Greetings Visitor.
If you are in need of something to read, I have written a few things, mostly medium-length Historical Fiction, Murder Mystery or Travel Literature Gamebooks; whatever I think might be interesting.
Approximate Reading Lengths: 1/8 Length: 1+ Words, 2/8 Length: 1,000+ Words, 3/8: 5,000+ Words, 4/8: 10,000+ Words, 5/8: 15,000+ Words, 6/8: 24,000+ Words, 7/8: 75,000+ Words, 8/8: 176,000-307,000+ Words (I want to check this one as I expand The Tales of Erenel, thanks MrAce321 for this info)
Approximate Reading Speeds (not factoring in branching): 1/8 Length: 5 Minutes, 2/8: 10 Minutes, 3/8: 20 Minutes, 4/8: 40 Minutes, 5/8: 60 Minutes, 6/8: 1.5 Hours, 7/8: Up to 5 Hours, 8/8: Up to 10+ Hours
Good music to listen to while reading and writing: Youtube Ambient Worlds.
Good source for writing ideas, laughs or distractions: Wikipedia Unusual Articles.
I award my trophy to a site member for achieving one or more of the following criteria:
Becoming an admin (automatic).
Writing ten story games of which at least five are featured or feature-worthy (my call).
Having an active and positive forum presence, usually over a number of years (also my call).
Winning the annual Reading Competition (you can do it!).
Not being a pain (very important).
Storygames
You know the story and have probably seen the film; now you can experience what the disaster was really like for those who were there.
Authors Note: This story is about 90% historically accurate, every event and spoken word occurred in identical or similar form, though to prevent this becoming a comedy I had to change some of the speech (things like "I say old man, that is frightfully sporting" has become "That is very decent of you"Â). On the bright side you should not find Jack and Rose running around in this story :)
Can you survive?
This is a tale of Bonnie and Clyde.
It is 1933 and America is in its fourth year of Depression. There is widespread anger at the banks and at the forces of justice. Against this backdrop the charismatic and carefree John Dillinger has emerged to lead a gang of hardened bank robbers and killers in challenging the American Government and the newly-formed FBI. You are one of his gang who rob the wealthiest banks in the country to buy the best life has to offer. The forces of justice will relentlessly pursue you and it is only by surviving deadly gunfights and high-speed chases that you will be able to stay ahead of them...
Author's Note: Though the next story in this series should be Butch Cassidy's Hole in the Wall Gang I decided to skip forward a bit and write about a smaller group operating in a different time than my previous two stories which were set in the Old West. Dillinger was one of the closest examples of a Robin Hood type criminal that America has yet produced and I hope the reader enjoys reading the story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Jesse James was a lad that killed many a man / he robbed the Glendale train / he stole from the rich and he gave to the poor / he had a hand and a heart and a brain.
It was on a Saturday night and the moon was shining bright / they robbed the Glendale train / and people did say over many miles away / it was those outlaws Frank and Jesse James!
Now the people held their breath when they heard of Jesse's death / and wondered how he'd ever come to fall / Robert Ford, it was a fact, he shot Jesse in the back / While Jesse hung a picture on the wall...
In this story your name is Bill Grey and you are an outlaw, one of a desperate gang who have chosen to live outside the law. By robbing Yankee banks you can make more money in one day than you could make in ten years of work but at the cost that thousands of lawmen and law-abiding citizens everywhere will hunt you relentlessly, not stopping until you are brought to justice Dead or Alive! By surviving deadly gunfights and eluding pursuit with the help of your fellow outlaws your objective is to escape with your ill-gotten gains and live a life of luxury!
Author's Note: This is a little gift to the site to make up for the fact that The CYS Challenge isn't even a quarter finished yet and Magellan 5 is still in the planning stage. As always with my Edutainment stories it's about 90% true but events have been edited or simplified to make the story flow more easily and be more enjoyable. Incidentally my personal feelings about Jesse James and his companions is that history has been incredibly kind to men who shot defenseless people, stole the money of their countrymen and kept it all for themselves but the things he and others like Billy the Kid, John Dillinger et al did are so remarkable it's hard to keep from admiring their pure nerve :)
They were dueling Doolin-Dalton / High or low it was the same / Easy money and faithless women / Red eye whiskey for the pain.
