In 1898, the Harz Mountains, that gloomy mountain region between Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, harbored a secret that would only come to light decades later.
Between the dense spruce forests and mist-shrouded valleys, about 8 km south of Clausthal-Zellerfeld, stood a farmstead that locals simply referred to as the Folling estate. The Folling family was not unknown in the region. Heinrich Folling, a middle-aged man with a weather-beaten face, farmed the remote property together with his wife, Martha.
What the neighbors did not know for years, however, was the number of children living on this secluded farm. Pastor Wilhelm Brenner from the nearby village of Altenau had been meticulously keeping records of all births, deaths, and marriages in his parish since 1892. When he took an inventory of his church books in 1899, he encountered a strange discrepancy.
The Folling family was indeed recorded in his documents; Heinrich and Martha had married in 1870, and a son named Johann had been baptized in 1888. But Pastor Brenner clearly remembered seeing far more children during his rare visits to the remote farm. On October 12, 1899, Pastor Brenner set out on the arduous journey to the Folling farm.
The path was little more than a narrow trail winding through the thick undergrowth. When he reached the homestead, he was met with a sight he would never forget. In front of the weathered wooden hut, it wasn’t two or three children playing, as his records suggested, but thirteen.
Thirteen children of various ages, from toddlers to teenagers, moved quietly and orderly around the estate. Their clothing was simple but clean. Their faces showed a peculiar calm, as if they had learned not to draw any attention to themselves. When Pastor Brenner approached Heinrich Folling about the missing birth certificates, the latter answered evasively: “The children are all here, Pastor. God has blessed us richly.”
When asked about the church records, Heinrich only shrugged his shoulders. “Papers sometimes get lost in these mountains.” What particularly troubled Pastor Brenner was the way the children behaved. They did not speak unless addressed directly.
They moved quietly, almost noiselessly, across the farmyard, and their eyes—their eyes seemed to harbor a caution that was unusual for children of that age. The pastor left the farm with more questions than answers. In his diary that evening, he noted: “The Folling estate harbors secrets that cannot be understood with ordinary explanations. Thirteen children and only one of them recorded in my books.”
The Folling farm lay in a valley enclosed by high spruces. The nearest inhabited building was over three kilometers away—a circumstance that offered the family the seclusion they apparently sought. The two-story farmhouse made of dark wood and fieldstone seemed firmly rooted in the landscape, as if it had slowly grown out of the ground over generations.
Martha Folling managed the household with military precision. Every morning at 5:00 AM, a small bell rang, calling the children to get up. Breakfast consisted of thin oatmeal and occasionally a piece of black bread. Meals took place in complete silence. Conversations were not desired.
Laughter was rarely heard. Heinrich Folling dedicated himself primarily to agriculture. His small farm yielded just enough to feed the large family. The older children helped with the field work, while the younger ones were assigned to household chores. Each child had their fixed task, their place in the rigid order of the farm.
What struck the few visitors who occasionally found their way to the Folling farm was the extraordinary discipline of the children. They obeyed immediately and without contradiction. They asked no questions. They did not cry when they hurt themselves. It was as if they had learned to be invisible.
The village messenger, Karl Meering, who delivered mail to the remote farmsteads once a month, later recalled: “These children were like shadows. You didn’t hear them coming. You didn’t hear them going. And if you spoke to them, they only answered with ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir’.” The interior of the house was sparsely furnished.
On the ground floor were the kitchen, a small living room, and Heinrich and Martha’s bedroom. The upper floor was divided into three rooms: one for the boys, one for the girls, and a third whose door always remained locked. On winter evenings, the family sat around the large wooden table in the kitchen. Martha read the Bible aloud while the children listened in complete silence.
Heinrich smoked his pipe and stared into the fire. There were no conversations about the day, about wishes, or dreams. The silence was so thick that the cracking of the wood in the fireplace sounded like claps of thunder. At night, when the house was shrouded in darkness, faint noises could occasionally be heard from the upper floor.
Sometimes it was a slight creaking of the floorboards, sometimes a barely audible sigh. But in the morning, everything was as usual: quiet, orderly, controlled. In March 1900, a seemingly insignificant incident occurred that nonetheless set a chain of events in motion. The local gendarme, Friedrich Wiesner, received a report from a woodcutter who had discovered small tombstones in the woods near the Folling farm.
