[SPEAKER_00]: I want to take you all to the 1800s, Mudlingen, Rotemback, a farming village pressed against the edge of the Black Forest, 535 souls, most of them pour, most of them devout, all of them about to spend 2 years listening through their walls at night, waiting to hear it, start again.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not folklore.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not a story-sanded smooth by 200 years of retelling round a fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a documented case written up in careful exhausted long hand by the Managed Centre, a man who tried for the rest of his life to make sure nobody ever read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was corroborated in writing by a physician, a man, half a dozen sober village councilmen who all stood in the freezing dark of a bedroom and counted the blows themselves out loud so there could be no argument about it afterward.
[SPEAKER_00]: This has no film franchise, no best sell over the face on the cover, and most of you will have only once had a name before.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the preseason show for season 25 when our guests touched on this case, her name was Gottlieb and Dietis, and what took place over a two-year period nearly killed her, and the pastor who tried to save her life.
[SPEAKER_00]: We said episodes three, six and nine of this season would be a trilogy of lesser known, but still infamous cases that in my mind require more attention than they have.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the experience the pastor never wanted anyone to hear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 3 of Season 25.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the first of our 3, 6, 9 episodes while we take a look at a case which I think deserves more of a light shining it than it currently has and as mentioned the first case we will look at is one that was touched on by our guests from believing the bizarre.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now it should be pointed out and be blatantly clear that this episode does not have
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason for that's quite simple, obviously these events are documented, there are things such as paintings, there are also descriptions that have been written down, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: That we would like to include when we do a visual version of one of these historic events.
[SPEAKER_00]: And right now, we don't feel where at the right point in our video progression to do that in the dark paranormal way that we'd like.
[SPEAKER_00]: So our goal from we hit the next episode in this trilogy of Episode 6 is to make sure that these historic events do have a full visual representation.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for now, we're going old school, and we're going back to audio, which I think will serve this episode much better.
[SPEAKER_00]: A quick mention to say that links to both our Patreon and how you can submit your own story to the show or in the show notes below.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you join our Patreon, you join the most amazing paranormal community I genuinely have ever seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: You also can receive early ad-free episodes and also two episodes only for Patron each and every week of the year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even on the downtime between seasons, that's 104 episodes in addition to the standard ones that you get on this feed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's been going on for a while that's currently a back catalogue of over 240 hours worth of Patreon only paranormal submissions from our listeners that you can go and binge right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: The link for this is in the show notes or go to patreon.com forward slash the dark paranormal.
[SPEAKER_00]: But right now, lower the lights, make yourself comfortable and of course leave your disbelief at the door.
[SPEAKER_00]: As we hear all about, the muttlingan possession, a battle with Satan.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gottliebon was born in October 1815, one of five surviving children in a family that already buried far too many.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her parents didn't live to see her fully grown.
[SPEAKER_00]: What remained of the Dito's family, two brothers, three sisters, were held together through poverty the way families do when there's no other option.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gottlieb and herself had been sickly since childhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bondleg was shorter than the other, which made even the walk to Sunday service a small agony.
[SPEAKER_00]: she had a kidney disease that had already almost killed her once, and a string of strange half-spoken of afflictions that the village had quietly for years put down to cunning folk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Old curses passed hand to hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: She'd been the favourite pupil of the previous pastor, writing himd in a beautiful handwriting that was known as the best in the village.
[SPEAKER_00]: and she was, by nearly every account that survives, with drawn, difficult, proud in a way that made people uneasy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of person that a room doesn't really warm to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Keep that detail, because it's the reason the man who was about to spend two years fighting for her life didn't truly want to.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the spring of 1840, the five details siblings moved into a crumbling ground floor apartment on the edge of the village.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was close enough to the tree line that the wind would come straight in off the forest.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the very first night at the table, the eldest brother and Dreis said Grace.
[SPEAKER_00]: The words were nothing unusual, an invitation, that all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Come Lord Jesus, be our guest.
[SPEAKER_00]: God leave and drop to the floor, unconscious before the food was even served.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the first thing, but it would by no means be the last, nor by any measure, the worst.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, a followed the noise, banking, low in the walls of the bedroom.
