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Six people – a family, well-to-do – murdered one-by-one in their own barn, at the hands of a monster unknown.

Sounds like the plot to a classic horror movie, but that’s actually the long-story-short for Germany’s most mysterious unsolved massacre; The Hinterkaifeck Murders.

It happened in 1922, in a rural area of southern Bavaria, on the farmstead known as Hinterkaifeck (which means farm beyond or hidden by the woods) in the small town of Wangen (now Weidhofen).  On the night of March 31, Andreas Gruber (63), his wife Cäzilia (72), their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel (35), along with her two children, Cäzilia (7) and Josef (2), and the new family maid Maria Baumgartner (44), were brutally murdered by persons unknown.  All but Josef and Maria were somehow lured to the barn, one-by-one, and bludgeoned to death with a mattock (similar to a pickaxe).  The killer or killers then entered the house and slaughtered the toddler and the maid in their beds.

It’s really not as cut and dried as that may suggest, though.

It turns out that Maria Baumgartner, the maid, was murdered on her first day on the job, in fact she may have been at the farm for only two to three hours before the first murder took place.  She had been hired as a replacement for the previous maid, who quit approximately six months earlier, claiming that the farm was haunted.

Some sources cite that a few days prior to the 31^st, Gruber had found a trail of foot prints, leading from the edge of the dark forest to the rear of the family home, where they disappeared.  They then tell of Gruber and other members of the family hearing strange footsteps in the attic, finding an unfamiliar newspaper in the home, and one of the two sets of house keys going missing in the intervening days.[1]  Official sources however, claim that on the morning of March 30^th, the day before the murders, Gruber had found that someone had tried to break into his ‘motor cottage’ (or garage), breaking the lock and disturbing the area outside the feed room.  After searching the farmstead for trespassers, he then found a single trail of footprints that led from the woods to the compound.[2]

As mentioned, around 7:30 on the evening of the 31^st, all of the adult family members were somehow lured to the main barn and bludgeoned to death.  Later autopsies confirmed that a mattock, which was later recovered, had been the murder weapon, and the coroner at the time, noted that the wounds were precise, indicating that whomever had done this was at least familiar with the use of such a tool.  After then moving to the main house and using the same weapon on the toddler and maid, they then arranged the bodies in the barn, by stacking them on top of each other, piling hay over them and then covering them with a broken door.  They covered young Josef, in his bassinette, with one of his mother’s dresses and simply laid the maid on her own bed, covering her with a bed sheet.

Whomever committed this heinous act was apparently quite comfortable with what he/she/they had done, as they stayed in the home for several days afterward, feeding the cattle and having meals in the kitchen, just steps from the corpse of Baumgartner.  Neighbours reported seeing smoke rising from the chimney on the following Sunday, and the family dog had been handled and tied up near the barn when the postman arrived on Saturday afternoon.  Unfortunately the dog was later brutalised and left for dead with the family in the barn, though it survived.

The gruesome nature of the crime is story enough, but there’s much weirdness that goes along with this.

It turns out that paternal responsibility for young Josef had long been in question.  Viktoria, who was the official owner of the farmstead, was a rather promiscuous young woman.  Several men later came forward, claiming to have known her intimately, but a veritable war went on between Andreas Gruber and their long time neighbour and widower Lorenz Schlittenbauer.  It seems Schlittenbauer had also been with Viktoria, and it was believed that Josef was his son.  Schlittenbauer was required to make an alimony payment to the family, and retired any rights he had in parentage.  However, during these events Viktoria had elected to marry Schlittenbauer, who was several years her elder, but Gruber objected, and in return allegations of incest were leveled at Gruber, and he was ultimately imprisoned for a year prior to the murders.  It’s now largely believed that Andreas Gruber was Josef’s real father (and grandfather).

The bodies were finally found on Tuesday April 4^th, by Lorenz Schlittenbauer and four other neighbours, who had been alerted to something gone wrong by Gruber’s absence at church that past Sunday, and the absence of the younger Cäzilia at school on the Monday.  They attended Hinterkaifeck late in the afternoon, and following a brief search, found the gruesome scene in the barn.

Subsequent investigation and autopsy saw the corpse’s heads removed for study, which were ultimately lost (most likely in the battle at Nuremberg during WWII), and the bodies were buried, headless, in a local cemetery.  The farmstead was leveled a few years later, and now a monument stands on the site in honour of the departed.

So who did it?

There have been several suspects in the years since, not the least of which was Lorenz Schlittenbauer.  His familiarity with the farmstead and the people involved, coupled with the controversy of his would-be son and almost-wife, gave plenty of room for motive.  In fact, on the morning of the 30^th, Gruber had seen Schlittenbauer at the neighbour’s farm while he tracked the trail of footprints, wherein he warned his neighbour of a possible prowler in the area.  This could have given Schlittenbauer opportunity to commit an atrocious act, while leaving doubt about who may have done it.

Of course, there’s those foot prints.  Someone attended the farm, approached on foot from the wood, and apparently never left.  Yet no strangers or trespassers were found.