The stones were roughly hewn and bore only initials and years. Wiesner was a conscientious official who took his duty seriously. On March 15, he made his way to the Folling farm to question Heinrich about the finds. When he reached the estate, he was met with the same image as Pastor Brenner: thirteen children of different ages quietly attending to their tasks.
Heinrich received the gendarme politely but with reserve. To the question about the tombstones, he replied evasively: “Many people rest in these mountains, Mr. Wiesner. Many a family has buried their loved ones on their own land, especially during harsh winters when the paths to the cemeteries were impassable.” But Wiesner did not let up.
He asked for the names of the thirteen children, their birthdays, and the missing entries in the church books. Heinrich became increasingly monosyllabic with every question. Martha, who was present during the conversation, did not speak a single word. What particularly bothered Wiesner was the reaction of the children. They had interrupted their work and were now standing in a line in front of the house like soldiers at an inspection.
Their faces were expressionless, their posture rigid. The youngest child, a girl of about four years, held the hand of an older boy as if seeking protection. When Wiesner asked about the locked room on the upper floor, Heinrich’s expression stiffened. “That is a family matter, Mr. Wiesner. In every house, there are rooms that should remain private.”
The gendarme left the farm with an uneasy feeling. In his report, he noted: “Family Folling shows unusual behavior. 13 children without corresponding documentation. Further investigation required.” Three days later, Wiesner returned to the farm with Pastor Brenner, but this time they only found nine children.
To the question about the missing four children, Heinrich replied: “They are visiting relatives in Goslar.” A visit to relatives for which there were no records, no letters, no traces. Pastor Brenner insisted on questioning all the children present, but none of them could or would give information about the missing siblings.
They only answered with “Don’t know” or remained completely silent. In the following weeks, a peculiar form of collective repression developed in the community. The villagers had known the Folling family for years as reserved but upright people. Heinrich was a hard worker, Martha a god-fearing woman.
No one wanted to accept that something was wrong. Pastor Brenner sought conversation with older community members. Elisabeth Kramer, a 70-year-old widow who farmed a small homestead not far from the Follings, had a simple explanation: “Heinrich and Martha were always fond of children. Perhaps they took in orphans, poor children whose parents had died. Papers get lost quickly in such times.”
The mayor of Altenau, Hermann Koch, shared this view: “The Follings run a Christian house. If they give a home to children who have no one else, then that is a work of charity.” He did not mention that laws might have been broken in the process.
Even Gendarme Wiesner began to doubt his concerns. His superiors in Clausthal-Zellerfeld showed little interest in the case. “As long as there are no concrete criminal acts,” the police commissioner told him, “we should concentrate on more important matters.” The four disappeared children became a topic that no one wanted to address.
Whenever someone asked about them, the answer was that they had been sent to relatives. The fact that no one knew these relatives apparently bothered no one. In the summer of 1900, the situation seemed to normalize. The Folling farm lay secluded in its valley once again. The remaining nine children went about their daily tasks, and the village community had found a way to suppress the uncomfortable questions.
But beneath the surface of this forced normalcy, something else grew—a feeling of unease that persisted stubbornly. The few people who visited the farm reported a peculiar atmosphere. “It is as if the house itself remains silent,” said the blacksmith Johann Brenner, a cousin of the pastor.
The winter of 1901 was particularly hard. Meters of snow isolated the remote farmsteads from the outside world for weeks. When spring came and the paths became passable again, Pastor Brenner made his first visit to the Folling farm in months. What he found shocked him. The estate appeared dilapidated. The shutters hung crooked on their hinges.
The farmyard was overgrown with weeds, and there were only seven children left. Heinrich Folling had aged significantly during the winter months. His hair had turned gray, and deep furrows lined his face. Martha no longer spoke to strangers at all. She only nodded briefly and disappeared into the house. The remaining children looked emaciated and pale.
Their clothes were patched and worn out. But the most disturbing thing was their behavior. They moved like automatons, mechanically and without any expression of joy. Pastor Brenner carefully asked about the missing children. Heinrich replied with a cracking voice: “The winter was hard, Pastor, very hard.” He gave no more detailed answer.