[SPEAKER_00]: a shuffling in the sitting room that would stop the second anyone would investigate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thumping came through the kitchen wall, hard enough and late enough at night that the family living upstairs began pounding back, shouting for the deepest family to stop, not understanding there was no one down there to stop it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Alone, in bed, in the dark, God
[SPEAKER_00]: pulled together, forced palm to palm, forced into a position of prayer she had though saying, then she saw small lights, where there were no candles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tall gangly shadows would appear at the end of her bed, and when she would turn to look directly, they would disappear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody spoke of it outside of the house, but could they say, especially in a village like
[SPEAKER_00]: but they had nothing left to lose.
[SPEAKER_00]: The new pastor's name was Johann Christ of Blumhart.
[SPEAKER_00]: The 35-year-old was trained in Turbingen, was married the year before, and was shaped by a generation of German theology that had quietly but comfortably decided, the age of miracles ended with the apostles.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not want this.
[SPEAKER_00]: When God Liban first came to him in the autumn of 1841 to confess various things from her past, vague, frightened, unable to push shape to whatever this was, he found her unpleasant.
[SPEAKER_00]: She seemed to radiate a spiritual pride that he did not think was befitting of a woman and labeled it arrogance.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so after arriving at his negative conclusions about Gottlieb and he kept his distance.
[SPEAKER_00]: He kept his distance through December of 1841 when a facial infection nearly killed her outright.
[SPEAKER_00]: He kept his distance through a bleeding from her chest that no physician in the district could explain let alone stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: He kept his distance until April 1842, when the details family came to him in open desperation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because by now, the entire village could hear the banging through the two walls, there was no keeping a lid on this anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: What they told him that April was this, a figure had begun appearing to godly benet night.
[SPEAKER_00]: one whom Bloomhart himself had known personally.
[SPEAKER_00]: A woman who, on her deathbed, had confessed something to him she could find no peace with.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now she was back, carrying in the vision what looked like a dead infant, repeating over and over and over the same broken plea.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just want to find rest, give me a paper and I won't come back again."
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the house itself hidden in places that no one would think to look, the family began finding things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Asuk covered scrap of paper covered in cramped, deliberate writing, powders folded into paper packets, chalk, salt, small, brittle bones, later identified as belonging to birds.
[SPEAKER_00]: You would think this revelation that they were not human bones would have at least brought some comfort, but the idea they were bird bones, and knowing how curses and spells operated, it made the family feel worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: Coyens wrapped tight and tucked into gaps in floorboards, hidden the way you hide something you never want found.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet, here it was being found, as if left out intentionally.
[SPEAKER_00]: Blumhardt still did nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Spith, the ability to position, came to him in tears and said plainly that there seemed to be no unleft in woodling and willing to care for a soul in this much need.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even a traveling preacher pulled him aside on the road and said to him, without softening it, don't forget your duty.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, on the night of the 9th of June 1842, Blumheart did something no frightened family nor village rumour could have talked him into on their own.
[SPEAKER_00]: He organised a watch.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mer Krausha, a carpet manufacturer that Blumheart described in his own curfell words as a man known for his level-headedness, came along to the watch along with half a dozen village
[SPEAKER_00]: They took a position in and around the house from 10 o'clock at night in silence, just waiting.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they didn't wait long.
[SPEAKER_00]: Within three hours, they counted roughly 25 blows.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the creek of Old Timber settling, not wind, blows.
[SPEAKER_00]: blows hard enough to send a chair jumping across the floorboards on its own.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hard enough to rattle the window glass in its frame.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hard enough that sand would sift down out of the ceiling plaster onto the men below.
[SPEAKER_00]: Loud enough that neighbors are good distance away, safe in their own beds, came out of their houses, saying it sounded like new years firecrackers going off inside someone's walls.
[SPEAKER_00]: Six respected men of that village stood in a cold dark room and heard it happened with their own ears.
[SPEAKER_00]: After that night, Bloomhart could no longer comfort himself with nerves or grief, or a lonely woman inventing an audience.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something else was in that house.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And he knew.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was his job to face it.
