Billboard about the Sodder children, who went missing on Christmas Eve, 1945.

For nearly four decades, anyone driving down Route 16 near Fayetteville, West Virginia, could see a billboard bearing the grainy images of five children, all dark-haired and solemn-eyed, their names and ages—Maurice, 14; Martha 12; Louis, 9; Jennie, 8; Betty, 5—stenciled beneath, along with speculation about what happened to them. Fayetteville was and is a small town, with a main street that doesn’t run longer than a hundred yards, and rumors always played a larger role in the case than evidence; no one even agreed on whether the children were dead or alive. What everyone knew for certain was this: On the night before Christmas 1945, George and Jennie Sodder and nine of their 10 children went to sleep (one son was away in the Army). Around 1 a.m., a fire broke out. George and Jennie and four of their children escaped, but the other five were never seen again.

George had tried to save them, breaking a window to re-enter the house, slicing a swath of skin from his arm. He could see nothing through the smoke and fire, which had swept through all of the downstairs rooms: living and dining room, kitchen, office, and his and Jennie’s bedroom. He took frantic stock of what he knew: 2-year-old Sylvia, whose crib was in their bedroom, was safe outside, as was 17-year-old Marion and two sons, 23-year-old John and 16-year-old George Jr., who had fled the upstairs bedroom they shared, singeing their hair on the way out. He figured Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie and Betty still had to be up there, cowering in two bedrooms on either end of the hallway, separated by a staircase that was now engulfed in flames.

He raced back outside, hoping to reach them through the upstairs windows, but the ladder he always kept propped against the house was strangely missing. An idea struck: He would drive one of his two coal trucks up to the house and climb atop it to reach the windows. But even though they’d functioned perfectly the day before, neither would start now. He ransacked his mind for another option. He tried to scoop water from a rain barrel but found it frozen solid. Five of his children were stuck somewhere inside those great, whipping ropes of smoke. He didn’t notice that his arm was slick with blood, that his voice hurt from screaming their names.

His daughter Marion sprinted to a neighbor’s home to call the Fayetteville Fire Department but couldn’t get any operator response. A neighbor who saw the blaze made a call from a nearby tavern, but again no operator responded. Exasperated, the neighbor drove into town and tracked down Fire Chief F.J. Morris, who initiated Fayetteville’s version of a fire alarm: a “phone tree” system whereby one firefighter phoned another, who phoned another. The fire department was only two and a half miles away but the crew didn’t arrive until 8 a.m., by which point the Sodders’ home had been reduced to a smoking pile of ash.

George and Jeannie assumed that five of their children were dead, but a brief search of the grounds on Christmas Day turned up no trace of remains. Chief Morris suggested that the blaze had been hot enough to completely cremate the bodies. A state police inspector combed the rubble and attributed the fire to faulty wiring. George covered the basement with five feet of dirt, intending to preserve the site as a memorial. The coroner’s office issued five death certificates just before the new year, attributing the causes to “fire or suffocation.”

But the Sodders had begun to wonder if their children were still alive.

The missing Sodder children. From left: Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, Betty.

George Sodder was born Giorgio Soddu in Tula, Sardinia in 1895, and immigrated to the United States in 1908, when he was 13. An older brother who had accompanied him to Ellis Island immediately returned to Italy, leaving George on his own. He found work on the Pennsylvania railroads, carrying water and supplies to the laborers, and after a few years moved to Smithers, West Virginia. Smart and ambitious, he first worked as a driver and then launched his own trucking company, hauling dirt for construction and later freight and coal. One day he walked into a local store called the Music Box and met the owners’ daughter, Jennie Cipriani, who had come over from Italy when she was 3.

They married and had 10 children between 1923 and 1943, and settled in Fayetteville, West Virginia, an Appalachian town with a small but active Italian immigrant community. The Sodders were, said one county magistrate, “one of the most respected middle-class families around.” George held strong opinions about everything from business to current events and politics, but was, for some reason, reticent to talk about his youth. He never explained what had happened back in Italy to make him want to leave.

