A few days before the murders, Andreas Gruber told his neighbours something odd. He had found tracks in the fresh snow, a line of them coming out of the woods toward his farm. He had followed the tracks back the way they came. There were no footprints going home.
Hinterkaifeck was not a village. It was an isolated farmstead in Upper Bavaria, about seventy kilometres north of Munich, a cluster of buildings surrounded by fields with the nearest neighbours a long walk away. In 1922 it was home to Andreas Gruber, sixty-three; his wife Cazilia, seventy-two; their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel, thirty-five; and Viktoria's two children, Cazilia, seven, and Josef, two.
The fortnight before the killings had already gone wrong in small ways. A Munich newspaper arrived that nobody had ordered and nobody read. Keys went missing. A lock on the machine shed was broken. A cow was found untied in the stable. At night there were footsteps in the attic, and searches that found no one. The farm's previous maid had packed and left, saying she could not stay: she believed the place was haunted, and described hearing voices from the ceiling.
Some accounts suppose the obvious thing that fits all of this, that someone was already inside the house or the attic, waiting. It is only a theory. It is also the theory that makes the rest of the story readable.
On the afternoon of March 31, 1922, a new maid arrived at the farm. Her name was Maria Baumgartner, she was forty-four, and she had been hired days earlier. It was her first day.
Sometime that night, six people were killed with a mattock, a heavy hoe-like farm tool. Four of them were apparently drawn out to the barn one at a time and killed there. The two-year-old boy and the maid were killed inside, evidently while they were in bed. The bodies in the barn were stacked and covered with hay and an old door.
They were not found until days later. The family missed church; seven-year-old Cazilia did not appear at school. Neighbours finally went in, and walked into the rest of it.
The detail that has kept this case alive for a century is not the murders. It is what happened next. Someone stayed.
The animals had been fed. The cows had been milked. Bread and cut meat had been eaten. Smoke had been seen from the chimney over the weekend, and a bed looked as though it had been slept in. For some span of time after killing everyone in the house, a person lived there with the bodies.
The investigation that followed went badly in ordinary, human ways. The Munich police, led by Inspector Georg Reingruber, questioned more than a hundred suspects. But the crime scene had been ruined before they arrived: curious crowds had trampled the ground, moved the bodies, and by one account even cooked in the kitchen. Robbery was ruled out almost at once, since money and jewellery had been left untouched, which pushed the case toward the conclusion that this was personal. The autopsies established the weapon and the time of death. The heads were removed and sent to Munich, where clairvoyants were consulted. That produced nothing.
The suspects were familiar to anyone who has read a village crime. Lorenz Schlittenbauer, the neighbour who had been Viktoria's lover and who may have been the father of her son, has been a suspect to this day. Karl Gabriel, Viktoria's husband, had been reported missing in the First World War and his body was never recovered, which fed a long rumour that he had come back. The Gump brothers were considered. A farmhand named Peter Weber was considered. The serial killer Paul Mueller has been proposed. There was also a piece of history the village already knew: years earlier, Andreas Gruber and his daughter Viktoria had been convicted of incest. Local gossip said the boy Josef might have been Andreas's son. Whether that fact pointed at the killer or only poisoned the way the village looked at the family is still argued.
Nobody was ever convicted. The case was formally closed in 1955. The farm was demolished in 1923, and during the demolition the murder weapon is said to have been found hidden in a gap in the structure. That did not solve anything either.
There is a companion case in the United States that runs almost parallel. In June 1912, in Villisca, Iowa, eight people were killed in a house with an axe, and the killer appears to have stayed: a bowl of milk and a slab of bacon were left out on the table, and cloths had been draped over the mirrors and windows. That case was never solved either. The same eerie shape appears in both: not just violence, but a period of quiet afterward, in a house that ought to have been empty.
Most of these cases are not supernatural. What makes them feel haunted is a different thing: they are unfinished. The snow at Hinterkaifeck gave one answer and withheld the other. A human mind cannot file away a story with a missing ending, so the file stays open, and we keep taking it out.
The farm is a field now, with a small memorial on it. People still leave things there. Somebody walked to that place in the snow, and nobody walked away from it, and that one missing set of prints is the entire story.
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