Go down Bill Dalton, it must be God's will / Two brothers lying dead in Coffeyville / Two voices call you from where they stood / Lay down your law books now, they're no damn good.
Better keep on moving Doolin-Dalton / Till your shadow sets you free / If you're fast and if you're lucky / you will never see that hanging tree.
With a pistol in each hand, your horse's hooves drumming beneath you, the incessant bangs and whizzes of gunshots all around you, the shouts of angry men and the screams of the injured and dying ringing in your ears you roam the towns, plains and wilderness of the American Old West with your fellow outlaws: the daring Dalton boys, the King of the Oklahoma Outlaws Bill Doolin and all the other members of The Wild Bunch.
Your mission is to get rich or die trying and if you are very clever and very lucky you might just live to enjoy your ill-gotten gains; if not... a weather-beaten cross in a dusty cemetery and your rusting pistol in a 21st century museum next to an old black and white photo of a bullet-riddled body will be your fate!
Author's Note: Following the (for me) surprisingly positive feedback on The James Gang I've decided to write the next story I had planned in that series, putting The CYS Challenge and Magellan 5 on hold for now. With a new cast of larger-than-life characters, more epic gunfights and daring robberies like it's predecessor this is the sort of story too unbelievable for fiction and absolutely incredible for being true! I sincerely hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it :)
In this story game you become a commander from ancient times, leading your brave warriors into the greatest battles in history!
Ranging from Ancient China to Carthage, Greece and Rome this story gives the reader the chance to command in over thirty battles in ten different campaigns to see if their decisions can win glory on the battlefield or merely consign themselves to an anonymous grave! The reader will fight alongside some of history's greatest commanders like Alexander the Great, Pyrrhus of Epirus and Bai Qi, the Human Butcher, in their quest to become the greatest general of them all!
Let the fight begin!
Author's Note: This is the long overdue and far more ambitious sequel The Trojan War, if it proves popular I will follow it with a sequel (or two) based, initially, on the rise and fall of Rome. I hope the reader enjoys the game aspect of this and good luck gaining the highest score possible! The Campaigns are best played in order and I've tried to include a mixture of countries and cultures in the selection of battles but naturally these are just my choices of ones I think might be interesting... :)
In this story game you become a commander from ancient times, leading your brave warriors into the greatest battles of history! Your decisions will determine whether you and your men live or die as you fight with and against the greatest and worst commanders the world has ever known! Let the fight begin!
Author's Note: This is basically a test story-game to see if I can figure out the mechanics of this site well enough to deliver a respectable war simulation...
Can you be the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest?
Re-live the story of Custer's Last Stand, the famous tragedy where Colonel Custer and hundreds of his men were surrounded and massacred by thousands of Sioux, who won the greatest victory in their losing struggle for freedom and independence. Play as either an American soldier or a Native American warrior and experience what really happened on that terrible summer's day many years ago. Will you live or die on the blood-soaked banks of the Little Bighorn River? (For my 30th story I thought I would write this one in my favourite genre...)
The first in a new series of stories featuring the teenage amateur detective Susan Knox as the reader's character. Set in open world locations where the reader is free to choose where to look for clues, who to interview, what to ask and where the correct suspect, motive and murder method must be identified within a set time limit, this first story is set on the mysterious and notorious Blacksea Island whose history of insanity and death holds the secret to the unusual death of Knox's best friend...
I hope the reader enjoys my latest story.
Note: This story includes a few cases of naughty words (for example one of these words rhymes with "bunt", "punt" and "hunt" and isn't "runt") so those with delicate sensibilities, easily offended eyes or a nervous disposition should avoid this story to avoid mental distress, disorders or damaging derangements of dangerous and diabolical dimensions.
Finally I estimate this story would take roughly one hour to complete, give or take, and the reader might benefit from making notes or a map of the island, depending how good their memory is :)
Susan Knox returns to solve another mystery! Travelling to the beautiful yet mysterious Island of Han in the heart of the South China Sea the young detective faces another challenge: solving the mysteries surrounding a five-year-old "suicide" amidst rumours of pirate gold. Playable as a stand-alone adventure, the reader must use all their intelligence and logic if they are to uncover the secrets that lie amidst the tangled web of massacres, insanity, skeletons, pirate treasure and, at their heart, a promising life cut tragically short, that make up the history of Han Island. Good Luck!
