5 Creepy Unsolved Mysteries

2. The Hinterkaifeck Murders

The Hinterkaifeck murders will definitely make you start checking the house before you go to bed. On March 31, 1922, six inhabitants of the Hinterkaifeck farm were brutally murdered. It was the Gruber family: Andreas and his wife Cäzilia. Their widowed daughter Viktoria, and her children Cäzilia, age 7, and Josef, age 2 (it is believed that Josef was the product of an incestuous relationship between Viktoria and Andreas, who both spent time in jail in 1915 for incest). The maid, Maria Baumgartner, was also murdered.

A few days before the murder, Andreas discovered footprints in the snow leading from the woods to the house. There were none leading back. The family began to hear footsteps coming from the attic, and Andreas found an unfamiliar newspaper on the property. He never reported anything to the police.

No one really knows what happened that day. It’s suspected that each family member was lured to the barn, one by one, where they were all killed with a mattock. Josef was killed in the house, where he was sleeping on a cot in his mother’s room. Maria was killed in her bedchambers. Their bodies weren’t discovered for four days.

The theories that followed were all horrifying.

One theory, was that the killer was Viktoria’s husband, who was believed to have been killed during WWI, but his body was never found. According to his deployment time line, there is no way he could have been Josef’s father, and that could have led to some bad blood between him and the Grubers.

Another was that it was a poltergeist. A maid had quit six months before the murders, claiming the farm was haunted. Maria, the new maid, had only arrived at the farm hours before her death.

One thing was for sure, the killer had been in the house for days. The police even suspected that they continued to live there afterward. Neighbors had said they saw smoke rising from the chimneys, and the cattle had been kept fed. The dog, a small pomeranian who had previously been an indoor dog, was chained up outside.

The autopsies were performed in the barn. It was revealed that little Cäzilia had been left alive for several hours after the killer presumably thought she was dead. She had violently torn our handfuls of her hair.

It get’s even weirder–after the autopsies, the corpses were beheaded and sent to clairvoyants to ‘read’ them. The skulls were lost during WWII, and never returned to Waidhofen, where the victims have been laid to rest.