Wednesday Weird: The Hinterkaifeck Massacre

On April 4, 1922, in Bavaria, a group of locals went to the Hinterkaifeck farm to see why the family members hadn't been showing up for school or church. To their shock, they found Andreas Gruber, his wife, their 35-year-old daughter, two grandchildren, and a maid had been murdered with a pickaxe.

So, terrible, yes of course. But this is where things start to get weird.

The family had been missing/dead for three days, but the cows had been milked, food had been cooked, and neighbors had seen smoke rising from the chimney. Which meant only one thing:
someone had been living on the farm after they killed the family.

Even before the murders some strange things had been happening. Days before the murders, Gruber told neighbors he had found a strange set of footprints leading from the forest to the farm. There were also strange noises in the attic, newspapers appearing, and a set of house keys went missing.

And these weren't necessarily new weird happenings. Sixth months earlier a maid had quit her job at because she thought the place was haunted.

Investigators determined the killer had lured the adults one by one into the barn. Finally, he entered the house and killed the youngest child and the maid in their beds. But that was all they could figure out. There was no motive. It couldn't be a robbery because a fair amount of cash had been left alone.

Andreas Gruber had been intensely disliked by his neighbors for being a jerk and an ass, but the fact that the killer had seemed to live hidden in their farm for so long pretty much ruled out any local suspects.

The case remained unsolved, mostly because the investigators lost evidence (including the heads of the victims) and because of WWII. Though, one of the stronger theories is that military political extremist may have taken over a temporary secure hideout.

Thoughts or theories?

 

Wednesday Weird: Reincarnated Boy

Today we're talking about a fun murder. A fun murder you say? How can that be a thing?
Read on, and find out!

Dr. Eli Lasch was best known for developing a medical system in Gaza as part of an Israeli government operation in the 60s. He died in 2009 (no, he's not the victim) but before that, he related a story he personally witnessed to a therapist.

In Golan Heights, a region near the border of Syria and Israel, a boy was born with a long red birthmark on his skull.

He was part of the Druze ethnic group, which accepts the idea of reincarnation. Because of this, they often believe that birthmarks can be related to trauma in a past life, and so when the boy was old enough to talk and told his parents that he had been killed by a blow to the head from an axe, no one was surprised or frightened.

When children are three, it's customary to take them to the home in their previous life if they remember it. After they arrived in his village, the boy was able to remember details of his home as well as who he was in his previous life.

A village local said the man the boy purported to be in a past life had disappeared years earlier, and his family had assumed he had wandered into nearby hostile territory.

The boy disagreed. He said he'd been murdered, and knew the name of the man who had killed him.
They confronted the man, who denied everything, but the boy wasn't done.

He said he knew where his body was buried. In the spot where he indicated, the villagers found a skeleton, with a wound in the skull that corresponded to the boy's birthmark. They also found the murder weapon, an axe, buried nearby.

The man accused admitted to the crime after being faced with this evidence.

See? A fun murder? (okay, I mean, the murder was probably horrible and terrifying. But look at this fun story, with outside witnesses--one of which was a doctor! Fun, right?)

Thoughts or theories?

 

Wednesday Weird: Herxheim Mass Grave

Continuing with our Halloween Wednesday Weirds, let's talk bones and skeletons.

Back in 09, archaeologists were digging at the site of near the village of Herxheim, in Germany. The site was from the Neolithic era, (7,000 years ago) when farming had spread into Europe.

The site was first excavated in 1996-99 so they expected to find much of the same. Instead what they found was a human bone.

Which, if you're an archaeologist, yay, right? But then they found another bone. And another. When they were finished digging, they had uncovered a mass grave of over 500 bodies. 500 bodies is a lot, but it's even more when you consider how small the population had been at the time the bodies were buried. Not to mention that Herxheim and other nearby settlements had been mysteriously and completely abandoned, ohhh, about 7,000 years ago.

So what had caused this massive die-off of the population and subsequent abandonment? The archaeologists weren't sure.

Until they found the bite marks.

Yeah. The mass grave was a mass cannibal grave. The bones in the mass grave had been chewed on, been cracked for their marrow, even had marks on them that suggested they had been spit roasted.

Cannibalism was extremely rare in Neolithic Europe (why would you need to eat people when you could grow your own food) and yet, here there was not just a single case of it, but a massive amount of it.

What happened at Herxheim, that caused much of the settlement to be eaten by other people, and that caused the rest of settlement to be abandoned?

We may never know . . .

 

Wednesday Weird: The Sunken Skulls

In 2009 archaeologists were excavating the dry bed of a prehistoric lake in Motala, Sweden. And because this is Wednesday Weird you know that had to find something. And they did. The foundation of a mysterious stone structure.

Okay, so not too crazy. They are archaeologists, after all. They had to be digging for something.
So they kept digging and began to unearth even more finds: stone tools and animal bones.

Oh, also, the skulls of 10 people.

Ranging in age from small children to the elderly, the 8,000 year old skulls were an anomaly.

Oh, and did I say 10 skulls? I actually meant 11, because they found another one buried deep in the mud. And buried in that skull was pieces of one of the other skulls, deliberately embedded inside the head of the 11th skull.

So, either someone put pieces of a head inside another head, or someone used a head to bash in someone else's head. Neither option sounds, you know, great.

