Transcript for:
The Chopper Incident

hello everybody shrouded hand here today we're going to look at a very unusual case from Germany before we begin though I just want to give a quick shout out to silence war on Instagram he really helped me out with this video because a lot of the information was in German and Google translate can only do so much so I'll put a link to sil's Instagram page and go check him out he does some really amazing artwork I've even got some up on my wall at home give him a follow I'll put a link in the description so the chopper incident it began in May 1981 in a town called neutral bling in southern Germany Dr Kurt bites the local dentist was at work in his Clinic when the phone rang when he answered he was Disturbed to hear a low guttural voice on the other end shouting obscenities at him Dr backit hung up he was bemused and a little unsettled little did he know that this would be the beginning of a string of nuisance phone calls each time the calls were the same a deep croaking potty mouthed voice hurling obscenities there were three people at the dental clinic Dr back sites and his wife Margot plus their 16 year-old assistant Claudia uden man if Dr bite saw his wife answered the phone the voice would simply hurl insults and mock them but if Claudia answered it would try to flirt with her in unsettling ways making lwd suggestions and professing its undying love for her The Voice called itself Chopper whoever Chopper was he was persistent over the following weeks the calls would increase in frequency until they were receiving multiple phone calls every single day Dr bites had had enough he contacted the Deutch bundus post the German post office and he reported this harassment the bundas post sent technicians to the dental clinic and they installed an intercept circuit on the line in the hope of finding out where the phone calls were coming from this did seem to work the incessant phone call stopped but it didn't stop chopper from intruding on the L in fact it caused the harassment to escalate in an alarming way now instead of phoning the clinic directly Chopper began to interrupt outgoing calls from the dentist's office whenever Dr bites or Claudia tried to phone somebody from the office the rasping voice of Chopper would cut in on their call screaming his usual obscenities think OBS now Chopper wasn't just some nuisance caller he was somebody with the ability to tap into private phone calls the bundist post spent a considerable amount of time and money investigating this case but they couldn't figure out how Chopper was interrupting the calls they ripped out and replaced all of the phones and phone cables in the clinic building this operation cost the bundus post 60,000 marks when they were finished Chopper interrupted the very next phone call stating I still have a clear line over the following months Chopper continuously interrupted their phone calls and he began making very creepy comments about the things that choria had been doing outside the office he seemed to have knowledge of what she did in her own house it seemed that he had been observing her in private the situation reached a critical point in November when Chopper threatened to kill Claudia at this point the police got very seriously involved recently there had been a number of young girls murdered in southern Germany and The Killers hadn't been caught in July of 1981 a 13-year-old girl named Sonia hurler had gone missing whilst walking to her grandmother's house in Kempton this was a few hours drive from nutral bling 3 months later her body was found dumped beneath a barn she'd been sexually assaulted and murdered one of the most disturbing murders had happened at almost the same time that Claudia had received her death threads this was the case of Ursula Herman a 10-year-old girl who on the 15th of September disappeared whilst riding her bike in the wine Garten Forest next to amsy Lake this is about an hour and a half drive from No traling 2 days after Ursula disappeared her parents began receiving strange phone calls these calls consisted of a recording of the Bon 3 radio station jingle he also received a ransom note asking for a sum of money but then no further instructions were left on where to leave the money 4 weeks after Ursula vanished police found her body in the wine Garten Forest she'd been buried beneath the ground in a small wooden box the box was equipped with lights blankets food a radio tuned to Bon 3 and a bucket for a toilet a ventilation system consisting of pipes camouflaged with leaves was installed it seemed that her kidnappers had intended her to spend a long time in the Box whilst they waited for the ransom money to arrive but unfortunately damp leaves on the forest floor clogged the ventilation pipes and Ursula had suffocated a few hours after being placed in the Box obviously with these stories hitting the headlines at around the same time that Claudia was receiving her threatening phone calls it was important that the police were seen to be doing something they began searching nearby houses and they interrogated anyone living in the vicinity of the dental clinic one neighbor was a prime suspect and this was a man who had had surgery on his larynx so he had a very distinctive raspy voice he was also a ham radio enthusiasts it was thought that he might have been using his radio equipment to somehow intercept the dentist's phone calls but no conclusive evidence was ever produced against him the investigations continued on fruitlessly for months 1981 passed into 1982 still Chopper continued to harass the dentist and his assistant and still the police and abundance post had no idea who was behind it then in February events took another Sinister turn Dr bites and Claudia were in the dentist clinic when they heard clear as day the voice of Chopper coming from the drain in