HYPNOTIC LODGER

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 190, 9 May 1931, Page 12

HYPNOTIC LODGER

Terrorised His Landlady BLACKMAIL AND FRAUD A former member of the Salvation Army, Max Schuler, had to answer in a Berlin court on February 17 to charges of blackmail and fraud of a peculiar kind, brought against him by his landlady. While the landlady was giving evidence Schuler had to be removed from court, for such was the terror his supposed hypnotic powers had for her that she could not be brought to make any accusation in his presence. The cause for her nervousness was forthcoming in her evidence. Schuler, a tall, gaunt man with a penetrating eye, had taken lodgings in complainant’s husband’s house more than a year ago and had battened upon the pair ever since through vaunting his powers of hypnotism and thought-reading and the terrible uses to which he could put them if crossed in his purpose. As accused’s purpose was to live comfortably at the expense of his. landlord, who was a nerve sufferer and could not be induced to make any statement in court, except that he had always advised his wife to let their lodger be, he was enabled to change his status of tenant to that of a guest. Whenever Schuler was in need of ready money or if it seemed that his influence was waning, he brought out newspaper cuttings as evidence of his. powers in which a hypnotist called De Castro—which, he alleged, was his professional name—was stated to have tracked down a coffee bean hidden in a street of a provincial town. Schuler further maintained to his apprehensive landlord that if people did. not obey his commands he could make them wither away like flowers or root them to the floor as motionless as trees. At last, taking the opportunity when his landlady was ill in bed, the lodger brought her a promissory note to sign for a suit of clothes he hall bought. She had no other course but to sign it, and afterward to pay for the suit.' The “hypnotist” was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.