Instead, he led the pastor through the farm and showed him the damage that cold and snow had caused. But Pastor Brenner noticed something else. The small wooden hut behind the main house, which had previously served as a shed, was no longer there. In its place was only a rectangular patch of leveled earth.
“What happened to the shed?” the pastor asked. “Collapsed under the weight of the snow,” Heinrich replied curtly. “We needed the wood for the stove.” But as Pastor Brenner looked closer, he noticed that the ground at this spot looked different. The earth was darker, as if it had been recently churned up.
On the way back to the village, Pastor Brenner met old Elisabeth Kramer. She reported to him that during the winter months, she had several times heard peculiar noises coming from the direction of the Folling farm. “In the nights, Pastor. Sometimes it sounded like shovels striking frozen earth.” What had really happened in those winter months was only reconstructed years later.
A diary found in 1962 during renovation work in the wall of the Folling house provided insight into the lives of the children. The diary was kept by Elisabeth Folling, one of the oldest girls. The entries began in November 1900 and ended abruptly in February 1901. “November 15, 1900: Heinrich told us that everything will be different this winter. We are no longer allowed to leave the house. Martha has become ill. She talks to herself and looks at us as if she doesn’t recognize us.”
“December 3, 1900: Karl and Friedrich did not appear for dinner today. Heinrich says they have been taken to the relatives, but it has snowed and the paths are impassable.”
“December 18, 1900: Anna did not wake up this morning. Heinrich and Martha took her away. They said the doctor in town could help her. But why did they wrap her in a blanket and carry her out the back door?”
“January 2, 1901: There are only eight of us left. Heinrich brings the food upstairs to us. We are not allowed to enter the locked room. But at night I hear noises from there.”
“February 14, 1901: Today I saw what is in the locked room. I wish I had never seen it. I wish I could forget it.” That was the last entry. Elisabeth Folling was one of the seven children who survived the winter.
In 1903, the Folling family left the farm. Officially, they sold the estate to a merchant from Hanover who wanted to use it as a summer house. In reality, however, the house stood empty and fell into disrepair. Heinrich Folling was no longer seen in the region. It was said he had emigrated to America with his family.
Of the seven children who were last seen, all traces were missing. The vacant Folling house quickly became a place that locals avoided. Hikers reported peculiar noises coming from the building at night—children screaming that stopped immediately when one approached. In the autumn, the young forester Wilhelm Stein ventured into the abandoned estate.
He had the task of assessing the condition of the building. What he found he documented in a report to the forest administration: “The main house is structurally stable but heavily neglected. All rooms on the ground floor are empty. On the upper floor are three rooms. Two of them are also empty. The third room was locked.”
“After breaking open the door, I discovered a room that was completely draped in black cloths. On the walls were 13 small wooden crosses with initials. On the floor lay objects that had apparently belonged to children: wooden toys, small shoes, pieces of clothing.” Forester Stein cut short his inspection and left the house. In his report, he wrote: “Recommend the demolition of the building for hygienic reasons.”
The demolition never took place. Instead, in 1907, the scholar Dr. Ludwig Hartmann bought the estate. Hartmann was an anthropologist at the University of Göttingen and was interested in rural communities and their traditions. Dr. Hartmann systematically began to research the history of the Folling family.
He conducted interviews with the villagers, searched church registers, and collected all available documents. What he discovered exceeded his worst fears. In the church books of Altenau, he found not only the entry for Johann Folling but also marginal notes that Pastor Brenner had added later: “Family shows abnormal behavior, further observation required.”
A conversation with the now 80-year-old Elisabeth Kramer brought more details to light. She reported to Dr. Hartmann that she had several times observed Heinrich Folling disappearing into the forest at night with a shovel. Sometimes he was gone until dawn. When he returned, his clothes were dirty and he smelled of freshly churned earth.
Dr. Hartmann’s investigations also led him to the piece of forest where the woodcutter had found the small tombstones in 1900. During a systematic search, he discovered a total of 19 such stones scattered over an area of about one hectare. The initials on the stones revealed a disturbing pattern. Some years overlapped with the years the Folling family had lived on the farm.
