throughout the house.
The Haunted Summer at the Joller House
Again it came a winter of silence, but the summer of 1862, the paranormal activity hit full force. On 15 of August, Joller went to Lucerne with his wife and Robert at seven in the morning. They left the house and the rest of the children with the 14 year old Melanie and the 13 year old servant girl.
Henrika started to hear a rapping noise and told Melanie and the servant girl. They went to investigate. Oscar and Edward also came trying to coax the spirit to give them a sign. But the children became afraid and fled the house, sitting outside on the front steps.
When they went back in at lunchtime, hungry and rattled, every single cupboard and door had opened when they were outside. They shut them all, bolting what they could. But as soon as they had closed them, they sprung open, including the bolted ones.
A sound of heavy footsteps were heard and the children fled out the house again. As the servant girl looked behind her, she claimed she saw the shape that looked something like a hung sheet in the corner coming towards her before disappearing when she called out with their food they ate outside under a hazel tree. .
The children reached the barn where some laborers were working. They took turns running back to the house to see what was going on, and according to them, a lot was going on. The sound of moving furniture, a voice saying “even if no one is around”, in a sad and groaning voice. A voice singing to a single-tone string was playing Camille’s prayer in Zampa, from the Ferdinand Herold opera from the upstairs living room.
Frightened, they all gathered under a tree when an old woman passed by and asked if this was where Veronika Gut had lived. The children confirmed, and the woman, claiming she had known her when she was alive started to tell them about the tragic story that happened generations ago.
The Story of the Drowned Girls
Three years after the house had burned down, Veronika had heard a mysterious voice, telling her to flee with her family because the French had invaded again in 1801. The French had not actually invaded, but she decided to run away to Engelberg with her children.
Joller’s father was with them initially, but for some reason, they split up and he went to another place with a guide. At Wolfenschiessen there was a narrow footbridge of the Engelberger Aa river the daughters Agatha, Franziska, Josefa and Anna had to cross. Veronika crossed first, then her eldest daughter of 19 followed, then the rest. The bridge collapsed and although Veronika managed to jump to firm ground, all of her daughters fell into the river and drowned.
According to the old woman, she had been the one ringing the bell in St Joder’s chapel after the tragedy. That night they had seen a man dressed in white, carrying a lamp and coming to the chapel, the sign that the bell was about to toll. But when her brother had gone to check, he hadn’t seen anyone and it wasn’t until the morning that they heard about the terrible news.
The old woman continued on her way, and the children had to get back into the house for their next meal. When the maid was preparing for supper in the kitchen, a light was seen coming down the chimney in the evening. The maid explained the sight as an object of little blue flames, exploding inside of the chimney and dowsing the fire with water. This was the final straw and ran off to the annex where the mother found them crying and frightened to death.
When Joller came back home from Lucerne and heard the stories the frightened children told him, he didn’t believe a single word and the children lost faith in him and decided to not tell him anything else, as they thought that he wouldn’t believe them anyway. This would however change when he experienced the so-called haunting himself. Later he had also heard from a relative in Germany that their whole family had experienced something similar the same day.
Joller Starts to Believe Something is Going on
On August 19, he started to hear the rapping noise of the wall, taunting, almost mimicking the noises he made. This made him promise his family he would investigate the matter. The next day he saw the door between the bedroom and kitchen bend before his eyes as the sound of knocking and banging came back. When he raised the catch on the door, it flung open and he saw a dark and almost shapeless form moving from the door to the chimney and disappeared.
The next day he saw what he described as a force as “powerful as a wooden mallet might make when swung with all the strength of a powerful arm.” The doors were slammed and opened with this force, in the kitchen, bottles and other glassware were ringing as being hit by metal. The sounds coming from different parts of the house made it look like it had to be four, maybe five people. His wife and son claimed to have seen a figure and he himself saw something dark shooting from the door to the side of the chimney before disappearing.
He called on his older sister to ask about if she had ever experienced something similar growing up in the house. She claimed she had never heard anything about it. A priest came by and gave the house a blessing and advised him to not let anyone else know about what was happening there. When the priest left, the whole house started up violently all evening.
The gossip about what happened in the Joller house started to spread to the neighbors, claiming that they too could hear all the ruckus. They stopped outside on the road to listen for the noises. The press started writing about it, and Joller felt they were also attacking his character.
Then, on 23 August Joller, his wife and a servant were all touched on the head in a first-floor bedroom. It was like a hand, and when Joller and Caroline grabbed the hand it felt warm and small, like a child’s. By now they had police guards helping them, as they were starting to fear they might get hurt.
On the 16 of September, Joller saw an apple, jumping around and down the stairs, along the corridor and into the kitchen. When picked up and put on the kitchen table, it jumped off and headed for the corridor. It was thrown out of the window by one of the servants, but flew back to the kitchen table before continuing jumping around the house on its own.