The Sodders planted flowers across the space where their house had stood and began to stitch together a series of odd moments leading up to the fire. There was a stranger who appeared at the home a few months earlier, back in the fall, asking about hauling work. He meandered to the back of the house, pointed to two separate fuse boxes, and said, “This is going to cause a fire someday.” Strange, George thought, especially since he had just had the wiring checked by the local power company, which pronounced it in fine condition. Around the same time, another man tried to sell the family life insurance and became irate when George declined. “Your goddamn house is going up in smoke,” he warned, “and your children are going to be destroyed. You are going to be paid for the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini.” George was indeed outspoken about his dislike for the Italian dictator, occasionally engaging in heated arguments with other members of Fayetteville’s Italian community, and at the time didn’t take the man’s threats seriously. The older Sodder sons also recalled something peculiar: Just before Christmas, they noticed a man parked along U.S. Highway 21, intently watching the younger kids as they came home from school.

Around 12:30 Christmas morning, after the children had opened a few presents and everyone had gone to sleep, the shrill ring of the telephone broke the quiet. Jennie rushed to answer it. An unfamiliar female voice asked for an unfamiliar name. There was raucous laughter and glasses clinking in the background. Jennie said, “You have the wrong number,” and hung up. Tiptoeing back to bed, she noticed that all of the downstairs lights were still on and the curtains open. The front door was unlocked. She saw Marion asleep on the sofa in the living room and assumed that the other kids were upstairs in bed. She turned out the lights, closed the curtains, locked the door and returned to her room. She had just begun to doze when she heard one sharp, loud bang on the roof, and then a rolling noise. An hour later she was roused once again, this time by heavy smoke curling into her room.

Jennie Sodder holding John, her first child.

Jennie couldn’t understand how five children could perish in a fire and leave no bones, no flesh, nothing. She conducted a private experiment, burning animal bones—chicken bones, beef joints, pork chop bones—to see if the fire consumed them. Each time she was left with a heap of charred bones. She knew that remnants of various household appliances had been found in the burned-out basement, still identifiable. An employee at a crematorium informed her that bones remain after bodies are burned for two hours at 2,000 degrees. Their house was destroyed in 45 minutes.

The collection of odd moments grew. A telephone repair man told the Sodders that their lines appeared to have been cut, not burned. They realized that if the fire had been electrical—the result of “faulty wiring,” as the official reported stated—then the power would have been dead, so how to explain the lighted downstairs rooms? A witness came forward claiming he saw a man at the fire scene taking a block and tackle used for removing car engines; could he be the reason George’s trucks refused to start? One day, while the family was visiting the site, Sylvia found a hard rubber object in the yard. Jennie recalled hearing the hard thud on the roof, the rolling sound. George concluded it was a napalm “pineapple bomb” of the type used in warfare.

Then came the reports of sightings. A woman claimed to have seen the missing children peering from a passing car while the fire was in progress. A woman operating a tourist stop between Fayetteville and Charleston, some 50 miles west, said she saw the children the morning after the fire. “I served them breakfast,” she told police. “There was a car with Florida license plates at the tourist court, too.” A woman at a Charleston hotel saw the children’s photos in a newspaper and said she had seen four of the five a week after the fire. “The children were accompanied by two women and two men, all of Italian extraction,” she said in a statement. “I do not remember the exact date. However, the entire party did register at the hotel and stayed in a large room with several beds. They registered about midnight. I tried to talk to the children in a friendly manner, but the men appeared hostile and refused to allow me to talk to these children…. One of the men looked at me in a hostile manner; he turned around and began talking rapidly in Italian. Immediately, the whole party stopped talking to me. I sensed that I was being frozen out and so I said nothing more. They left early the next morning.”

In 1947, George and Jennie sent a letter about the case to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and received a reply from J. Edgar Hoover: “Although I would like to be of service, the matter related appears to be of local character and does not come within the investigative jurisdiction of this bureau.” Hoover’s agents said they would assist if they could get permission from the local authorities, but the Fayetteville police and fire departments declined the offer.

Next the Sodders turned to a private investigator named C.C. Tinsley, who discovered that the insurance salesman who had threatened George was a member of the coroner’s jury that deemed the fire accidental. He also heard a curious story from a Fayetteville minister about F.J. Morris, the fire chief. Although Morris had claimed no remains were found, he supposedly confided that he’d discovered “a heart” in the ashes. He hid it inside a dynamite box and buried it at the scene.