In the spring of 1908, Dr. Hartmann made a discovery that would haunt him for the rest of his life. While searching the cellar in the Folling house, he came across a loose stone slab. Beneath it was a small cavity containing a waterproof container. The container held a collection of documents: letters, records, and a detailed diary that Heinrich Folling had kept over several years.
But that wasn’t all. In a second, smaller box were objects that Dr. Hartmann initially could not identify: small locks of hair, carefully wrapped in paper and provided with dates; tiny teeth in small cloth bags; and, strangely, precise drawings of children’s faces.
The entries in Heinrich’s diary began harmlessly. Heinrich described his marriage to Martha, the birth of their son Johann, and the difficulties of farming the remote homestead. But from 1892, the tone of the records changed fundamentally. “Martha cannot have any more children,” Heinrich wrote. “The doctor in Clausthal has confirmed it. But we need laborers for the farm. Martha is of the opinion that God will show us a way.”
As Dr. Hartmann read further, he discovered that Martha Folling had apparently suffered from a form of mental confusion that had developed after a miscarriage in 1891. Heinrich wrote: “Martha speaks with the angels. She says the dead children do not want to be alone. They need siblings in heaven.”
The following entries described how the couple began to “collect” children: orphans from remote farmsteads, children from families who were too poor to feed them, and sometimes children who simply disappeared while their parents were at markets or in inns. “The blonde girl from Herzberg has integrated well,” Heinrich noted in 1895. “She no longer cries and follows all instructions. Martha is satisfied. She calls her Anna, even though her name is actually Margarete. Martha says the names of the past must die.”
Dr. Hartmann came across another disturbing discovery. Heinrich had developed a sophisticated system to blur the identities of the children: new names, new birthdays, new stories. “Wilhelm from Osterode is now Franz. He was eight, now he is six. Younger children forget faster,” Heinrich wrote in 1895. The records showed a system of control and intimidation.
Children who did not comply were isolated in the locked room. “He who does not obey deserves no community,” Heinrich wrote. “He who does not work deserves no food. He who cries will be forgotten.” Dr. Hartmann also found letters that Martha had written to her deceased mother. These letters revealed the degree of her mental confusion.
“Dear Mother, today we sent another angel to you. It was too weak for this world, but it will keep you company in heaven.” Particularly disturbing were the entries from the winter months of 1900–1901. Heinrich described how the children became weaker, how some of them fell asleep and never woke up again.
But the details he noted left no doubt that not all deaths were of natural origin. “Little Gustav coughs too much. He disturbs the others while they sleep. Martha gave him ergot tea. This morning he was quiet.” Ergot, Dr. Hartmann knew, was highly poisonous in larger quantities.
An entry from February 1901 made Dr. Hartmann shudder. “Elisabeth asked too many questions. She wanted to know where her biological parents are. Martha says: ‘Curious children are dangerous.’ Tonight Elisabeth will find her answers.” At the end of Heinrich’s records, Hartmann found a list: 33 names ordered by years.
Beside each name was a date and a brief note: “Returned to God,” “Entered eternal sleep,” “Taken by the angels.” It took Dr. Hartmann weeks to process what he had found. His first reaction was an attempt to rationalize everything. Perhaps Heinrich had been mentally ill. Perhaps the entries were the fantasies of a confused man.
But the physical evidence spoke another language. He began systematically matching the names on Heinrich’s list with missing person reports and church registers. What he discovered exceeded his worst fears. At least 18 of the names matched children who had been reported missing in the region between 1892 and 1901.
Dr. Hartmann visited Pastor Brenner, who was now 82 years old and seemed to be suffering under the weight of his memories. When Dr. Hartmann showed him the documents, the old man collapsed. “I knew it,” Pastor Brenner stammered. “God forgive me, I knew it and did nothing. In the winter of 1901, there was this girl, Elisabeth. She came to me in the middle of the night, barefoot in the snow.”
“She told me things, terrible things. But I thought they were fever dreams. I took her back to the Follings.” Pastor Brenner reported to Dr. Hartmann that Elisabeth had told him of a “room of silence” where children disappeared. She said Martha would give them sweets that made them sleepy, and then—then they would go to the angels.