[SPEAKER_00]: What followed him into the fight, by his own account, was something closer to anger than faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: One Sunday evening, he found Gottlieb and convulsing, spine arced backwards arms twisted rigid at unnatural angles, foam gathering at the corners of her mouth.
[SPEAKER_00]: He described himself feeling seized in that moment by a kind of wrath.
[SPEAKER_00]: A feeling he could only describe as, coming from somewhere entirely outside of himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: He crossed the room, took her cramped, locked hands in his own, and shouted directly into her ear, loud enough that it startled everyone else in the room,
[SPEAKER_00]: God, Liban, put your hands together and pray, Lord Jesus, help me.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have seen long enough what the devil can do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now let us see what the Lord Jesus can do.
[SPEAKER_00]: The convulsion stopped instantly.
[SPEAKER_00]: She opened up her eyes, turned her head and looked at him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then repeated the prayer back word for word.
[SPEAKER_00]: As if she had simply been waiting for permission.
[SPEAKER_00]: Blumhardt called it the decisive moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: From that night on, he wrote, he was pulled into the fight with a force he no longer had the ability to resist or refuse.
[SPEAKER_00]: What came next over the following year and a half is documented in a more granular hour by hour detail than almost any case of its kind to survive from that century.
[SPEAKER_00]: for his church superiors, and at no time did he expect a soul outside of himself and his church leaders to read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He began speaking directly towards ever was speaking through God Leban.
[SPEAKER_00]: He justified the act to himself through scripture.
[SPEAKER_00]: The gathering the Moniak of Luke's gospel question by name answered by name.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he asked his questions, a night at the night, he got answers.
[SPEAKER_00]: The voice confirmed it was the same dead woman from Gottliebens' vision.
[SPEAKER_00]: Asked why she found no peace, she said.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the reward for my deeds.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pressed further, she said.
[SPEAKER_01]: I murdered two children and I buried them in a field.
[SPEAKER_00]: Asked if it knew the name of Jesus Christ, the voice recoiled with a violence that shook the whole room.
[SPEAKER_00]: I cannot bear the sound of that name.
[SPEAKER_00]: Asked who else was with her, it answered, flatly, they most wicked of all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every single time Blumhardt spoke Christ's name aloud, the same thing happened without fail.
[SPEAKER_00]: Godly bent eyes rolled back, white.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her folded hands wrenched apart as if by another pair of hand entirely.
[SPEAKER_00]: and a voice that was by every witnesses account, unmistakably not hers, cried out that it could not bear to hear it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Through the summer of 1842 it got worse, not better.
[SPEAKER_00]: During one violent storm in a frenzy that witnesses struggled even to describe afterwards,
[SPEAKER_00]: Failing to find one, she climbed onto an attic window sill, ready to jump into the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stopped only by a crack of lightning, closing off the startled her back into her own body.
[SPEAKER_00]: Later the same night, in the same house, she was found, with a noose already tied.
[SPEAKER_00]: Already fitted around her own throat.
[SPEAKER_00]: She told her family she could never have tied a knot, like that, with the same mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: In that little time, in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was during that same storm that the voices, claw, by now, unmistakably plural, screamed out a number that would follow the case for the rest of its life.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are 1,067, but there are many others still alive, nobody could have driven us out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Only you have managed it, you're with your best sister playing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Blumhardt brought witnesses to see all of this happen with their own eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Precisely because he couldn't trust his own account to be believed.
[SPEAKER_00]: His wife, Doris, Dr. Smith, the village councilman, a gain and a gain they watched Gottlieb and convuls for four and five hours without pause.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hard enough on one occasion to force the bedframe apart at his joints.
[SPEAKER_00]: They, along with their own aunt, watched as a handshipped burn rose on a neck in real time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Though as no fire near her, no source, just her blistering skin under an invisible power.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they reported the detail that later doctors would spend most of the time trying and failing to explain away.