An escaped mental patient was also among the suspects.  Joseph Bärtle had slipped away from an asylum at Günzburg in 1921, and was apparently at large, possibly in the area of south Bavaria at the time.

But what if the foot prints weren’t the trail of a man after all?  I give you the Devil’s Footprints.

Found in February of 1855, following a heavy snowfall in Devon, England, were a strange line of tracks of an apparently two-legged creature with cloven-hoof feet.  The strange foot prints were tracked from Exmouth, across the Exe Estuary, to Teignmouth some 40 miles away.  There were, at times, large gaps in the trail, where it appeared that the creature had taken flight and then landed further down-field, and it was said that they appeared on rooftops, in gardens and up walls.  At the time witnesses attributed the tracks to the devil, hence the name, and though the tracks were studied and diagramed, no one has ever come up with an acceptable explanation for what made them.

Now, the Hinterkaifeck foot prints were never photographed, and the description of the tracks doesn’t provide any detail about their appearance.  And the Devil’s Footprints were never associated with any known crimes or otherwise unexplainable events, but one can’t help but see a similarity between the footprints of the Hinterkaifeck Murders and the Devil’s Footprints.

Were the family of Andreas Gruber slaughtered by a disgruntled neighbour, a deranged lunatic, or an otherworldly creature who left its calling card in the form of mysterious footprints?

“Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.”—Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

I wonder if French novelist Victor Hugo realized how true that statement might be when it comes to our disappearing universe? Disappearing universe, you might wonder? What’s that all about?

Well, to explain that, I must first flash back to my recent attendance at a Deepak Chopra lecture. I am not particularly a fan. His financial empire sets off an internal cynic alarm, but I was curious about what this icon was like in person. If I can leave a lecture with one new insight or nugget of information, I’m satisfied.

Most of his talk was predictable, but at one point he mentioned something that piqued my curiosity. He talked about the acceleration of matter in the expanding universe and how all galaxies are racing away from the Big Bang to the point of eventually exceeding the speed of light. It was a simple idea, but inspired some additional reading when I got home.

My area of science is biology, not astrophysics, and it never occurred to me that anything could exceed the speed of light. Yes, there’s the Warp Drive from Star Trek that supposedly creates a warp bubble enabling a ship to do just that. The ship remains in the bubble while the space “warps” around it. But as much as it pains me, the point must be made that Star Trek is still fiction.

Does Relativity Allow for Faster Than Light?

According to what I’ve read, under the special theory of relativity, a particle with subluminal velocity needs infinite energy to accelerate to the speed of light, although special relativity does not rule out the existence of particles that travel faster than light at all times (tachyons). That definition did not offer an entirely clear explanation for a non-astrophysicist, however, so I found a web column titled Ask an Astronaut—run by volunteers at Cornell University—that offered some more digestible insights.

First, the author explains, the universe is, indeed, expanding faster than the speed of light. But we should not think of it as a collection of galaxies all careening away from a central point.

Instead, he likens the universe to “a giant blob of dough with raisins spread throughout it” (raisins equal galaxies; dough equals space). Now imagine the dough is placed in a celestial oven and begins to expand, or more precisely, to stretch, maintaining the same proportions as before but with all the distances between galaxies expanding over time.

This, apparently, is what’s happening out there. Galaxies will eventually race away from us and disappear into the darkness, one by one, as if shut off by an immense omnipotent dimmer switch (albeit, long, long, long after we are all gone from this mortal coil).

Is Seeing Believing?

These galaxies are real, measurable entities that will someday fade beyond our perception. Perhaps millions of them already have and are quietly occupying an unseen pocket of our universe. This concept resonates with me and my personal experiences, the specifics of which I will explain a bit further down in this article. An important point I would like to make here is this: This is a scientific example of something that truly exists, but is beyond our ability to sense. Galaxies that exceed light speed in comparison to our galaxy, will travel too fast for their light to return to us so that we can detect them. However, their invisibility will not make them cease to exist or consign them to the realm of fiction. They’ll still be out there, somewhere, dwelling in an imperceptible cosmos. Any life that exists in those galaxies will forever be beyond our discernment as well.

Why does this resonate with me? I write about science all day, but I am married to a man who has a special ability to sense the invisible. In short, he’s psychic. What I explore in my book, Loitering at the Gate to Eternity, through research and stories is the possible existence of unseen energy beyond the physical realm. To be more specific, my book broaches the idea that maybe, as neuropsychiatrist and former Harvard Medical School instructor Dr. Diane Hennacy-Powell suggests, psychics may possess more sensitive nervous-system antennae than the rest of us. And they may be picking up on an entire plane of energy out there moving at a frequency beyond common observational measurement, like a galaxy traveling beyond the speed of light, like subatomic particles without the aid of instrumentation, or like our thoughts and emotions.

Is the Universe Invisibly Crowded?

Perhaps as Victor Hugo once wrote, “the luminous world IS the invisible world,” something we are too limited to see with “eyes of flesh.” Who knows how many universes and dimensions may exist beyond technology’s grasp? Are there bustling worlds silently surrounding or overlapping with our own? Why not? In a cosmos brimming with diverse energies, anything is possible.