The research also led Dr. Hartmann to the former village blacksmith, Otto Kleiner, who had visited the Folling farm in 1899 to repair tools. Kleiner, now a broken man, confessed to Dr. Hartmann that he had seen small coffins in the cellar of the house. “Heinrich said he used them for sick lambs,” Kleiner remembered, “but the coffins were too small for lambs and too perfectly crafted. And they smelled—they smelled of lavender and other herbs used for other purposes.”
Dr. Hartmann also confronted Elisabeth Kramer with his findings. The old woman, who had always claimed to have noticed nothing unusual, finally broke down and confessed that she had several times observed Heinrich carrying small white bundles into the forest. “I thought they were dead animals,” she wept. “I wanted to believe they were dead animals, but the shape—the shape was too human.”
The truth that gradually came together was even more cruel than Dr. Hartmann had initially suspected. The Folling family had operated a system for nearly a decade that went far beyond simple child fostering. They had systematically collected children, erased their identities, and exploited them as laborers. Those who were too weak, too sick, or too defiant were eliminated.
Dr. Hartmann brought his findings to the police in 1909. However, the investigation that followed encountered significant resistance. Many of the former neighbors of the Folling family were still alive and did not want to admit that they had looked away for years. Gendarme Wiesner, now promoted to police commissioner, led the investigation.
He ordered excavations in the forest where the tombstones had been found. What the workers found confirmed the worst fears. In shallow graves lay the mortal remains of at least 17 children. Most appeared to have been between 4 and 12 years old. The remains showed signs of malnutrition and, in some cases, the impact of violence.
Traces of ergot were found in the bones of three of the skeletons. However, the investigation was hampered by the political situation. The German Empire was on the brink of major political upheavals, and local scandals were given little priority. Furthermore, many witnesses contradicted their earlier statements or suddenly refused any cooperation.
The search for Heinrich and Martha Folling proved more difficult than expected. Initial investigations suggested that the couple had indeed emigrated to America, but the trail was quickly lost. In December 1909, Commissioner Wiesner received an anonymous letter from Hamburg. The sender claimed to have seen Heinrich Folling at the docks.
“He works under the name Hermann Friedrich at the Steinbach shipping company,” the letter said. “He has shaved off his beard and wears glasses, but the scar on his left wrist is unmistakable.” Wiesner traveled to Hamburg, but when he arrived, the man had already disappeared.
The foreman of the shipping company confirmed that a Hermann Friedrich had worked there, but he had suddenly stopped coming to work a week ago. During a search of Friedrich’s accommodation, investigators found further disturbing clues. In his room, they discovered a letter that Heinrich had apparently never sent.
It was addressed to his vanished son Johann and contained instructions for the continuation of “the work.” “My dear Johann,” the letter began, “the world does not understand our actions, but God knows that we have done His work. The weak children suffer in this cruel world. We have redeemed them. If you have the strength, continue our work. Humanity needs those like us.”
This discovery led investigators to fear that Johann Folling might have set up a similar system elsewhere. A nationwide search was initiated but remained unsuccessful. Martha Folling was never found. Some witnesses claimed to have seen her in various northern German cities after Heinrich’s disappearance, but none of these sightings could be confirmed.
In the years after the discovery, the Folling estate was sold several times. No buyer stayed long. The first new owner, a merchant from Braunschweig named Karl Müller, reported unexplained events after only three months. “The floorboards on the upper floor creak constantly at night,” Müller wrote in a letter to the realtor. “It sounds like small feet are running across the floor.”
“My wife refuses to enter the house. She claims to hear children screaming.” After Müller came a Schneider family who wanted to run the estate as a guesthouse. They too gave up after only a few months. Mrs. Schneider later told the local newspaper: “It was as if the house itself were breathing. In some rooms, the air was so heavy that one could hardly breathe. And then there were those noises from the cellar.”
In 1920, the widow Anna Bergmann bought the estate for a fraction of its original value. She was determined to disprove the rumors and superstitions. But after only six weeks, she too fled the house. In her diary, which was later found, she described her experiences: “The house is cursed. There is no other expression for it.”
