In the winter of 1896, a small Bavarian mountain village was shaken by a series of unsettling events centered on a young widow named Greta Eichelberger, a woman who claimed she was being followed by something that had pursued her for years. The story, preserved in a private notebook kept by the village schoolmaster, describes a winter in which the community of Falkenrast (Falcon Rest) was forced to confront something none of them could explain. Greta had arrived in the village in 1886 as the wife of a goatherd named Johann Eichelberger. Her origins were unclear; when asked, she would only say she came from a place where the winters were longer.
After her husband died in an accident in 1890, she remained in the village alone, raising goats and weaving blankets. She was a solitary figure, and the villagers largely left her to herself. That changed in November 1895. The first sign was the dogs.
All four working dogs in the village began barking at night, always between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning, always facing the eastern edge of the village toward the slope behind Greta’s cottage. The old mountain guide, Konstantin Marbach, said the dogs were not barking at a wolf. He said it was the sound a dog makes when it sees something it does not understand. Soon after, the woodcutter’s wife, Hedwig Brendel, who was gravely ill, woke her husband in the middle of the night claiming she had heard a woman singing a lullaby in a dialect she had not heard since childhood.
When her husband looked outside, the road was empty and there were no footprints in the fresh snow. She had no memory of the incident the next morning. Then Marbach’s apprentice, a young man named Wendelin Holtzmann, was found sitting on the edge of his cot, fully dressed and unresponsive. When he finally spoke, he said he had gone walking up the slope behind Greta’s cottage and had encountered a voice that knew his name and the name of his deceased fiancée, a name he had never spoken to anyone in the valley.
He also reported seeing Greta through her kitchen window, sitting alone at her table with both hands flat on the wood, speaking as though in conversation with an empty chair. When Marbach went to speak with Greta, she told him plainly: “There is a thing that follows me. It has followed me for a very long time. ” When he asked if it had a face, she answered: “Sometimes.
Sometimes it has my face. ”
The situation escalated in early December when the village well was found disturbed. A bundle of dark hair, tied with red thread and weighted with a stone, was discovered hanging inside the bucket. The women of the village identified it as Greta’s hair.
When confronted by six men, Greta said the hair was hers but that she had not put it in the well. She claimed the thing that followed her came into her house while she slept and cut her hair, then took it from her hands in broad daylight before she could bury it. She warned the men not to drink from the well, to keep their dogs inside, and never to answer if they heard singing on the road at night. The village followed her instructions, and for nearly a week nothing happened.
Then, on the night of December 9, the schoolmaster Oswald Klee heard a woman singing outside his house. He did not look out, remembering Greta’s warning. The singing passed his door and moved toward the eastern edge of the village. When he finally looked out, the road was empty and untouched.
The next day, eight men, including Marbach, Klee, and the blacksmith Augustin Vetterli, climbed the slope behind Greta’s cottage. In a clearing among the black pines, they found a circle of packed snow, about four paces across, with marks around the perimeter suggesting something had walked around it hundreds of times. At the center lay a small wooden doll, old and worn, carved in the form of a woman in a long dress. The face was unmistakably Greta’s.
Wendelin Holtzmann said quietly: “This is what spoke to me that night. This is what knew my name. ”
Marbach brought the doll down, though Greta warned him that now the thing would know he had it. The men sat around a table in the schoolmaster’s house and agreed that the doll felt as though it were listening to them.
Marbach decided it should be burned, but first they sent Klee to speak with Greta. He found her cottage empty. She had left a note pleading with them not to come after her. She wrote that the thing wanted her, and she would rather it take her on the mountain than among the houses.
She instructed them to burn the doll, or if they could not, to bury it under stone without naming the place to anyone. Six of the eight men went up the mountain that afternoon to find her. They followed her tracks for about an hour before noticing that a second set of tracks had appeared, walking beside hers. The second set was identical to the first: the same boot, the same length of stride, the same depth in the snow.
They were the same tracks doubled. Just below the saddle of the ridge, both sets of tracks simply ended in open snow. There was no struggle, no disturbance, no sign of movement. It was as though both figures had stepped off the surface of the world.
The men returned to the village without her. Greta Eichelberger never came back. Heavy snow buried the slope in the days that followed, erasing any trace of the tracks. The singing returned on the night of December 18.
Klee heard it pass his house, move to the eastern end of the road, and then come back, heading westward out of the village. In the morning, a length of dark hair tied with red thread was found in the snow outside his door. Marbach said the thing was “making itself at home. ” He reasoned that the cottage at the eastern end of the road was empty, and the thing did not like empty places.
Marbach decided the only course was to return the doll. On the morning of December 20, the same six men carried the doll back up the mountain to the saddle where the tracks had ended. Marbach placed it in the snow with the carved face turned upward, spoke an apology to Greta aloud, and asked that whatever was on the mountain stay there and not come down to the village. The men turned and walked away without looking back.
For the remainder of the winter, the village was undisturbed. The well ran clean when it was reopened. Hedwig Brendel died peacefully in February. When the spring melt came in late April 1897, Marbach and Vetterli went up to the saddle to check on the doll.
They returned saying only that it was gone. They provided no further explanation. Greta Eichelberger’s body was never found. The cottage at the eastern end of the village stood empty for years until a heavy snow brought down the roof, and the pines eventually closed over the site.
Konstantin Marbach died in 1904 at the age of 77. On her own deathbed in 1919, his housekeeper Theresia Olmer told the parish priest what Marbach had confided to her, and the priest wrote it down. That account is one of the few written records of the events. The schoolmaster Oswald Klee died in 1916.
Among his possessions was a small leather notebook containing a careful account of everything he had witnessed during that winter. The notebook is now in a private collection. In the final entry of that notebook, dated the winter of 1915, Klee recorded that while walking in the snow near his house he had heard, very faintly, a woman singing the same melody in the same unknown tongue from somewhere far up on the slope. He wrote that the singing was not mournful or cruel, but almost peaceful.
He wrote that he had come to believe that whatever Greta Eichelberger had been, she was still up on that mountain, and that the thing that had taken her had perhaps in turn been taken by her, and that the two had become a single quiet thing walking the saddle as the snow came and went. His final line read: “I do not know if she rests but I know that we let her go and I know that the mountain has kept her and I think that perhaps in the end that is all that any of us can hope for to be kept by something to be remembered even if only by the wind. “