This true tale of terror takes place nearly a century ago, on a small, isolated German farm named Hinterkaifeck.
Sometime around mid-March of 1922, the farm's owner, Andreas Gruber, began to notice a lot of ominous things happening on his property.
He found weird footprints, keys went missing, unknown items mysteriously showed up, and the family began hearing footsteps in the attic.
It seems that people were less sensitive to obviously terrifying things back in the good old days, because the Grubers shrugged off the weirdness and went back to waxing their mustaches, souring their kraut, and whatever else German families occupied themselves with in the 1920s.
They probably should have checked that attic, though.
On the evening of March 31, 1922, Andreas, his wife, his daughter, his two grandchildren, and the maid were all brutally killed by someone wielding a mattock (a tool that's half pickax, half ax, and all deadly).
At least whoever did this wasn't a completely terrible guest, though, since the animals were well fed when the family's bodies were discovered four days later.
To this day, the identity of the killer remains a hotly contested mystery, but given that the victims were named Gruber and the murderer had a penchant for skulking around above the ceiling, it's hard not to imagine the suspect as some sort of psychotic German John McClane.