[SPEAKER_00]: The objects that would work though a up and out of her body, without any wounds to show for it, no cut, no scar.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sand, glass, nails, shoe buckles, coils of wire, knitting needles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Through late 1842 and into 1843, the voices began speaking in languages, God-Leban had never been taught, and had no means of learning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Italian, French, sounds that none of the assembled witnesses, however many languages between them they spoke, could place at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: The house, inevitably, became an attraction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three Catholic priests travelled from Baden and asked outright to spend a single night inside the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: Blumhardt turned them away at the door.
[SPEAKER_00]: The village policeman who happened to live directly across the street kept his own private watch on the place without ever
[SPEAKER_00]: But throughout all of it, Blumhardt refused absolutely to do any of the things that people expected of a man fighting demons to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: No crucifix, no Latin ritual.
[SPEAKER_00]: No folk countermeasures of the kind that had very possibly caused this in the first place.
[SPEAKER_00]: He called that whole tradition, Godless Miracle Mungering.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he wanted no part of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, he fasted, he prayed.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the whole of his arsenal, for at least a year and nine months, against something that had already named at a number in the thousands.
[SPEAKER_00]: By Christmas 1843, the fight had been running for a year and nine months.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in its final days, it did not shrink towards an ending.
[SPEAKER_00]: It spread.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gottliebens' brother, Hans, and her sister, Katharina.
[SPEAKER_00]: Both began showing the same signs that the family had watched Gottliebens suffer for two years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Blumhart, by his own account, exhausted past any point, whether word exhausted still meant anything, found himself fighting for all three detour siblings at once in the same house on the same night.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, hands came free first, and once clear of it, he stood a plum-hot side for the rest of the ordeal, praying alongside him rather than needing to be prayed for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Katharina was the worst of all three.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fully conscious throughout.
[SPEAKER_00]: no fainting fit to soften it.
[SPEAKER_00]: No gap in her own awareness to spare her from what was happening to her own body.
[SPEAKER_00]: She raged a plum heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: She swore to tear him into a thousand pieces.
[SPEAKER_00]: And spoke in what he described as the overlapping battle of a thousand spiteful tongues talking across one another at once, so that not one single sentence could be picked out of
[SPEAKER_00]: And whatever was inside her this time claimed to be something new.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not her dead human bound to the devil through old sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: No woman carrying a dead infant.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing like the guys of the first spirit.
[SPEAKER_00]: This, in its own chosen words, said, I am an eminent angel of Satan.
[SPEAKER_00]: It warned Blumhart directly,
[SPEAKER_01]: force me out, drive me down into the abyss, and she will bleed to death in the chair she sits.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Blumhard did not stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: At midnight, a quarter of an hour of pure screaming torouted cappuccino's throat, screaming loud enough that Blumhard wrote afterward that half of the village had it plainly through their shut windows and locked doors, and they lay awake, counting the minute until it stopped.
[SPEAKER_00]: they would wait 15 minutes before it did.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, in the deep hours of the morning, somewhere near to a clock on the night straddling the 27th and 28th of December, 1843.
[SPEAKER_00]: Catherine's head and shoulders arched backwards over the back of her chair, further than a spine should allow.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a voice tore out of her that Blumhart himself said was
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is Victor, twice, and then silence.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first true ordinary, unhaunted silence that house had known in almost two years.
[SPEAKER_00]: In his report to the church
[SPEAKER_00]: writing, that was the point at which the two-year fight came to an end.
[SPEAKER_00]: It ended, and unlike so many cases that quietly relapse it stayed ended.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gottliebann recovered completely.
[SPEAKER_00]: The convulsions, the voices, the visions in the dark, all gone, and gone for good.
[SPEAKER_00]: but what's harder to explain away, even now is what replaced them.
[SPEAKER_00]: A total transformation in who she was as a person.
[SPEAKER_00]: Though with drawn, difficult, young woman blew heart at once found so hard to like, became in the years that followed, calm, steady, and trusted with
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1844, she was running the new village kindergarten with a spotless record behind her.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Bloomhart later bought a sulfur spring spa, a bad bottle, he relocated his ministry there in 1852.
[SPEAKER_00]: Got Leiband, went with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Running the household itself, managing a business hosting up to 150 guests at a time.