Inspired by Red Dead Redemption this open-world adventure transports you to the exciting and dangerous world of the Wild West. With a wide range of activities, characters, gunfights, locations, weapons and much more available your fate is entirely in your hands: will you survive and prosper to earn a legendary reputation as a deadly Gunfighter of the Old West or will a bullet, a shallow grave and a long-forgotten, lonely, wooden cross be your fate?
This is the first story in the Gunfighter series, I have checked it carefully but if readers notice any broken links or anything not working as it should please notify me so I can fix it. This story is a bit long so, like a computer game, you might want to save and come back to it from time to time. I made the map deliberately small so I can test all the features and make sure they work well, if all is good I will make larger worlds in the future. Enjoy!
Rule 1: Unless your story is at least 100 pages long you shouldn't divide it into parts and pay some attention to choosing the correct Maturity, Difficulty and Tags for your story.
As I happen to be on holiday for the first time in about 900 years I've managed to write a little story game offering some examples I've brainstormed or seen recently in badly-written stories of how not to write. Like it's older cousin, The Land of Bad Writing, this story uses examples of bad writing as a way of showing how not to write and I don't have any one story in mind particularly in writing this, just practitioners of bad writing in general.
I've decided to base this story on Pokemon for no other reason than the fact Fan Fiction requires less creativity than most other styles of writing and because Pokemon reminds me of when I was a little Will11 and I, my ten brothers (all coincidently called Will as well) and my nine sisters (the Wilmas 1 to 9) would gather behind the nuclear waste and anthrax testing facility in the woods outside our little trailer park called Asbetos to trade black market Pokemon cards for Plutonium with a mixture of Gypsies, Elves and the Dutch... basically I'm writing about Pokemon because I'm feeling a little Nostalgic today :D
(Rule 1.5: Don't write lengthy and pointless descriptions offering fake autobiographies to your readers).
The clues are always there, it is just a case of searching and thinking hard enough...
Continuing my experimental grim and gritty approach to detective stories I've scribbled this real life mystery. Written in the style of Hunting the Ripper it is worth mentioning this story is based on true events and people (some of whom are still alive) with about 90% accuracy and as it concerns the hunt for a serial child killer and rapist obviously it is not suitable reading for some, though I have tried to deal tactfully with some of the more unpleasant subject matter. Disclaimer over.
As always, thankyou for taking the time to read my stories.
"Jack the Ripper is dead / Jack the Ripper is dead / He's lying on his bed / Bleeding through his head / Jack the Ripper is dead" - A Victorian Children's Skipping Rope Song.
Death stalks the fog-shrouded streets of London as prostitutes are killed and mutilated in the darkness of the night... As a Private Detective working alongside Scotland Yard you will be faced with the most challenging adversary of your career, a man who's very name has become a byword for terror: Jack the Ripper. Are you smart enough to catch him?
BEWARE: This game is 200 pages long and will take about 30-60 minutes to read through. Do not read if operating heavy machinery, juggling chainsaws or entertaining small children.
Author's Note: This story will require some thinking and the reader might want to make notes, though with a bit of cleverness and logic readers should be able to correctly identify the real Ripper. About 95% of the information in this story is historically accurate. Finally as you'd probably guess a story about hunting someone who killed and mutilated prostitutes is not a feel-good family comedy, if you are under 13 I don't recommend that you read this. Certainly do not google "Jack the Ripper victims" if you suffer from nightmares :D
For hundreds of years your people have lived on The Three Islands completely surrounded by a vast impenetrable reef. Scientific advances and large amounts of gunpowder has finally allowed your people to breach this reef in two places, making accessible for the first time a vast unexplored world beyond your country's borders. The ten greatest sea captains of The Three Islands have been summoned by the King to take part in a great race: to be the first to sail around an unexplored world!
You are one of these Captains and an exciting adventure into the unknown awaits you!