It’s something to contemplate, perhaps even hope for, as we gaze into the night skies and fondly remember the faces, words and nuances of our departed who sometimes seem to exist only in the ghosts of our memories.

Did you see headlines like this over the last few days?  “The Woman Who Can Will Herself Out Of Her Body” or “Scientists unlock mystery of out-of-body experiences (aka astral trips)”, or even “Out-of-body experiences are the result of unusual brain activity, study claims”?

If you just read the headline and not the linked articles, you might have gotten the wrong impression.  Actually, even if you did read the article you may still have gotten it mixed up, but that’s not really your fault.

All three of those headlines, and a host of others, refer to a “study” published 10 February, 2014 in the science magazine Frontiers, titled Voluntary out-of-body-experience, an fMRI study.[1]  The story broke via a Popular Science Magazine article by Douglas Main, titled The Woman Who Can Will Herself Out Of Her Body.

It’s an interesting story.  An unnamed Canadian woman, an undergraduate student at the University of Ottawa, whom had attended a lecture on out-of-body-experiences, came forward claiming that she has the ability to leave her body at will.  To qualify that, her claim is that she, since childhood, has been able to induce a state of being that to her feels like she has left her body, whenever she wants.

At face value, this claim is no different than any other claim that a person can somehow leave their physical form in a non-corporeal state, and exist as some form of energy or body-less soul in the environment of their physical location.  Also known as astral projection or astral travel, this is a phenomenon that has been known to occult, metaphysical, and spiritual circles for many, many years.  And while those who undertake the practice, whether voluntary or not, seem to have no doubt that the experience is real, there is relatively little evidence to support it as a real phenomenon, as opposed to an hallucination.

Anyway, after coming forward, this woman underwent an fMRI “study” in the hopes that researchers might be able to see what was happening in her brain during such an episode.  What they found is impressive and interesting, but it doesn’t mean what the authors of those headlines mentioned above think it means.

There are a significant number of caveats that need to be put forward before anyone can really understand what happened here.

1)      This wasn’t a study.  It was an fMRI procedure that was described and discussed in a pseudo-research paper.  The output of the procedure is a technical readout that required interpretation by experts, but the fact that it was a single participant, and not a group of people surveyed and assessed with controls and blinding, means it’s not a study.

2)      The cited paper didn’t make any of the claims that the subsequent articles suggested, like the statement that science has “unlocked” out-of-body-experience, or that this woman can leave her body at will.  It says only that, during periods of time when she feels like she has achieved this astral trip, the brain imaging revealed the quoted results.  It does not confirm out-of-body-experience in any way.

3)      The publication in which the paper appeared, is not a peer-reviewed journal.  It is (self-described) as an “open source, community based academic publisher”.  It is reputable and is a valuable resource, but much of what appears on its website is suppositional commentary on on-going research.  It does have a community driven review forum, but this is not the same as peer-review publication.

4)      The purpose of the “study” was not to confirm or deny out-of-body-experiences.  It was to determine what goes on in the brain of a person who undergoes the experience, whatever that experience may actually be.

Now, to the result.  It turns out that when this woman undertook her astral trip during the fMRI procedure, the results showed significant deviation in her neural activity in the parts of her brain related to both visual processing and motor control.  And there was a significant activation in the area of her brain that is related to kinesthetic awareness (where your body parts are in relation to the rest of you).

This is fascinating, if you’re interested in neuroscience and psychology.  It provides insights into the way in which our brains organize and process sensory information, and the physiology of altered states of consciousness.

As mentioned though, it does not prove the case for out-of-body-experience.  The authors of the paper used the word hallucination several times throughout the paper as a label for what was happening, and it’s as good a word as any.  The woman involved claims that her experience is real, but this hasn’t been tested, at least in scientific terms, as it could have been with little effort.  The only evidence that she has this ability is her own claim that she does so.

The possibility does exist.  Most certainly.  But that’s really a separate issue from the “study” in question.

There is much better research that offers much better chances for finding answers in this regard.  Dr. Sam Parnia and his AWARE Study (which actually is a study) through the Human Consciousness Project is a prime example of what’s being done.  There’s also Dr. Dean Radin’s veritable mountain of research, experiments, and testable theories, among many other talented and brilliant scientists who focus on these subjects.  So with that in mind, why would anyone choose to place so much emphasis on a non-study-study that doesn’t say what they want it to say?

I leave you with the following:

“The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to truth.” — Scott Adams

As amazing as our highly evolved brains are – and even in spite of evidence to the contrary in our culture, it is an amazing organ – they are really not to be trusted.  Outside of a discussion of existential psychology – which might suggest that what we think we know as reality, is nothing more than an elaborate dream – our brains primary function is to fool us into thinking that things are certain ways, when they really are not.

Astral travel may well be real, or at least no less real than any other form of reality, but how are we to differentiate between an hallucination and an unquantified experience confined to your head?

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