The Hohensyburg 'ghost house' (demolished 2009)

OVERVIEW

The Geisterhaus (or Spukhaus) Hohensyburg was an empty, partly ruined house of Ruhr sandstone built in 1880 on a 20,000 m² partly wooded plot between Dortmund-Syburg and Buchholz, near the ruins of Hohensyburg castle. It belonged to the farming family Scholle; it stood empty from about 1979 after new owners from Hagen found the land too much to keep, and they walled up its doors and barred its windows against break-ins.

HISTORY

In the 1990s and 2000s internet forums made it 'one of the best-known ghost and haunted houses in North Rhine-Westphalia or Germany'; one forum alone carried over 2,000 posts on it between August 2004 and October 2011. Young people broke in for séances, 'occult masses' or simply to drink, above all on Halloween night, costing the Dortmund-Hörde police about 300 call-outs. In September 2008 the TV magazine Welt der Wunder counted it among the 'ten creepiest places in Europe'; in July 2009 a forged Westfälische Rundschau article — 'Young man vanishes without trace in Syburg' — appeared on a forum and was taken down at the paper's request. In October 2009 the City of Dortmund had the decaying house demolished.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The stories — a priest who murdered his family, nuns who worshipped Satan, a headless rider, three small boys who died in agony, blood running down the walls at midnight, a bloody dress in an attic wardrobe, cameras failing, a stench rising from holes over old sandstone galleries — are recorded by the German article as rumours spread through internet forums; it gives no source for any of them. A study of the house as a modern internet legend appears in Fabian Vierbacher's Die 'moderne' Sage im Internet (2008). Filed UNVETTED.

VISITING

The house is gone; the land is private. Nothing to visit.