Author's Note: My first foray into Fantasy for teenage readers! Inspired by the incredible first voyage around the world by Ferdinand Magellan if this story isn't universally detested it will be the first of a five-part series of adventures! I hope you enjoy it and as always, thank you for taking the time to read the semi-literate scribbles I like to call my writing :)
The Great Reef has been breached and your people are pouring out into a vast new world: a world of opportunities, adventure... and danger.
Explorers and traders establishing new colonies on the islands discovered by you and your fellow sea-farers have come into conflict with warlike and deadly Natives and blood has been shed. In response Queen Anne-Marie has assembled a vast War Fleet to sail out to meet with these Natives and establish land ownership by diplomacy or force. As a member of this great expedition you will travel once more into an unknown and dangerous world in the greatest undertaking in your people's history... do you have what it takes?
Author's Note: This story can be read by itself but useful background information is provided by reading Magellan 1: Race into the Great Unknown first. In an effort to try to respond to the feedback of readers I have specifically tried to create a greater interaction between the strong-willed and unique personalities of you and your fellow Captains and also changed the main character's name from Cleo to Leo to make him more... manly. I hope you enjoy reading this :)
As you country continue to expand beyond the borders of the Great Reef into the largely unknown world of Magellan worrying news arrives: Tobias Cuthrew, the greatest sailor your people have known, has vanished while on a voyage of exploration into the West. Once more your hard-hearted monarch Queen Anne-Marie demands your services, this time to lead an expedition to find your missing comrade. But is there more to this mission that meets the eye?
Author's Note: As always thank you to everyone who takes the time to read my stories and a larger thank you to the CYOA community at large for giving me a reason to write them in the first place :) I have specifically tried to make this story less linear than the last, with four main story branches.
Betrayed by your Queen and hunted by her allies the situation looks bleak for you and your small band of allies. But opposition to tyranny takes many forms and from small beginnings and a few great ideas is it possible you could gain the weapons you need to defeat your enemies while simultaneously protecting your defenseless allies from the vengeance of your foes? Requiring all your ingenuity you are about to embark on the greatest fight of your career!
Author's Note: This fourth installment of the series is a bit longer and more difficult than its predecessors but it ties up quite a few loose threads ready for a big finish in Magellan 5. Thanks for everyone's feedback and support so far! Please be aware teenage readers and those of a low maturity this story is a bit more X Rated than earlier stories in the series as the relationship between Leo and Naomi is... improving :). Homophobes should probably steer clear of this story too :)
In 1787 the HMS Bounty left England with a crew of 46 men to sail to Tahiti, pick up breadfruit trees, transport them to colonies in Jamaica and return to England. This seemingly innocent voyage would result in an incredible series of events including a mutiny by murderous pirates, incredible open boat voyages, shipwrecks, bloody battles with natives, trials, executions and suffering that would leave most of the original crew dead.
This is the true story of the Mutiny on the Bounty.
In SCI you are the leader of a team of elite detectives in a violent and dangerous city where you must solve tough and challenging crimes from bank robberies to murders (single, mass and serial), prison escapes, the Mafia and more mundane crimes such as robberies and drug dealing. Inspired by amazing real life cases this story pits you against some of the most evil, smartest and toughest criminals to ever terrorize the streets of urban America...
This story is inspired by CSI (I've never actually seen it but I feel I like the name and the concept :) ) and the cases are adapted from true crimes with some names and details changed. I've decided to make this a stand-alone story and I hope you enjoy it and, as always, thank you for taking the time to read my scribblings.
This is a classic whodunit for those readers who feel like solving a little murder mystery. Ten people are sleeping in a locked house overnight, by dawn one of them is dead. Called in to investigate you must carefully search the crime scene, interview the suspects and find the clues to determine who the killer is before time runs out but beware: almost everyone has something to hide and to discover the murderer you must dig deep into the secrets that hide behind the closed doors, faded photographs and old memories of every family home. Are you clever enough to solve the Graves Mystery of Hanging Hill House?
In this story-game you become a member of the Donner Party.
The Donner Party were a group of about 90 men, women and children who tried traveling to their new homes in California by an unfamiliar route across the Salt Lake Desert of Utah and the Sierra Nevada Mountains but met with enough misfortunes and suffering to kill half the group and leave the remainder scarred for the rest of their lives...
