Haunted House Of The Week: Hinterkaifeck

Okay, so this week’s house hasn’t been officially declared haunted, but upon hearing the details, the only reasonable conclusion one can come to is that it TOTALLY IS. Even though it’s not actually there anymore, because someone made the very solid decision to demolish it. Hopefully they also salted the earth afterward.

Basically, what happened at Hinterkaifeck, a small German farmstead, is one of the creepiest unsolved murders of all time.

From Travel Creepster (and, just a warning: there are photos of bodies at that link, including the body of a child. They’re black-and-white and not terribly graphic, but still, I didn’t want to just spring that on everyone. I’ll post most of the relevant text in case some people would rather not see them):

On March 22nd of 1922 a German farmer by the name of Andreas Gruber met with his neighbours to tell them of disturbing events occurring at his farm in Kaifeck. He spoke of how he found footprints leading to the farm, but not leaving, and of strange sounds from the attic. He and his neighbours recalled that a farm maid had left the farm six months earlier saying that it was haunted, but none could have expected what happened next.

Three days following the meeting with his neighbours Andreas Gruber, his wife, daughter, two grandchildren, and the farm’s maid were slaughtered with a mattock, a tool best referred to as a cross between a pick-axe and an axe used for the tearing of dense soil.

The authorities’ reconstruction of events that night described how each of the Gruber family members excluding the young two year old were lured into the barn one by one. There was no sign of a struggle left in their tracks leading to the barn, and despite the curiosity of how each might have been lured alone there was no further explanation offered. Stranger yet that Mrs. Gruber had left her two year old son Josef sleeping in his cot alone while she walked through the dark into the barn. Inside the barn it was as though the Gruber’s had allowed themselves to be sacrificed. There was little sign of struggle, the mutilated corpses laid neatly in separate piles of hay.

…

Whoever or whatever was responsible for their murder did not end the night in the barn, but carried on to the house where two year old Joseph still slept in his cot next to his mother’s bed. He too was killed with the same instrument, then came the maid; Maria Baumgartner, killed in her bed and again with no sign of struggle.

The killer then spent the next week living at the farm, not just taking refuge, but actively participating in the farming duties of the murdered family which still laid where they had been cut down with a mattock. The killer fed the animals, cleaned the home, chopped firewood and rested by the lit fireplace in the evenings, yet not a single neighbour saw a stranger on the property. Stranger still was that a large sum of money was found on the property, the amount being too large to have belonged to the family. This ruled out robbery, but only raised more questions.

…

The final eerie and unaccountable fact in the case was returned weeks later in the final report. It was determined that the granddaughter of the Grubers, seven year old Cäzilia had not only walked of her own accord alone into the barn, and not only not struggled, but laid in the hay with her grandparents pulling her own hair out in tufts as the remainder of the family was slaughtered.

OK THEN. SOUNDS GREAT. And I mentioned that this is unsolved, right? Because it’s unsolved.

According to Wikipedia, a group of criminology grad students “came to the conclusion that they consider one person the main suspect,” but wouldn’t say who out of respect for that person’s still-living relatives. Oh, come on.