The Koch Family Secret

I was reading through some of the stories in the archive and I decided to enter my own true ghost experience.

When I was 15 years old, I moved up to the country with my father. I moved to a small town 255kms north of Adelaide, South Australia. It was a town of about 5000 people living in and around the area.

My father was transferred to work in this town as a police officer so he was assigned a house by the government. It wasn't a particularly old house. It was 1970s transportable so the layout was simple. I will describe the layout for you so you can get a mental picture.

First thing I have to tell you is that no one ever entered the front door of our house they usually came in from the back of the house that have sliding glass doors. You would walk up the back path and unlock the door and step up into the dinning/lounge area. This room was in an L shape and was open plan. When you look to your left, you would see the kitchen and the sliding wooden doors that led into the formal dining room. We never actually used the formal dining room we just stored boxes and other items we weren't using in there. Then if you looked to your right you would see the door that led down our hallway.

Down the hallway there was the bedrooms, bathroom/toilet and laundry. On the first left there was my bedroom then the next room up there was my fathers and stepmothers room. There was then a large long rectangular shape room that was used as a spare room for visitors. Then on the right hand side of the hall there was a large laundry and a bathroom. Now that I have explained the house layout I will continue with the story.

About three weeks after we moved in strange things started happening. I would be home alone a lot due to the fact my father is a shift worker and my stepmother stayed at her elderly grandmothers house due to her failing health. Anyway there would be strange noises coming from the spare room. Like a whimpering sound. I had told my dad and he just put it down to stray dogs or children playing. There was also the strange fact that the room was always cold. Now you may say that it may have been climate changes but in this town's climate averages a temperature of 40?c plus on most days.

I had friends come and stay and most would stay in that room for one night and then sleep in my room because they said "something doesn't feel right in there."

The strangest incident that happened in that house happened when my stepmother was asleep alone in my fathers room.

I was out at a friends and my father was doing night shift. The house was heavily locked because people liked to play pranks on the policemen's houses. My stepmother swears that she work up at 2:13am. She had looked at the alarm clock that was on her side of the bed and when she heard heavy footsteps walking down the hallway, she thought it was my father. She heard someone walk into the room and sit down on the end of the bed. She then asked "Bill, can you get me a coffee?" She felt the bed rise and heard footsteps walking back down the hallway. She says the last thing she remembers hearing was the sound of the kitchen light switching on. She then drifted back to sleep.

At 5:13am, my stepmother woke up when she felt the bed sink down again. This time she rolled over and saw my father. She then asked him; "Why didn't you get me that coffee?" My father looked straight at my stepmother and stated that there had been a massive accident on the highway and he had done overtime. He hadn't even come home for his meal break. He also wondered why the kitchen light had been left on and why there were sugar granules spread over the kitchen counter.

After this strange incident happened, I was approached by the town's oldest living relative of the town founder. Old Mrs. Koch spoke to me and asked questions about what had happened in the house. She seemed to be almost ashamed to ask about the house. She then suggested to me that I look in the town's history files in the local library. She also said that no one had stayed in that house over six months before the Government bought it and rented it out to the visiting police officers.

I went to the library in a free lesson I had at school. The history section of the library was a small musty attic-like room. I did really know where to start. I thought to look when the town originally stated and found out that the house I lived in was situated on the Koch Family land. This family had five sons and the youngest was thought to be mentally ill.

I fast-forwarded to when the house was actually built in 1972. I found out that the land was were the old wool shed had been so the developers bulldozed the shed and start to level the land. This is where it everything starts to make sense. When the workers were grading the land, they found two bodies. One was an adult body and one was a baby's body. I was shocked by this but I wanted to see if these bodies were found on the land that I was living on. After looking in a few more papers, I found out that the bodies were found directly under our spare room.

The old lady that had spoken to me a few days prior lived in the old Koch farmhouse about three streets away so I went to speak to her.

She was a little hesitant at first to speak about the incident, but she revealed that the youngest Koch brother, Augustan, was her father and in the farm's diaries she had discovered that her father had killed a young female aboriginal servant when she had given birth to his child, and buried her near the wool shed. No charges were ever laid for this death.

I moved out of that house soon after and no one has lived there since. It is a sad story and no one has ever known the truth. So I wanted the world to know so the ghosts can finally rest easy.