You knew you should not have eaten and drank so much on Christmas Day, a troubled sleep leads to a nightmare where you find yourself trapped in the worst place imaginable: The Land of Bad Writing! Will you ever escape?
Authors Note: I should point out I have assumed about twenty different author's voices to give the worst examples of bad writing as possible as a guide of how not to write. If you want to know what my usual style is like message me or read my other story-games. It is also worth pointing out this story-game isn't aimed at anyone's stories in particular but practitioners of bad writing in general.
You are a Victorian Adventurer, a man who explores dangerous places and does dangerous things for the thrill of it. Following your recent expeditions in Africa you have been invited to the island of Marco, recently claimed by the British Government. Landing in the port of Victoria on the east side of the island you soon learn why you are there: a party of fifty men led by a certain Captain Donovan have vanished on an exploration expedition into the unknown jungle interior.
Your assignment is to find him and learn what has befallen his men, though you will be lucky if you too do not vanish from sight and knowledge beneath those deadly trees...
Author's Note: As this is the first story game I will have posted I am only posting half of it while I get used to the scripting etc. If it is not universally despised I will post the sequel Donovan's Curse (2) as soon as I have written it.
You are a Victorian Adventurer, a man who explores dangerous places and does dangerous things for the thrill of it. Following a month of searching the deadly island of Marco you have found the remnants of the lost expedition of Captain William Donovan, a renegade officer who seems to enjoy his role as adopted chief of the local Yantu Natives. You and your men now find yourself at the mercy of these dangerous and war-loving warriors... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Author's Note: This is the sequel to The Lost Expedition (1), the first story-game I wrote on this site over two years ago, and my entry into the January 2017 Wilderness themed competition. I think everything I've done in these Lost Expedition stories I've done bigger and better in the Magellan stories but I'm glad Bucky's competition has given me the motivation to finish this little two-part adventure. To get the most out of this story I recommend you read The Lost Expedition (1), first, though this can be read as a stand-alone adventure.
You are an amateur detective plunged into the heart of the 1920's Oklahoma oil boom, where one by one native Osage men and women are being brutally murdered. As more and more are slain you find yourself increasingly alone in a desperate world of shadows, unsure who to trust, not even knowing if you will be the next to fall... This is a remarkable and true story of murder, conspiracy, and insatiable greed. Do you dare to experience the Reign of Terror?
(If you enjoy this storygame and wish to know more of the true life history, I recommend David Grann's book Killers of the Flower Moon.)
In this medium-length Whodunnit you assume the role of a professional Detective having to solve a crime with a difference: not only do you need to identify the perpetrator of a brutal and gruesome crime but you also need to identify the victim too... In this one I've deliberately gone for a more grim and gritty "true crime" sort of thing than my usual stories so if you suffer from a delicate nervous constitution or are just a bit of a wuss then probably this story is not for you :)
The year is 1588. King Philip II, Catholic head of a vast Spanish Empire that stretches across the Americas and much of Europe, is poised to invade little England with a vast fleet of 130 ships and 55,000 men, only the little English fleet stands in his path...
In this story you play the role of Martin Bertendona, one of the ten Squadron commanders in the Fleet. With deadly challenges and difficult decisions you will do well just to survive, let alone avoid the dangers of either capture or imprisonment in these dangerous times...
This is my 20th story game, a personal milestone, but one of my shortest yet coming in at around 40 pages. It is not my entry for the 2019 competition, I am still working on that, just a little story I threw together when I had a few days off work combining my twin loves of history and people having unpleasant experiences at sea :D I hope you enjoy it.
Welcome to the land of Erenel, a fantastical place of great beauty and danger. Terrible monsters lurk in the dark forests and hills and the handful of human settlements stand like islands in a great unknown sea, the depths of which conceal true horror. You are Robin, a young Adventurer beginning your journey through this land. Will you survive to become a great and heroic warrior, a Champion of Good, or will you perish in battle with a foul monster like the untold number of nameless dead who have gone before you?
