The death of the medium Rudi Schneider

Rudi Schneider, a medium tested by investigators decades earlier, died suddenly at Weyer on 28 April 1957. By then he worked as a mechanic.

Rudi Schneider, the younger of the medium brothers Willi and Rudi Schneider, died unexpectedly of a brain haemorrhage on 28 April 1957, at the age of 48. In his later years he had given up mediumship, became a car mechanic and taught driving at Weyer, his home, with his wife Mitzi. Wikipedia records that no more investigations took place after that.

The case against him came from his sittings decades earlier. In April 1927 Psyche, a journal, ran a piece by Warren Jay Vinton charging fraud through a confederate. Vinton, introduced at Braunau by a man named Dingwall, attended ten seances and concluded that someone secretly slipped into the room.

Harry Price tested Rudi himself in his own research laboratory over the years 1929 to 1932. Rudi's employer Karl Amereller, an electrician, travelled with him to London and set up an indicator device there. It built on an electric-chair design of Price's: contact-makers tied to several points on the sitter's body, wired to coloured lights that went out if the person under test moved. Accusations of fraud against Schneider were made by named investigators and challenged by others, so his case remains disputed.