the wash basin it seemed that Chopper had moved on from harassing them via the telephone now he was using using the plumbing from then on the voice of Chopper manifested inside the room multiple times a day sometimes it would appear to be coming from the plug hole of the Basin or it would come from an electrical outlet or the light fitting one time it terrified a customer by shouting from inside the toilet ball whilst she was sat on it as always Chopper was abusive and obscene usually the target of his comments were custom who were sat in the dentist chair he would make insulting comments about their looks or accuse them of being scared or tell them to shut their mouths it began to affect business and pretty soon terrified customers were avoiding the dental clinic like the plague word began to spread about Dr pite's ghost it didn't take along for the press to get wind of the story and soon an article was published in a local paper after after that the story spread even further soon newspaper reporters from further a field along with paranormal research groups psychics and scientists began visiting the clinic and from there it just snowballed it wasn't long before the story got into national attention within a space of a few weeks reporters and investigators from all over the world began flying into nral bling in the hopes of meeting chopper for themselves many theories were put forward as an explanation for The Voice maybe there was someone with speakers hidden in the walls or perhaps it was just an act of ventriloquism perhaps someone was in the sewers speaking through the pipes one theory was that the dental clinic had been built over the sight of an Old World War II meses Schmid aircraft Factory it was thought that the factory might have had secret tunnels underneath and these tunnels might still be in place beneath the clinic giving someone the means to transmit their voice into the building without being scene ultrasound equipment was brought in to try and find evidence of this but nothing was ever proven with the media frenzy surrounding the dental clinic Claudia found herself the center of attention the only person that Chopper seemed to like was Claudia in fact he was infatuated with her she seemed to be the only person who could prompt Chopper into speaking Chopper MI [Music] [Applause] [Music] Claudia didn't shy away from this attention either she seemed to love having the cameras on her the newspapers painted her as some sort of medium the girl who was able to speak to the Dead the girl with the ghostly admirer pretty soon she was being offered huge sums of money to appear on chat shows apparently also she recorded a pop song about Chopper in the space of a few weeks Claudia had become a star and neutral bling had become a freak Show crowds of people would appear on the street outside the clinic whilst an endless stream of TV cameras reporters psychics and paranormal investigators Tred to get access to the building the police who were probably embarrassed by their inability to crack the case set up a task force named Soo gist or the special ghost commission this was a crack team of investigators from Munich determined to get to the bottom of the thing the soo gist team spent several days in the clinic observing everyone carefully trying to determine where the voice was coming from reportedly during this time the phenomena escalated even more the soo guys team reported some Poltergeist like activity furniture and ornaments falling over or seeming to be thrown from an unknown source despite this the team were somewhat skeptical of this ghost and they were carefully observing the movements of everyone in the building paying special attention to people's positions in the room when the phenomena occurred Claudia especially seemed to be acting suspiciously sometimes on one occasion the voice of Chopper Was Heard coming from the toilets a police officer ran to the bathroom door and pulled it open just to find Claudia inside she seemed dazed and she claimed that Chopper had somehow compelled her to go there they noticed how the voice usually appeared when Claudia had her back to the room unfortunately for Claudia there was a mirror on the wall where she often stood the next time Chopper made an appearance a policeman watched Claudia's reflection in the mirror very closely as he suspected her lips moved as Choppa spoke it was Claudia that was producing The Voice after that Claudia Dr backit and his wife were taken in for questioning and this is where things get a little murky in the reporting you see I've read a lot of different articles about this case and most of them state that after being interrogated the three of them broke down and they confessed to faking the entire thing end of story but I'm not sure if this paints a completely accurate picture of what happened here according to articles like this Claudia only made a partial confession and then afterwards refused to testify in court as far as I can tell Claudia always maintained that she was a little bit responsible for the chopper phenomena one of the best papers I've read on the chopper case written by Gerhart mayor which I'll link in the description has this to say on the issue in a TV talk show long after the solving of the case Claudia again confessed that she was responsible for some of the occurred voice phenomena and that she furthermore assumed that back sites also took part in the game however she said that there must have been a third ghostly voice whose originator she didn't know this big unknown had been the instigator of her own Chopper activity after receiving anonymous calls for several weeks from someone using a disguised voice she began to reply and the game began so it seems that Claudia by her own admission was making up at least some of the voice but not all of it as far as motivation goes there's multiple