Tinsley persuaded Morris to show them the spot. Together they dug up the box and took it straight to a local funeral director, who poked and prodded the “heart” and concluded it was beef liver, untouched by the fire. Soon afterward, the Sodders heard rumors that the fire chief had told others that the contents of the box had not been found in the fire at all, that he had buried the beef liver in the rubble in the hope that finding any remains would placate the family enough to stop the investigation.

Over the next few years the tips and leads continued to come. George saw a newspaper photo of schoolchildren in New York City and was convinced that one of them was his daughter Betty. He drove to Manhattan in search of the child, but her parents refused to speak to him. In August 1949, the Sodders decided to mount a new search at the fire scene and brought in a Washington, D.C. pathologist named Oscar B. Hunter. The excavation was thorough, uncovering several small objects: damaged coins, a partly burned dictionary and several shards of vertebrae. Hunter sent the bones to the Smithsonian Institution, which issued the following report:

The human bones consist of four lumbar vertebrae belonging to one individual. Since the transverse recesses are fused, the age of this individual at death should have been 16 or 17 years. The top limit of age should be about 22 since the centra, which normally fuse at 23, are still unfused. On this basis, the bones show greater skeletal maturation than one would expect for a 14-year-old boy (the oldest missing Sodder child). It is however possible, although not probable, for a boy 14 ½ years old to show 16-17 maturation.

The vertebrae showed no evidence that they had been exposed to fire, the report said, and “it is very strange that no other bones were found in the allegedly careful evacuation of the basement of the house.” Noting that the house reportedly burned for only about half an hour or so, it said that “one would expect to find the full skeletons of the five children, rather than only four vertebrae.” The bones, the report concluded, were most likely in the supply of dirt George used to fill in the basement to create the memorial for his children.

Flyer about the Sodder children.

The Smithsonian report prompted two hearings at the Capitol in Charleston, after which Governor Okey L. Patterson and State Police Superintendent W.E. Burchett told the Sodders their search was “hopeless” and declared the case closed. Undeterred, George and Jennie erected the billboard along Route 16 and passed out flyers offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of their children. They soon increased the amount to $10,000. A letter arrived from a woman in St. Louis saying the oldest girl, Martha, was in a convent there. Another tip came from Texas, where a patron in a bar overheard an incriminating conversation about a long-ago Christmas Eve fire in West Virginia. Someone in Florida claimed the children were staying with a distant relative of Jennie’s. George traveled the country to investigate each lead, always returning home without any answers.

In 1968, more than 20 years after the fire, Jennie went to get the mail and found an envelope addressed only to her. It was postmarked in Kentucky but had no return address. Inside was a photo of a man in his mid-20s. On its flip side a cryptic handwritten note read: “Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Ilil Boys. A90132 or 35.” She and George couldn’t deny the resemblance to their Louis, who was 9 at the time of the fire. Beyond the obvious similarities—dark curly hair, dark brown eyes—they had the same straight, strong nose, the same upward tilt of the left eyebrow. Once again they hired a private detective and sent him to Kentucky. They never heard from him again.

Alleged photo of an older Louis Sodder.

The Sodders feared that if they published the letter or the name of the town on the postmark they might harm their son. Instead, they amended the billboard to include the updated image of Louis and hung an enlarged version over the fireplace. “Time is running out for us,” George said in an interview. “But we only want to know. If they did die in the fire, we want to be convinced. Otherwise, we want to know what happened to them.”

He died a year later, in 1968, still hoping for a break in the case. Jennie erected a fence around her property and began adding rooms to her home, building layer after layer between her and the outside. Since the fire she had worn black exclusively, as a sign of mourning, and continued to do so until her own death in 1989. The billboard finally came down. Her children and grandchildren continued the investigation and came up with theories of their own: The local mafia had tried to recruit him and he declined. They tried to extort money from him and he refused. The children were kidnapped by someone they knew—someone who burst into the unlocked front door, told them about the fire, and offered to take them someplace safe. They might not have survived the night. If they had, and if they lived for decades—if it really was Louis in that photograph—they failed to contact their parents only because they wanted to protect them.