On the 6 of October, five different people claimed to have seen a figure on four different occasions. It was described as a woman, bowing her head with a melancholic air about her. Melanie claimed it was the same figure she had encountered and seen on the 10 September.
A Tragic Aftermath
The strain of the haunting proved too much for Joller. Later that month the final straw was drawn for the Joller family. They packed up and left the Joller House forever and moved to Zurich where they rented. No one really knows what happened that made the family decide that enough was enough.
It is also worth noting that he had to appear in court three times on fraud charges together with Robert and they left a huge debt back in Stans. Some speculate that moving his family to Zurich and then to Rome was a financial move to get away from the debt.
In any case, the stress got to him, and contemporary sources claim that his hair turned white almost overnight in Zurich and had a “a peculiar dreamy look about his eyes” according to paranormal societies across Europe who picked up the case.
According to Joller who sold the Joller House to the Lussi family. The house was closed down until spring in 1863, and as far as he knew, nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the house.
A man named Emilio Servadio contacted Emaline in 1938 and interviewed her about the story, and she said that the poltergeist didn’t follow them to their new home. Her father died in 1865 in Rome where he had been hoping to see the pope, exiled and in poverty after he had been ridiculed by family and friends and lost his positions in Switzerland. He was only 47.
Explanations and Theories
As with many poltergeist cases, contemporary explanations struggled to make sense of the phenomena. Some suspected that one of the Joller children might be unconsciously causing the disturbances, a theory common to 19th-century poltergeist lore, which often linked such hauntings to pubescent or emotionally distressed young people.
Joller himself maintained that the disturbances were neither tricks nor delusions. His attempts to logically document and combat the events only added to the eerie credibility of the case.
Another theory about who was behind it all was Robert. He came under suspicion, particularly after he was seen talking to an actor in the street in Lucerne, and so did the servant girl. But things happened when neither was present. And for the motive? His family lost close to everything. For what reason would he have done it?
Another theory is Joller himself, driven by financial problems, started the poltergeist rumor himself to drive the price for the house he was about to lose down. A prank that went too far. The problem with this theory though, would he really have tormented his family and household to this extent? Also, to drive down the house price would also backfire when he had to sell it. Fact was, the family ended up suffering tragically from the whole ordeal.
The Spirit of Veronika Gut
But what about the tragedy of Veronika Gut? Could her spirit have something to do with the haunting as many posed as an explanation? Already having lost her eldest son when he was fighting the French, it was a huge family tragedy. Joller himself gave no notion in his sources that he believed this was the story behind the haunting.
There were however several theories that it was earthbound spirits that wanted attention from the family living in the house, and Veronika was one of the main suspects haunting the Joller House. According to this theory, she was in fact a militant nationalist and Joller’s liberal politics was the cause of her haunting and wanting to bring him on a more righteous path in her opinion.
There is also the theory about the haunting being because of how close in age Joller’s daughters started to be to Veronika’s daughters, and that this is what released the haunting.
This seems to be the holding theory of the family itself as well. When a documentary crew went to Rome to meet Riccardo Joller, Melchior’s great-grandson, he showed a spirit drawing og Veronika they had made.
Then there were the secret manuscripts allegedly existing and explaining the whole thing. An editor from Zurich told about her father and how he had talked with some of the great grandchildren of Joller. Apparently, Nicolao Joller, who was Alfred’s grandson, was in possession of a secret manuscript, detailing the exact reason of why the events of the Joller house had taken place. On the cover of the manuscript it read in the local Roman dialect: “for the family only.” But the actual contents of the manuscript were never published publicly, and there is no actual proof that it even exists.
The Suspicion of Teenage Daughters
One part of poltergeist’s hauntings, is the presence of teenage girls, in their early prepubescent. We see it from the Veronika case in Spain or the Enfield poltergeist in England from more modern times to the case of the Fox sisters in America starting the spiritual movement.
Exactly why do so many poltergeist stories have young girls in the midst of it? Some point to sexual exploitation or other dysfunctional dynamics within the household that would solve itself when they left Stans and started their independent lives outside of the family home. This theory is that the supposed poltergeist haunting is some sort of cry for help and is about unsolved trauma that the girls twist into a spiritual haunting to cope with their lives.
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The fact is that we simply don’t know what really happened those years inside of the Joller house.
Legacy of the Joller Poltergeist
Today, little remains to mark the site where terror once held sway. The Joller House in Stans was demolished on February 23 in 2010 and a high rise shopping center was built in its place opposite the Länderpark.
Whether the product of unresolved grief, repressed secrets, or something far older and more malevolent, the story of the Joller House poltergeist endures as one of Switzerland’s most unsettling ghostly mysteries — a chilling reminder that even in idyllic mountain towns, darkness can take hold.
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References:
https://archive.org/details/MelchiorJollerAndTheStansPoltergeist/page/n18/mode/1up
Stans (Switzerland) Poltergeist | Psi Encyclopedia