But that wasn't all. Some of the skulls had had stakes driven through them before they were set on fire. Two of the skulls were actually found with the stakes still embedded in (or in one case, melted to) the bone.

There are multiple theories for this find, from war trophies to strange funerary practices, and each one holds as much weight as the next because no one really knows what the structure was, or what the deal is with the skulls.

 

Wednesday Weird: Persian Mummy Princess

In the world of archeology, finding a mummy is the shit. I mean, they give you a medal and junk. Well, not really, as far as I know, but you get what I'm saying. You get some mad props if you're an archaeologist and find a mummy.

In 2000, someone tipped off Pakistani police that there was a mummy in a house that the owners were planning to sell on the black market for $20 million dollars and have smuggled out of Pakistan. When they raided the house, it turned out the tip off was right, there was indeed a mummy.

The mummy was 2,600 years old, encased in a carved stone coffin inside a wooden sarcophagus and was wearing a gold crown and mask. An inscription on her breastplate read: I am the daughter of the great king Xerxes. I am Rhodugune.

This was a huge archaeological discovery. No Persian mummy had been found before, especially royalty. And actually mummification had always been thought to be a strictly Egyptian practice.

An incident broke out about who would get to keep the mummy, Iran or Pakistan. So while that was going on, scientists got down to sciencing and closely examined the mummy.

That's when things got weird.

The first thing they noticed was that the grammar on the inscription was terrible. Like maybe the inscriber didn't actually speak ancient Persian very well.

Then they noticed that the coffin itself wasn't ancient. It was actually only about 250 years old.

Like the grammar, the mummification process was a crap job as well. Some of the steps of the process had been completely skipped.

So, at this point, with the hack work, they started to think that maybe the mummy wasn't a princess at all. Maybe someone had dressed up a common mummy as a princess to hopefully garner more bucks on the black market.

BUT! And this is a big but. (heh. Big butts). It turns out the mummy herself wasn't ancient at all. She'd only been dead 2 years.

And she'd been murdered.

It seemed someone had actually murdered a person to make a fake mummy purely to try and sell it on the black market for a crap ton of cash. And there is evidence to show that this wasn't the first time they had done this. They had actually done this three other times as well.

So, not only do you have to worry about being murdered by a stranger, now we have to worry that said stranger will mummify us (crapily) all to make some money.

Wednesday Weird: The Isdal Woman

In 1970, a University professor and his two daughters outside of Bergen, Norway, discovered the partially charred, naked body of a woman in the middle of the Isdalen Valley hidden among some rocks. Her body was laced with alcohol and sleeping pills, and had evidence of blunt force trauma on the back of her neck. The investigation that followed was so strange that it landed it on my Wednesday Weird post.

Isdalen Valley

Beside the Isdal Woman, items including bottles of gasoline and liquor, a mostly burnt passport, and a ton of sleeping pills were close enough to have been quickly dropped. But the Isdal Woman herself was difficult to identify. Her fingerprints had been sanded off, and her dental records returned no matches, though it seemed she'd had some work done in Latin America.

Two of her suitcases were found in a safety deposit box at a train station, but all of the clothing inside had been stripped of their labels. There was a prescription bottle, but the label had been peeled off. In addition, the police found several fake passports with entrance stamps from Moscow (this was during the Cold War), and there were 500 deutschemarks sewn into the lining of one of the bags. She also apparently wore a collection of wigs and wrote notes to herself in code.

Despite over 100 eyewitnesses all claiming to have seen her on the days leading up to her death, nobody could agree on anything except that she looked like "an attractive foreign lady in her 30s or 40s." She might have been German, or  French, or Italian or she just might have known how to speak those languages. She used nine different, fake names at multiple hotels around Norway and Europe, and the primary witness, an Italian photographer who'd had dinner with her before she died, said she was an antiques collector from South Africa on a sightseeing trip, but he couldn't remember any useful details. Though it's important to note he had previously been questioned in an unrelated rape case.
She was last seen hiking in, oddly enough, evening wear and being closely followed by two large men in black clothing. The police were so baffled by every single facet of the case that they ruled the Isdal Woman's death a suicide because of course they did.

Thoughts? Theories?

Wednesday Weird: Ata the Humanoid

**Warning: Creep Factor Ahead**


On October 19th, 2003, a man was looking for objects of historical value in the ghost town of La Noria, a ghost town in the Atatcam desert in Chile.

Near an abandoned church he found a white cloth containing a strange skeleton around 6 inches in length.

It had nine ribs, hard teeth, a bulging skull with a nob on top.

People didn't know what it was. Which, makes sense, because look at it:

 

 

 

 

Some people thought it was the remains of a fetus. Or perhaps a monkey. Others thought that finally, here was proof of extra-terrestrial life on earth.

Was it any of those things?

It turns out, no, it wasn't. DNA testing released this year (2013) confirmed that the skeleton was indeed human, but a child (probably) between the ages of six and eight. 91% of the genome matches the human genome, and the 9% that doesn't match could be due to multiple factors, including the quality of the specimen and techniques used. It's mitochondrial DNA, though, show that it's mother was a Chilean woman.

They're not sure how old the bones are, but probably at least a few decades.  The genetic mutations that created it are still unknown, though it's clear the child lived for quite a few years, despite its tiny size.

Thoughts?