The youngest and last surviving Sodder child, Sylvia, is now 69, and doesn’t believe her siblings perished in the fire. When time permits, she visits crime sleuthing websites and engages with people still interested in her family’s mystery. Her very first memories are of that night in 1945, when she was 2 years old. She will never forget the sight of her father bleeding or the terrible symphony of everyone’s screams, and she is no closer now to understanding why.

The Baltic Sea anomaly is a 60-metre (200 ft) circular rock-like formation on the floor of the Baltic Sea, discovered by Peter Lindberg, Dennis Åsberg and their Swedish “Ocean X” diving team in June 2011. The team reported that the formation rests on a pillar and includes a structure similar in appearance to a staircase, leading to a dark hole.

Commentators have suggested that the structure could be a World War II anti-submarine device, a battleship gun turret, sediment dropped by a fishing trawler, or a flying saucer. Several experts have stated that it is most likely a natural geological formation.

The discovery was made on June 19, 2011 by the Swedish based “Ocean X Team” during a dive in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland while searching for an old shipwreck. The group describes themselves as treasure hunters and salvage operators who specialize in underwater searches for sunken “antique high-end alcoholic beverages and historic artefacts”. In March 2012, Ocean X formalized a partnership with entertainment producers Titan TV to produce a TV documentary series and documentary film.

According to Ocean X, the formation has an appearance of “rough granite”, is round, 3 to 4 metres (9.8 to 13.1 ft) thick and approximately 60 metres (200 ft) in diameter, stands on an 8-meter (26 ft) tall pillar-like feature, and is located at a depth of 85 to 90 metres (279 to 295 ft). There is also another smaller object not far away. The object is at the end of what resembles a 300-metre (980 ft) “runway”.

The Ocean X team has published one additional close-up sonar scan on their Web site and nine additional close-up sonar scans on their YouTube page that appear to show a 90-degree angle and other features of the object.

On their second expedition, they reported that they found something that looks like a staircase and a round black hole that goes directly into the structure.

“It is not an object which is man made in modern time. What ever it is it’s either from during the ice age or pre-ice age.” – Peter Lindberg, February 24, 2013 “The object is older than 140.000 yrs. Older than that… with straight angles/lines – rounded corners… much like a “dinner plate” and separate from the base below.”

– Dennis Asberg, September 28, 2012

There are THREE objects of interest – 1) the main 60 meter circular anomaly, 2) a smaller secondary object lying approx. 200 meters from the 1st anomaly with an area shaped like two “Gothic church windows” and 3) a third anomaly – a 28 meters high and 275 meters wide rock outcrop with a crack running through it, lying some 1500 metres South of the circular object, direct on the other end of the “trail”. The team has stated Anomaly 2 might turn out to be the most interesting than the first, and they plan to dive on it this time around.

There are two holes on the anomaly. One is 25 centimeters in diameter, and the other is 2 meters surrounded by a square formation. It’s not yet known where the holes lead. “What I do not believe because I know, is the fact that we found a round hole approx 25 cm in diameter going straight into the surface of the circle, how odd is not that? How deep? No idea, we just saw it for some seconds before we decided to back off to preserve the visibility for the divers that was going down later on.

It looks like there are stair-like structures on the top right side (North-East) as well as the lower bottom left (South-West) of the 60 meter circular object. (Peter confirmed the “staircase” reference was only an example to describe what he saw and that steps on the lower south-west side are comprised of 8 steps with each step a 1 meter drop starting from the missing section on the left.)

“The staircase comment was slipped from my mouth, and probably too early. I have seen something that looks like a stair, or steps, on the Multi Beam raw data. And it looks like they are going from the missing part on the left side of the side scan image from last year and down to the bottom. I could only count eight of them and that should mean that every step should be like a meter high which is a bit to high for a person to use. If there actually are something that looks like steps they probably just natural.”

“Someone asked about the stairs, there is stair shaped formations but I do not know if I have got it right. I thought they were on one side but on the Multi beam image they appeared to be on an other side. I will come back to the stairs when I can study an image from a different angle.