“Every night I hear voices from the former children’s room. Small voices calling for their mother, and sometimes when I wake up, small figures are standing at the foot of my bed. But when I turn on the light, they are gone.” In 1923, the house burned down completely due to a supposed lightning strike.
The fire department from Altenau arrived too late to save anything. A witness, the farmer Friedrich Koch, later reported that he had seen a figure near the house shortly before the fire. “It was a man with gray hair,” Koch said. “He stood in front of the house and stared at it. When the fire broke out, he smiled, then he disappeared into the forest.”
The police investigated the cause of the fire but found no evidence of arson. Officially, the cause remained unexplained. After the fire, the community bought the land and left it as a meadow. A small memorial stone was erected, simply dedicated to the “forgotten children” without further explanation.
Dr. Hartmann continued his research even after the fire. In 1925, he published a comprehensive study on social isolation and violence in rural communities, in which he documented the Folling case in detail. The book caused a stir in academic circles but was largely ignored by the broader public.
In his later years, Dr. Hartmann turned to other fields of research. But the Folling case never let him go. In his estate, which was handed over to the University of Göttingen in 1950, hundreds of pages of additional notes and correspondence regarding the case were found. Particularly noteworthy was a letter from 1948 in which a man named Johannes Friedmann claimed to be the missing Johann Folling.
“I have spent my whole life trying to forget what happened in that house,” he wrote. “But the memories do not let me go. Every night I see their faces, the faces of the children I could not save.” Dr. Hartmann traveled to Canada, where Friedmann supposedly lived, but he found only an empty address and neighbors who claimed never to have seen a man by that name.
In 1960, more than 60 years after the events, another discovery was made during renovation work at the old school in Altenau. Workers found a walled-up chamber in the basement of the building that contained a collection of children’s drawings. The drawings were of varying quality, but they all showed similar motifs.
Dark houses, weeping figures, and repeatedly the same symbol: a cross with 13 small dots underneath. On the back of one of the drawings, it said in a childish hand: “We are here, we are waiting. Do not forget us.” The handwriting was examined by experts and classified as authentic from the period around 1900.
How the drawings had gotten into the school could never be clarified. Pastor Brenner had confessed in a sealed letter that he had known more about the Folling family than he had ever admitted. “I saw them in the forest,” he wrote. “Heinrich and Martha at night with shovels and lanterns. I should have intervened.”
“I should have notified the authorities, but I was a coward. I did not want to believe what I saw.” The letter also described his last meeting with one of the surviving children. “Elisabeth came to me before they disappeared. She was completely distraught. She told me of the locked room, of the sweets Martha gave the children, of the nightly visits from the angels.”
“I should have protected her. Instead, I took her back. Back to her tormentors.” The story of the Folling family became a taboo subject in the region. Older residents did not speak about it, and the younger ones usually learned nothing of the events. It was as if the community had decided that some truths were better left buried.
But the past could not be suppressed so easily. Even in the decades after the fire, unusual events were repeatedly reported near the former Folling farm. Hikers told of children’s voices that seemed to come from the forest. Photographers reported strange light phenomena in their pictures.
In 1967, a team of parapsychologists from the University of Freiburg conducted an investigation of the site. Their reports, which were never officially published, spoke of extraordinary electromagnetic anomalies and unexplained temperature drops in certain areas of the former farm grounds.
The land on which the Folling farm once stood lies abandoned today. The meadow is overgrown, the memorial stone weathered and barely legible. Only a few locals still know the story, and even fewer speak of it. Sometimes, hikers say, one can hear peculiar noises near the old farm site.
A soft whimpering that seems to be caught in the wind, or the faint echo of children’s voices calling for help. But perhaps those are just the tricks that the wind in the mountains plays on you, or perhaps it is the conscience of a community that remained silent for too long.
The thirteen children without birth certificates no longer have names, no identities, no families to mourn them. They have become symbols for all the nameless victims who have disappeared into seclusion while the world looked away. And sometimes on cold winter nights, when the wind howls through the trees, it is as if the echo of their voices still rings through the valleys of the Harz.
A sound that never falls silent, a memory that never fades, a memorial to the power of silence and the price of indifference.
