In 1922, on a chilly spring afternoon in the Bavarian countryside, two coffee traders trudged through a dense stretch of woods until they arrived at a secluded farmstead on the forest's edge.

The two men approached the main residence with their burlap bags of coffee beans and knocked on the front door, ready to fill an order placed by the farm's owners.

But as they waited for someone to answer, they began to register this eerie emptiness all around them,

an emptiness that felt like it was closing in on them.

The farm was usually alive with the buzz of the family that lived there.

But today, the only signs of life they could hear were the bellowing sounds of hungry cattle in the barn

and a dog barking somewhere in the vicinity. The coffee traders knocked on the door once more,

but again, no one answered. So they started walking the perimeter of the house, wrapping on

windows as they went, trying all of the doors only to find each of them locked.

Now, three days later, another visitor journeyed out to the farm, and this time it was an engine

mechanic with a work order who also arrived to find the farm completely desolate, void of any

sign of the family that lived there. He even tried making his presence known with a loud

whistle, but the only reply he got was the same barking dog and the same mooing cow. After about

an hour of this, he just went ahead and broke the lock of the engine room so he could get started

on his work order. The mechanic didn't know the family

that lived there personally, but he had heard around town that the patriarch, the old farmer named

Andreas Gruber, was an eccentric workhorse who spent all day out in the fields and wouldn't

come home until pretty late. But even still, the mechanic was at the Gruber Farm for over five hours,

and he never saw a sign of a single other person.

The mechanic finished his work, he closed up the engine room,

and he continued on to his next appointment.

And on his way there, he encountered some young women from the neighboring Schlittenbauer farm. He briefly stopped to chat

...