– Peter Lindberg, – June 28, 2012

While it seems that in recent days the case of Jack the Ripper has had the spotlight shone on it, and has been slowly brought out into the light, there are still some murder mysteries that have stood the test of time, and have over the years gained a reputation for their bizarreness as much as for their gore. One such mystery comes from the majestic alpine forests of the German state of Bavaria. The idyllic mountain scenery and pristine nature here seem to be an unusual location for violent murder, yet in 1922 one quiet farmstead by the name of Hinterkaifeck was the setting for one of the most brutal, mysterious, and perplexing murders in German history.

Hinterkaifeck was a farm located within the woods outside Groebern, between the Bavarian towns of Ingolstadt and Schrobenhausen, about an hour’s drive from Munich. The farm was occupied by a family called the Gruebers, which consisted of the husband Andreas, his wife Cazilia, their middle aged, widowed daughter Viktoria, and their two grandchildren Cäzilia (7) and Josef (2). They lived in relative isolation, their farm being nestled away in a forest 1km away from the main town of Kaifeck.

The Hinterkaifeck farm

Despite the remoteness of their farm, the well-off family was fairly well known in the area, although not for the best of reasons. Andreas Grueber was known as an unfriendly loner who beat his wife on a regular basis and was not well liked by the town folk. It was also rumored that the youngest grandchild, little 2 year old Josef, was the result of an incestuous relationship between Adreas and his daughter Viktoria. Andreas was reportedly so obsessed and infatuated with Viktoria that he had actively forbidden her to marry again and kept her under his strict control. In addition to mistreating his wife, Andreas was also known to be severely abusive with his own children, of which Viktoria was the only survivor. In general, the family was sullen, reclusive, and mostly kept to themselves. The only one that had a relatively good reputation in the town was Viktoria, who had a remarkably beautiful voice and sang on the church choir.

The farm’s descent into true strangeness started when the maid suddenly quit her job and wished to leave immediately. When asked why she had so suddenly decided to abruptly leave, Maria explained that she had been hearing strange voices and other noises in and around the house, as well as the sound of disembodied footsteps emanating from the attic. The terror stricken maid had become convinced that the house was haunted and wished to stay there not a moment longer. She was reportedly white faced and emaciated when she said her final goodbyes. After her departure, the Gruebers chalked it up to the poor woman being simply mentally disturbed.

Six months later, things got more bizarre when in the middle of March, 1922, Andreas was surveying his property after a snowstorm and discovered odd footprints in the snow that originated in the thick surrounding forest and led right up to the house. Eerily, there were no footprints to be found that actually led back out to the woods. Andreas searched all around the property looking for any further sign of the mysterious tracks, but there were none. Alarmed that a potentially dangerous intruder could be hiding in his home, Andreas conducted a thorough search of the house, and even the barn and tool shed, but found no further footprints and no sign of an intruder.

That same night, Andreas was awoken by strange, inexplicable noises coming from the attic. Remembering what the maid had said about ghosts and the noises from the attic, he checked there too, but found nobody hiding there. With apparently nobody hiding on the property and no footprints leading back out into the woods, it seemed like the trespasser had simply vanished. Satisfied that no one was there yet still a bit unsettled, Andreas went to bed only to wake up the next morning to find a strange newspaper on his porch that no one in the family recognized. Not long after that, on March 30th, 1922, a set of keys to the house mysteriously disappeared and could not be found anywhere. In his search for the keys, Andreas came upon the disturbing discovery of scratches on the lock to the tool shed, as if someone had tried to pick it.

On May 31st, 1922, amid all of this high strangeness, and a day after the discovery of the lock scratches and the disappearance of the keys, a new maid by the name of Maria Baumgartner came to the house to replace the one that had fled in a panic six months earlier. Maria’s first day on the job would prove to be her last, and this would also be the last day anyone would see the Gruebers alive.