[SPEAKER_00]: standing alongside his wife as an equal.
[SPEAKER_00]: But nobody who met her there described the person that Blumhardt could see this soft serene ethereal woman.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, they described someone blunt, playing spoken, almost course.
[SPEAKER_00]: Solid is a word that keeps recurring in every account.
[SPEAKER_00]: So one can only wonder why Blumhardt now saw Gottlieb and in a completely different light.
[SPEAKER_00]: Apparently, according to anyone who met her, she was described in a similar way to how Blumhardt described her upon meeting her.
[SPEAKER_00]: So why now, didn't Blumhardt have this apparent new perspective, seeing her as soft, even a
[SPEAKER_00]: Regardless, in January 1855, Gottliebann married a man named Theodore Brodison, and together they had three sons.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gottliebann died of Stomachancer on the 26th of January 1872 at Bad Ball.
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost exactly 30 years to the season, since a dead woman first appeared at the foot of her bed.
[SPEAKER_00]: carrying a child that was never really there.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is an addendum to this story that some people find holy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I question it.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the days, immediately after that final night in December 1843, something else began happening across Muddlingon.
[SPEAKER_00]: One by one, entirely
[SPEAKER_00]: Villages started coming to Blomhardt to confess things they'd carried, hidden, for years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stolen property, broken marriages, decade-old grudges, he recorded 156 of these confessions in the first weeks alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: By spring, word had travel the length of the black forest and
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, 5,000, not long after.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many would sleep out on open hillside because there was simply no floor space left in doors for a mile in any direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: People arrive reporting healings of their own, rheumatism, tuberculosis, blindness, epilepsy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And laid every one of them at the door of that small, ordinary stone house, on the edge of the village.
[SPEAKER_00]: The civil authorities grew nervous long before the church did, and Blumhardt was eventually forbidden from housing overnight guests in Muddlingon at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: And was effectively pushed out to Bad Ball, where he ran a healing ministry until his death in 1880.
[SPEAKER_00]: His own son believed every word of the experience, Carl Bath, one of the most consequential theologians of the 20th century.
[SPEAKER_00]: He took that single phrase, Yezos is Siga, and built an entire section of his life's work around it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Other men, studying the very same case, reached instead for words like hysteria, and conversion new roses and unresolved childhood trauma.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once I chiedress, decades later, admitted in print that the diagnosis fit almost everything about God's leap in details.
[SPEAKER_00]: Except for the objects that surfaced from beneath her skin, without a single mark left to show how they'd got that.
[SPEAKER_00]: On that one point he conceded, the interpretation simply goes nowhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not one solitary witness who stood in that room on the night of the 27th of December 1843 ever changed their account.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the mayor, not the physician.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not one of the councilmen who stood shivering in a dark bedroom, counting those blows out loud, so nobody could lay to claim they'd imagined it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Blumhart himself tried to bury the fuller account for the rest of his life.
[SPEAKER_00]: He printed only one hundred copies and only for the eyes of his church superiors.
[SPEAKER_00]: He quietly hoped that would be the end of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He never wanted to be remembered for the fight itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: He only wanted to be remembered for what came after.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those strange batches of confessions, the even more bizarre healings, the seeming awakening in muttling and that followed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He got his wish mostly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost nobody, outside of a handful of theologians and one obscure village church record remembers that fight at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, exorcisms or demonic possessions recorded in that much detail are obviously exceptionally rare.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, along with the awakening in Muddlingon,
[SPEAKER_00]: arguably, in my opinion, not famous enough, which is why it's the first of all, 3, 6, 9, trilogy.
[SPEAKER_00]: A next time we will unearth another lesser known yet famous, dark paranormal case, for you all to listen to.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, we're now going to close the case of Gottlieb and Dietis, a case which obviously as you've heard has some of the most pronounced and repeated experiences whenever we hear or watch or even read about possession cases, and it does make you think is this the origin point for a lot of stories, and to some they will always be just stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: but not to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So until next time, stay safe and remember.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whenever you're discussing the paranormal, always leave some of your disbelief at the door.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll see you next time, right here on the dark paranormal.