The Tales of Erenel is unlike any other storygame on this site. I will write and upload a new tale from time to time so new adventures will continually be appearing and available to play within this one story-game (I'll announce in the Writing Workshop on the forums whenever a new one is ready). This will provide more content as well as depth to Robin's story after the initial tale. These Tales are inspired by Dragon Warriors, Dungeons and Dragons and Fighting Fantasy to the point they could be considered Fan Fiction and are traditional fantasy Gamebook / RPG adventures.
This is my entry for the 2025 Edutainment Writing Competition.
If it were a movie I guess it would be rated 15.
Recent Posts
CYS HOT TAKES
on 1/17/2026 6:34:42 PM
Hm, I want to guess End? Because the Pit of Shame is his thing.
CYS Monthly Gazette - 8 January 2026
on 1/14/2026 10:26:12 PM
Ok, so a few different thoughts on this one :D My fellow Gazetteers lean towards C, the Gump brothers, Clay thinks A or J while Unescapable Death leaned towards A, C, F and G before settling on the idea of a seven-year-old repeatedly dropping from the ceiling ninja style to crush the skulls of her victims before committing suicide by whacking herself repeatedly in the head. Certainly, some interesting opinions here, now I’ll deliver my take on what I think happened.
For me the big question is motive and if we disregard the random slasher theory only a couple of the suspects had motives. The Gump brothers were murderously anti-Nazi and while killing Andreas Gruber would fit their MO, killing three innocent women and two children (two of them sleeping in their beds) wouldn’t. The other possible motivate is outrage at Andreas and his daughter Viktoria’s incest and two suspects would possess this strongly: Karl Gabriel and Lorenz Schlittenbauer. By most accounts Gabriel was dead long before the Hinterkkaifeck Murders occurred, making his culpability a little bit speculative and supernatural (that would make a great horror story though).
Schlittenbauer is another matter.
He is heavily involved in the story of the Hinterkaifeck murders, both before and after. He is the sole account for the conversation in which he claims Gruber described an intruder on his property - the only corroborating evidence with this is the testimony of the Gruber’s former maid Kreszenz Rieger who left the farm six months before the murders claiming it was haunted (judging by her subsequent accusations of five different men of being the Hinterkaifeck killers I speculate she might have had a bit of an excitable personality). Schlittenbauer would have known of her fears and may have expanded on them in his account of his conversation with Gruber in order to direct suspicion away from himself.
Schlitternbauer also had by far the best motive of all the suspects and also the only one, apart from Karl Gabriel, who might have borne a grudge against the entire family. He was passionately in love with Viktoria (despite having a wife and child of his own) and may have seen her incest with her father as a disgustingly warped rejection of him. He also firmly believed he was the father of baby Josef to the point that he insisted on paying child support (which the Gruber family weirdly accepted) despite Viktoria apparently telling him that she believed Andreas was both the father and grandfather of her child.
Obviously, there was something seriously wrong with the Gruber family. Andreas was undeniably a monster (in addition to being a Nazi) and it is unclear whether Viktoria was a victim or willing accomplice in his perversions. Andreas’s wife Cazilia also must have turned a blind eye to the abuse of Viktoria which supposedly went on for nearly a decade. Both Viktoria’s child Josef and Cazilia Junior may well have been the result of this incest. In Schlittenbauer’s eyes the whole family would have been warped aberrations and moral freaks worthy of death. If this theory is accurate then only the new maid, Maria Baumgartner, was unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There are other factors that make Schlittenbauer a likely suspect. As Viktoria’s lover and a long-time neighbour of the Grubers he would have been intimately familiar with the layout of Hinterkaifeck Farm, having visited it on a number of occasions. As a farmer he would have been skilled in handling agricultural tools, like the mattock which was the murder weapon. He would have had experience in slaughtering animals. Finally, the Grubers’ dog barked at him when he visited the farm after the murders which, though slight, may be taken as corroborating evidence of guilt.
If it is questionable whether anyone was living on the farm before the murders, I also find it questionable whether anyone was reckless enough to be living on the farm after the murders as well. The police believed this because of witness testimony and because food had been cooked on the farm and the cattle fed. But in the 18 hours between the discovery of the bodies and the arrival of the police townsfolk swarmed over the farm. It is known that at least one cooked a meal on the property, it’s not beyond possibility that another might have taken pity on the suffering cattle and fed them as well.