On April 4th, 1922, people in town became concerned about the Gruebers. No one had seen any of the family in days and the older grandchild, Cäzilia, had not been showing up for school. In addition, none of them had been to church and the Grubers’ unclaimed mail had been piling up at the post office. Viktoria in particular was never known to miss church due to her high standing as a member of the choir. A few of the townspeople decided to head out to their property and check up on them to see what was going on. Upon arriving at the farm, the search party’s calls went unanswered. A preliminary check of the outside of the farm turned up no sign of the family, and the whole place had an eerily quiet atmosphere.

They decided to inspect inside the barn, and upon opening the door were met with a gruesome sight. There lying in a pool of blood were the bodies of Andreas, his wife, his daughter Viktoria, and the elder granddaughter Cäzilia. Oddly, their bodies had been carefully stacked on top of each other and covered with hay. The horrified search party proceeded to frantically look for the other members of the family and found them in the farmhouse. The youngest grandchild, Josef was found dead in his cot in his mother’s bedroom, and the maid, Maria, was also found killed in her bed chamber. Both had also bled profusely and were found lying in pools of coagulated blood. In total six people, all five Gruber family members plus one maid, had been brutally killed in cold blood.

Gruesome discovery in the barn

The townspeople immediately called the police, and within hours investigators from the Munich Police Department had arrived at the scene. Preliminary autopsies done on the bodies showed that all of the victims had been killed with blows to the head inflicted by a pickaxe. Viktoria’s body also showed signs of strangulation as well but it was not thought to be the cause of death. The perpetrator was guessed to be very familiar with the use of a pickaxe, since all of the wounds had been precise and confidently delivered, with only a single, decisive blow to the head evident on each corpse and no such wounds to the bodies. All of victims except one were believed to have died instantly, all except Cäzilia, who showed evidence of having survived several hours after being grievously wounded, and tufts of hair had been torn from her head for unknown reasons. Most of the victims were dressed in bed clothes except Viktoria and Cäzilia, who were dressed in regular clothes. This plus the fact that Maria and Josef had been killed in bed suggested that the murders had happened in the evening, right around bed time.

An investigation of the crime scene led police to the conclusion that someone had lured Andreas Gruber, his wife, and his daughter Viktoria into the barn one by one to dispatch them with the pickaxe, after which the murderer had entered the farmhouse to finish off little Josef and the maid as they lay in their beds. It was believed that Viktoria and Cäzilia had likely been the first to arrive and be attacked since they had not been dressed for bed when they had gone out to investigate whatever had drawn them to the barn. One detail that police noticed was that all of the corpses had been covered somehow. The stacked bodies in the bar had been covered with hay, the maid’s body had been covered with bedsheets, and Josef’s body had been covered with one of his mother’s skirts.

A pickaxe, the Hinterkaifeck Killer’s weapon of choice

So far, so scary, but further analysis of the bodies turned up some very unusual findings. The date of death was determined to be Friday, March 31st, 1922, but after questioning the neighbors of the farm, this proved to be rather bizarre. It was found that witnesses near the farmhouse had seen smoke coming from the chimney over the entire weekend, suggesting someone had been home. The house also had evidence that someone had only recently eaten meals there, and one of the beds appeared to have been slept in not long before the bodies had been discovered. In addition, it was found that all of the cattle and livestock were well fed and had recently eaten, which was an odd finding seeing as everyone who typically cared for them had been dead for nearly a week. In fact, none of the animals on the farm had been harmed in any way. The dog, which was found barking in the barn, had been patiently tied up by whoever had killed the family and was shaken but otherwise healthy. This information left investigators rather puzzled, as it implied that whoever had killed the family had done their dark deed and then stayed around for several days feeding the cattle and making themselves at home before fleeing the scene. Why would anyone do that? Nobody knew.

The baffled police went about struggling to find a motive, but came up with more mysteries. At first it was presumed that the motive must have been pure and simple robbery. After all, the Grubers were a very wealthy family and it was not uncommon to find vagrants and thieves in the general area, however, although some paper money had been taken off of the corpses, a significant amount of gold coins and valuable jewelry had been untouched. Surely someone with robbery in mind who had stuck around the farm for days after the murders would have uncovered these valuables? Curiously, it was found that Viktoria had emptied her bank account a few weeks previously and left a 700 goldmark donation to her church for what she’d called “missionary work,” but the rest of her money was unaccounted for. It was not known if this had any connection to the murders, and so it remained merely an odd detail.

