Dear readers, all you are about to read is true and is haunting me to this day...
A couple of years ago when we were college students here in Slovenia, we started an urban exploring group. We traveled around Europe looking at old abandoned towns, houses, factories etc... But nothing gave me nightmares like the find in our homeland Slovenia.
It was a nice saturday morning, when one of my friends said if I want to check on some house he heard was abandoned. It was in the middle of Kočevski rog, which is famous for thick forrests, bears and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_graves_in_Slovenia (ctrl + f and type Kočevje - to see what I mean).
So it was an hour and a half drive to Kočevje and a further one hour drive on dirt road to reach the point where we parked our car. We took all the necessary equipment with us - water and food, helmets, lights, masks and of course our GPS and maps (if we lost the gps signal - if we went in one of the caves or if we lost battery in GPS).
Ok, so we parked the car and started walking towards the abandoned house that was supposed a house where a family of German imigrants lived before and during WW2 (of course it is said that they were executed by partisans after WW2).
The walk was supposed to be about an hour and a half away, but we had quite a lot of trouble finding the house so we arrived there about 4 hours after we started walking.
At last, we found the house... It was an old two story peasant house with barn attached to it, nothing special, but still a nice house at the time it was built.
What surprised me when we came to the house was how well it stood the test of time... It was still quite intact (but I was cautios nonetheless). So we put our equipment on, drank some water, ate a couple of sandwiches andstarted exploring. My lamp had s bad battery so we used only one lamp. We started walking around the house to see if anyone left anything there. The large things were all there, all the small things around the house was taken away after the war or maybe by explorers or bounty hunters... We proceeded to the barn. It still smelled like farm animals after all this years. It looked like some hay was on the floor but nothing else. It seemed that the family had a few cows and perhaps a horse which was quite a status symbol in those days. So they were quite well off. In the barn we located some old tools (styche, an axe and a shovel). Nothing much to see so we went out and opened the door of the house.
We had to turn on the light since the windows were very dirty and also the house was built with small windows to prevent heat going out during cold winter days. What we saw shocked me. The furniture was still there and it looked like nobody touched the house in years, maybe nobody even knew it existed. So I asked my friend what was the deal with the house and he told me he heard from his grandpa (who was in partisans) that he went to this house with his unit (about 12 men) and they had to "relocate" the family. The grandpa also gave the description where the house was, so we were lucky to have found it!
He also said that his grandpa didn't say a lot about relocation, but that he said sometimes during his wartime storytelling that "war is hell". So relocation would probably mean that the family was executed probably, but of course you never know.
So we started walking on the ground floor. There was a big living room that contained a sofa, few chairs and a book cabinet. Books were not there because somebody took them already (that was my thought).
Kitchen was very interesting it was so called "črna kuhinja" - black kitchen. I don't have any photos, but I can show you a picture so you could imagine it.
Of course there was not a lot of kitchen items in there but it was nice to see.
The second floor contained the bedrooms. We entered the master bedroom and what we saw shocked me. There were still sheets on the bed with some brown stain on them, but what shocked me was something that looked like a bullet hole (that would be my guess) that was in the matress... Maybe some kids were playing or maybe it had a more chilling story to it. My guess would be that brown stain could be the blood and the bullet hole was from a rifle which shot someone who was lieing on the bed... I had goosebumps all over my body and my friend was trembling. He took a photo and we just left the room. There was only one room to see, it was the children's room... We entered it. There was a small crib and also a bed in it, so my guess is that they had two kids. It was just funny that nobody touched the crib or the bed, they were still there... Ok enough for today I thought and also I just wanted to leave because it gave me the creeps... The other reason was that it was getting dark (winter time so dark around 17:00 or 5pm) and the woods were full of bears and other animals (some say it is even haunted by souls of people who were killed after WW2). We jogged down the stairs and when my friend jumped down 2 stairs we heard a hollow thump on the floor. It seemed like there was some space under the wooden floor. We started knocking on it and we "located" a hollow space aroud 1 square meter (3 square feet). We couldn't lift the wooden planks on the floor because they were nailed to other planks. Ok I never take anything from abandoned buildings and also never damage them, but we had to look. I went to barn to get the axe and just hit the floor once. The old rotten wood collapsed down the small space beneath the floor. There was a lot of dust so we had to look away for a while but what we discovered in that space was something that still haunts me to this day. We found the remains of two children crammed in the small space, it looked like they were holding or hugging each other. The baby skeleton was one of the worst things I saw in my life. I screamed and my friend was terrified of our discovery......
Aftermath was that we ran to our car (what took us 4 hours before, was just an hour run back - also because we had the exact GPS location of the car) and notified the authorities so they could give a proper burial to the dead bodies (skeletons)
What was even creepier was that when my friend "confronted" his grandfather and told him that we were there (but not the whole story ofc), he told him that they relocated a couple (so a man and a woman - no kids)...
I'm still wondering to this day, did the parents try to hide the kids, but the children were too little to escape or was this the work of the "relocators".
His grandfather died 2 years ago so even if he knew, he took his secret to the grave. If I find my old phone, maybe I can upload some images from the house (but I prefer not to upload the remains - because I don't think it is proper to do that)...