reasons why a teenage girl might do something like this in Chopper she had the ability to break social taboos by hurling insults at the adults around her without any repercussions by having Chopper fall in love with her she became the center of attention when the Press started to arrive she became the main character in the case the focus of every camera as for Dr back sites and his wife the motivation is a lot less clear these were two serious and respected people in the community the chopper phenomena negatively impacted the business and it caused them great deal of embarrassment and distress it was Dr back sites who originally contacted the police to try and stop the voice so it seems very out of character that he would go along with it however there is eyewitness testimony of a police officer witnessing Dr bit's producing the chopper voice in this article they have a quote from a police officer who was there at the time after witnessing some Poltergeist like activity it says that suddenly Mr bit's lost it bulling bulling he yelled with Chopper's voice it was truly terrifying now this doesn't sound like Dr bites was trying to hide the fact that he was producing Chopper's voice it seems more like he was doing it openly as if possessed or at least trying to appear as if possessed I've spoken in other videos about the phenomenon of the folad dir a mental delusion that affects multiple people at the same time I do wonder if something like this happened to here something that started out as a prank but became real at least in the minds of Mr and Mrs backs sites at one point they were getting harassed by phone calls hundreds of times a day this would be enough to strain anyone's mental health and then after it all they have the voice manifest itself inside the room with them who knows how that would affect someone psychologically Chopper could have been an obsession for them something that solidified in their minds like a thought form or toper an entity that began to influence their their actions Dr bites did confess to producing The Voice sometimes although again it was just a partial confession he confirmed that some of the time the voice was coming from him but that he must have been doing it subconsciously and in the end he always felt that he wasn't guilty of hoaxing any of the phenomena there's also the issue of how they made the voice how three different people could produce the same gutl sound is interesting in itself but then how did they make it come from different parts of the room making it sound like it was coming from light fittings and toilet balls this is another place where the details get a bit murky depending on what articles you read different sources give different explanations on how this was achieved according to this article Claudia confessed that she'd created the ghost voice with the help of commercially available cheap effects devices and her own vocal power the article also says that the backs sites couple finally admitted that they'd used the in-house telephone system with disguised voices this article claims that tape recorders were found hidden in the pipes of the dentist's office according to this article the two had taken advantage of the special Acoustics of the tiled practice and created the obscene sounds using pure vocal acrobatics this article says that the voice of the ghost was faked through tubes linked to the plumbing somewhere else I read that they might have hidden themselves in wall cavities annoyingly I can't find the article to screenshot it now but the point is there doesn't seem to be much consensus on how exactly the voice was faked my guess is that most of these explanations are just speculations someone came up with an idea of how the phenomena could have been achieved and journalists who wanted a neat way of wrapping up the story said yep that explains it and printed it as fact so we have slightly dubious confessions and dubious explanations I do Wonder in that gray area does it leave any possibility of Chopper being real I mean probably not most likely just a prank but pretty much every Poltergeist case has some element of human trickery read up on the Enfield poist or Jeff the talking [ __ ] you'll see that in both these cases there were times when inv investigators caught people trying to fake the ghostly phenomena but other times they experienced voices or thrown objects that seemed completely unexplainable some investigators concluded that the chopper case was a mixture of human hugs and genuine paranormal phenomena maybe that's just cope because they didn't want to admit to being fooled or maybe just maybe they witnessed something that they couldn't explain in the aftermath of the chopper case for all time and money that they' wasted and the chaos that they' caused Claudia was find 1,500 marks Kurt and Margo back sits were find 35,000 marks afterwards Claudia tried to distance herself from the case and she eventually changed her name to avoid being recognized for Dr back sites and his wife it seems that the stress of the chopper incident plus the public backlash afterwards was way too much for them to handle soon after the case ended they admitted themselves to a mental hospital and the dental clinic was closed and that's pretty much where the tale of Chopper ends why the name Chopper I'm not sure I've heard some suggestion that it might be because Claudia was a fan of motorbikes in England the word Chopper has other connotations but I don't think that's the case in Germany maybe it's the ghost of a Mad Axe Murderer or something so we'll end it there thanks once again to silence for helping me out with the translations and stuff go check out his Instagram and give him a follow Link in the description and as always thank you to the patrons for supporting the channel I hope you found the video interesting until next time goodbye