The maid’s room

Police then started to suspect that the murders had been a crime of passion. Suspicion fell on a man by the name of Lorenz Schlittenbauer who had been a suitor of Viktoria’s. Viktoria had always claimed to the end that Josef had been Schlittenbauer’s son, but since everyone in the village thought that Josef had been the result of an incestuous affair between Andreas Gruber and Viktoria, it was believed that Schlittenbauer could have lashed out in a jealous fit of rage. It also could have been to escape alimony payments, because it later came to light that Viktoria had been on the verge of suing Schlittenbauer for this right before the murders. Since he had been remarried and with another child at that point, who had sadly died at a young age, having to pay for alimony payments for a child he couldn’t even be certain was really his when his own had died may have been a trigger for the violence.

Other weird little details also seemed to point to Schlittenbauer’s involvement. First off, he just so happened to be one of the members of the original search party who had gone to the farm to look for the Gruebers after they had gone missing. While he had been there, it was reported that the dog tied up in the barn had taken a particular dislike to Schlittenbauer, and had barked profusely at him the whole time he had been there. In addition, one witness said later that Schlittenbauer had seemed to be remarkably unperturbed by the sight of the bloodied bodies, and had been able to unstack the bodies in the barn without showing any sign of disgust. When he had been asked why he was disturbing the corpses before police arrived, he was reported to have said that he needed to find his boy. Beyond such an amazing calmness in the face of such death and violence, Schlittenbauer also demonstrated a beyond normal familiarity with the farm, and was able to navigate his way round the property effortlessly, as if he had spent a lot of time there. All of this certainly raised eyebrows, and Schlittenbauer was questioned extensively by police, but in the end they simply did not have enough concrete evidence to link him to the crime and he was never arrested for it. In fact, to this day no one has ever been arrested for it.

Regardless of who actually committed the murders, there are many other unexplained features of the case. Why did the perpetrator hide out at the farm for so long before making their move? Surely the footprints and noises in the attic must have been those of the murderer, but these events were happening long before the murders took place. If the original maid who quit on the grounds of a haunting had in fact been hearing the murderer, then that would mean the culprit would have been hiding out undiscovered on the property for a full 6 months. In addition, why would the murderer stay nearly a week after the killings, have meals, and even feed the cattle? What purpose could that possibly fulfill? Nobody knows.

The Hinterkaifeck farmhouse

The bodies of the six victims were eventually buried in a graveyard in Waidhofen, without their heads since those had been sent to Munich for analysis and had never been returned. The skulls are thought to have been lost sometime during the chaos of WWII and no one is really sure what happened to them, which is a mystery in and of itself. The six headless bodies are buried alongside a memorial.

The investigation of the Hinterkaifeck murders would ultimately go on for years, with over 100 suspects questioned, without getting police any closer to solving the mystery, and the case has become one of Germany’s most enduring unsolved mysteries. To this day, not a single suspect has ever been apprehended for the crimes. Police got so desperate that at one point they even hired clairvoyants to handle the skulls of the murder victims, to no effect. Over the years, the mysterious murders have become fertile grounds for amateur sleuths to debate and pick apart the case in their search for answers, much like the Jack the Ripper case has stimulated similar ongoing analysis. Many theories from the rational to the fringe have been put forward to try and get a grip on the mystery.

One idea was that Viktoria’s ex-husband, Karl Gabriel, carried out the murders. Although Gabriel had supposedly been killed in the trenches of World War I, his body had never actually been found and had ever received a proper burial, so it was speculated that he may have come back for his wife. Upon hearing of Viktoria’s incestuous relationship with her father and of her involvement with Schlittenbauer, he could have snapped and murdered them all in a crime of passion. This theory was fueled by the reports of two people who came forward claiming to have met a Russian soldier after WWII who had claimed to be the “Hinterkaifeck Killer.” It has been speculated that he originally faked his death to be free of his wife, but had changed his mind and come back only to be less than pleased with what awaited him at home.