What of the witness testimony? I think it is entirely possible that Schlittenbauer had at least one accomplice that kept his silence: he employed a number of workers, was on good terms with various neighbours and the Grubers were not locally popular. A farmer saw two men in the woods on the night of the murders. An artist was approached in the woods by an unknown man the night after the murders. I think both of these sightings are potentially valid.
The artist also claimed to have seen smoke rising from the chimney of Hinterkaifeck the night after the murders, this is important because it is the only solid testimony of someone being on the farm after the murders took place. What I think is possible is that Schlittenbauer returned to Hinterkaifeck the night after the killings to make sure the victims were definitely dead, to check if they had been discovered and I think he may have also taken the opportunity to burn incriminating objects in their fireplace – my guess would be the clothes he committed the murder in, which would surely have been covered in blood splatters.
It would actually have been safer for him to burn them at night at Hinterkaifeck than in his own farm, where any of his family or workers could have woken, come into the kitchen, asked him what he was doing and possibly seen the incriminating evidence. I guess that after the murders he hurried back to his own farm, washed and changed his clothes, keeping the bloody clothes in a bag or similar to dispose of at a later date. He would have been keeping an eye out to see if he was spotted and when the artist saw him, he approached him with a lantern and scared him off.
Schlittenbauer was also key to the discovery of the bodies. Five people visited the farm without discovering the bodies but it wasn’t until Schlittenbauer heard that his son and stepson had been there (possibly sent by him) that he gathered a small search party that finally succeeded in finding the bodies (it would have been suspicious of he’d found them on his own). Of the three searchers Schlittenbauer was by all accounts the most active, being the one to actually break into the house.
He (admittedly naturally) continued to show an interest in the murders in later years, lingering around the former site of the crime and speculating that the killer may have been thwarted in his plan to bury the bodies by the frozen ground (which may be a reflection of his own thinking). He was widely suspected of being the killer at the time and was the only suspect who actively took his accusers to court and won money repeatedly in libel cases - if he was the killer this would have given Schlittenbauer immense satisfaction. He would not have seen he was committing a crime with the murders so much as ridding the world of an inbred Bavarian hillbilly family of freakish Nazi-sympathizers. He may have rationalised that the children would only have grown up into copies of their morally degenerate parents.
Anyway, sorry for the long-winded exposition but this is my theory on what I believe happened. After all this time it is impossible to know the truth about the Hinterkaifeck Murders but it certainly makes a fascinatingly horrifying real-life tale and a good addition to my Unsolved Mysteries series 😊
So I think the killer was F, Lorenz Schlittenbauer (possibly with one unknown accomplice).
CYS v S. Penguin
on 1/14/2026 6:28:58 PM
I literally didn't know taking points from a banned person was a thing (how does that make sense?) but it does seem to give mods a good incentive to ban people (along with all the other excellent reasons those doomed individuals generously provide by themselves). I assumed Sent's 10,000+ points came from his 10,000+ incisive and frequently hilarious forum posts and the admiration and love of his fellow mods in the form of random point bonuses, which are each their own thing. All the points from duelling, rating and writing I think are fully justified but, tbf, if we're going to audit Sent we might as well audit everybody. And those are a lot of generously-proportioned cans of worms - gotta admire your cojones here MHD :D
CYS Monthly Gazette - 8 January 2026
on 1/13/2026 9:41:55 PM
Lol :D You can't trust anyone in a murder mystery!
CYS Monthly Gazette - 8 January 2026
on 1/13/2026 5:37:34 PM
It's a bit of a sidetrack but I think it would be an interesting possibility in a whodunnit mystery if a child turned out to be the killer as no one would suspect them (a bit like when Maggie shot Mr Burns in The Simpsons :D).
CYS Monthly Gazette - 8 January 2026
on 1/13/2026 2:48:06 AM
This is a very imaginative solution, she sounds like a murderous Spidergirl! To help distract you from schoolwork I've researched your hypothesis a little and come up with some leads for you. There are very few cases of children killing adults (one I read about a few years ago was Kate Summerscale's The Wicked Boy about Robert Coombes who was 13 when he stabbed his mother to death while she was sleeping). For a child to kill multiple adults is almost unheard of: the only cases I found are school shooter Andrew Golden, who helped kill 5 and Kristen Pittman, who killed her grandparents when she was 12 but both used guns.
