I've been working through this thread for about an hour, and I'm amazed at how little an ammount of information about the Celle Neu Rathaus is
available on the internet.
However things I find strange about this thread.
1) Why did they not drain the basement? The story of it being dry but with words forming on the walls sounds more credible. It seems unlikely that to
this day the building would have flooded basements. You would not get planning permission to develope such a building, so I wager that if the basement
was flooded in the 1980s when the troops were there they are not now. How would you access, modify or repair the plumbing infrastructure?
2) Why was it sealed off? The Military seem somewhat cash-strapped if you check out their record with Chinook Helecopters, so I doubt the potential
presence of bad juju and a severe case of waterlogging would be the best reason for blocking that stuff off. Once again maybe the Belsen artifacts
down there would be a good reason to block off the basement from eager soldiers.
The thing to remember here is that these guys would be about my age (21) back in the 1980s. A good few drinks and the stories get passed down. Guy
first joins the army gets scared with these stories by older lads, passes it on to scare the younger lads and the story would get wilder with the
telling. I cannot picture the deaths of highly trained divers going unnoticed. Did they even recover the bodies? Again I only have the internet at my
disposal but no news story exists that suggests the event itself or any inquest. You cannot have dodgy Nazi Occult stuff killing off troops in the
height of the cold war and nobody batting an eyelid.
Once again, you take bored 18 year old guys, station them far from home in a wrecked ex-Nazi installation with water everywhere and a general bad vibe
and the stuff will all fall into place. A few beers and the stories get embellished.
As far as I gather the Neues Rathaus is still used as a town hall after much renovation. I somehow doubt they neglected to deal with millions of
gallons of dirty and possibly contaminated water just below the floorboards (unless they sealed off that stuff better
). Who can honestly
say.
It still seems odd that the downstairs area was out of bounds, but maybe nobody wanted the job of removing holocaust victim materials from down
there.
On a side note, for all the paranormal guys here I have a wee story. A friend of mine is in the Army at the moment, and currently is stationed in
Afghanistan. He joined the army to get away from home, because he and a friend drunkely broke into a tomb in a mausoleum, and this guy stole some
teeth fresh out of a corpse. He lost the teeth and kept waking up to sleep-paralysis episodes that started to really scare him (and he is not the type
to scare easily). He never did find the teeth!