Others have pointed to the seemingly paranormal elements of the case, such as the ghosts reported by the original maid on the farm, as well as the strange noises heard by Gruber himself, the mysterious newspaper, and the inexplicable footprints in the snow. In light of these details, there are those who think the culprit was no man at all, but rather some kind of vengeful supernatural force that had set its sights on the family.

The puzzling case poses so many questions and unexplained mysteries, and to this day it is no closer to being solved than it was back in 1922. For its part, the Munich Police Department has on occasion reopened the case. It did so in both 1996 and again in 2007, but on both occasions ran into nothing but dead ends. The police have said that it is likely that the case will never be solved, since so many years have passed, the evidence is scarce or has been lost over the years, witnesses and suspects have died, and because the investigative techniques of those days were fairly primitive, resulting in incomplete records and evidence. That doesn’t stop amateurs from trying, and debate and discussion on the murders is likely to continue for many years to come.

In Germany, the case of the Hinterkaifeck murders has become legendary, and is the subject of several books and movies. The farm itself is long gone, having been demolished in 1923 by villagers unhappy with having such a monument to death and horror still standing in the vicinity. All that stands there now is a monument and the memories and ghosts of those events pervading the quiet trees amongst which a truly terrible crime unfolded all those years ago. It seems that it is a very real possibility that those trees will remain the only ones to know what really transpired here.

Klerksdorp spheres the product of mother nature or human intelligence?

This is a question that has been asked since the discovery of the South African spheres who according to researchers are 2.8 billion years old. The spheres are elliptical in shape with rough ridges around the center. These spheres are balanced in shape and design with features on their surface that some attribute to intelligent design.

According to Michael Cremo (Michael A. Cremo (born July 15, 1948), also known by his devotional name Drutakarm? d?sa, is an American freelance researcher who identifies himself as a Vedic creationist and an “alternative archaeologist”) and other researchers of prehistoric culture, these spheres add to a body of evidence suggesting intelligent life existed on Earth long before a conventional view of history places it here.

According to John Hund, the spheres were submitted for testing at the California Space Institute where researchers concluded based on the tests performed on the spheres, that the balance “is so fine, it exceeded the limit of their measuring technology.” It was “within one-hundred thousandths of an inch from absolute perfection.” This statement was later subtracted by the California Space Institute which denied that anyone told Hund that the object had the extraordinary properties. According to their statement, there have been “some error in transmission” and that Hund had completely misunderstood the information regarding these objects.

Various “researchers” have tried coming forward claiming extraordinary properties in these spheres, but to back up these claims, a significant amount of scientific research needs to be performed on the spheres to conclude and state anything. According to research performed on the spheres, they are found in pyrophyllite a secondary mineral which is quite soft. The spheres have a fibrous structure in the interior with a shell around them. The spheres are very hard and according to researchers it is nearly impossible to scratch them. According to Roelf Marx, curator if the museum of Klerksdorp, South Africa, the spheres are harder then Steel but more research is needed as there are no scientific papers that have been published concerning the globes. The size of the spheres varies over a relatively small range, going from a few millimeters to several centimeters and can be found as large as 10 cm in diameter.

There have been claims that these spheres have a power of rotation, where individuals claimed that the Ottosdal objects had rotated in their museum cases. This according to the museum is false. Vibrations from underground blasting in local gold mines regularly vibrated the museum’s display cases and caused the Ottosdal objects to rotate and it is clear that the claim that these objects rotated under their own power is completely false.

But are they man-made or the result of mother nature? Researchers have debated the origin of these strange objects for years. Some say that they formed in a natural process called concretion. A concretion is a hard, compact mass of matter formed by the precipitation of mineral cement within the spaces between particles, and is found in sedimentary rock or soil. Concretions are often ovoid or spherical in shape, although irregular shapes also occur.

The spheres found in South Africa are inconsistent in shape, meaning that even though there are elliptical spheres with rough edges there are some that are balanced in shape and proportion making the debate between two theories continue until conclusive evidence is presented by either side.

Even though several researchers have claimed that these objects- also called “Spheres” of Ottosdal, are spherical objects according to new research they are neither spherical in shape nor perfectly round.

I have to say even I’m intrigued by this. I could swear it was Bernstein when I was growing up…