Interestingly children as young as 6 have been murderers (according to Wikipedia's List of youngest killers article). Theoretically it is not impossible for Cazzilia to have committed the murders but there is no known equivalent of a crime like that.
CYS Monthly Gazette - 8 January 2026
on 1/12/2026 5:45:16 PM
This is very well-reasoned here :) I personally think this sort of crime would be impossible for a seven-year-old to commit, certainly I've never heard of such a thing in the annals of crime. I could just about see her killing the baby but I think she would lack the strength to take down four adults, even with surprise. If any of the family snapped and went on a killing spree I would imagine Viktoria after her years of abuse (which may or may not have been consensual). I've also never heard of anyone committing suicide with something like a mattock, or even a blunt object.
The rest of your conclusions are sound, though I question whether any sane person would come upon a crime scene with six victims and decide "This looks like the sort of place for me to live in". As much as anything else they would surely be worried the murderer might come back, find them and add them to the victims? Only the killer themself would feel a sense of security that this would not happen (or, I suppose possibly someone with very severe mental illness like Bartle but then how would they be wise enough to make themselves scarce before the bodies were discovered and people started swarming around the farm?).
Very good deductions and logical reasoning on each suspect :D
CYS Monthly Gazette - 8 January 2026
on 1/12/2026 7:57:42 AM
I think there is something to be said for both the homeless vagrant theory (though killing six people just to get a place to live for a couple of days is a bit extreme) and the familiar with the farm theory, though if someone had been hiding out on the property for a while, perhaps coming out at night, they may also have grown comfortable there. The murders could have been triggered by a hidden person being discovered?
CYS Monthly Gazette - 8 January 2026
on 1/12/2026 4:20:11 AM
Interesting consensus here :)
CYS Monthly Gazette - 8 January 2026
on 1/11/2026 5:47:17 PM
The Hinterkaifeck Murders… one of the most gruesome and puzzling crimes in German history. Did the murderer live in the victims’ home for up to 6 months before killing reviled incestuous and Nazi-loving patriarch Andreas Gruber, four other members of his family and an incredibly unfortunate maid who had started working for them the day before? Did the killer then stay living on the farm alongside the bodies for several more days, cooking meals and feeding cattle? Who was responsible for such a terrible crime?
Was it escaped mental patient Josef Bartle? Victim Viktoria’s husband Karl Gabriel, supposedly killed several yeas before in World War I but potentially survived and returned to the farm to commit terrible vengeance on his incest-committing partner and her family who enabled it to happen? The notorious and murderous brothers Adolf and Anton Gump who virulently hated Nazi supporters like Gruber? The monstrously vampiric serial killer Fritz Haarman? The mysterious brothers Andreas and Karl S?
Or were the murderers closer to the scene? Could it have been neighbour Lorenz Schlittenbauer, who helped find the bodies and had a long and difficult history with the family? The Grubers’ former maid Kreszenz Rieger had her suspicions: she accused Anton and Karl Bichler and Georg Siegl of telling her of their intention to kill Andreas Gruber. She also later accused suspected burglars Andreas and Josef Thaler. Farmhand Peter Weber apparently had a plan to kill Andreas too. A 21st century theory identifies the notorious German axe murderer Paul Mueller as a potential culprit. Finally, were local Nazis involved?
What do you think? What person or persons brutally and mysteriously ended the lives of six people on one cold winter’s night on an isolated farm deep in the heart of a foreboding German forest? Did they hide out in the farmhouse before committing the crime, leaving footprints in the snow, and then linger after? How did they manage to murder six strong and healthy people, including four adults? And, perhaps most perplexingly of all, why did they do such a terrible thing?
Who do you think was the killer or killers?
A: Josef Bartle
B: Karl Gabriel
C: Adolf and Anton Gump
D: Fritz Haarman
E: Andreas and Karl S
F: Lorenz Schlittenbauer
G: Anton and Karl Bichler and Georg Siegl
H: Andreas and Josef Thaler
I: Peter Weber
J: Paul Mueller
K: Nazis
L: Someone else
