Location: The Koss Farmhouse is a remote residence on a hill somewhere near  the intersection of Highway 555 and the E39 Interstate outside Bergen, Norway on the peninsula of Bergenshalvoyen on the west shore to the North Sea.

Description Of Place: The structure is a plain derelict two-story gray-frame farmhouse. A skylight covered in vines adorns the overhead of the foyer, The wide open rooms are littered with soiled furniture and numerous dolls, both intact and in pieces. Many of the pipes are covered in rags, and a tree has crashed into the upstairs main bedroom. The interior is desolate, almost barren, except for the scant pieces of furniture. 

Ghostly Manifestations: We've all seen or at least heard of these places. Distant remote locations in areas empty of human life where one wonders why is there a house there. They are treasured destinations of urban explorers trying to peel back reality to see the past, and the fascination of vagabonds and vandals trying to exploit the location. 

"Footsteps, apparitions, doors opening and closing..." George Breeschooten, an amateur historian and paranormal aficionado, enlightens visitors to the tales of the house. "It's a rather popular haunted house here. I think a majority of the local kids in the area have pedaled out here on their bikes to challenge each other to go inside or throw rocks at the windows.  Sometimes, they stand outside and wait for something to happen, and when something does happen. like a shadow at a window, they go tearing down the hill on their bikes as if the Devil himself was after them."

"However," He adds in his Dutch accent. "I doubt you're going to find any serious ghost stories here unless you find someone who's lived in the house since young Koss departed in 1985."

Breeschooten is speaking of Kai Koss, a Norwegian stock analyst, who was arrested for a series of murders here between 2002 and 2004 and subsequently acquitted of the charges. Arraigned in court of public opinion, he later moved to Germany, where he refuses to talk anymore about the case or the murders, but he has given permission to talk about the house and to a lesser extent, his childhood there.  

"I don't believe in ghosts." His interview is translated here from German. "But I do confess I experienced things when I returned to the house that I still don't understand."

Koss recalls that almost immediately after coming home and getting a room at the Great Northern Hotel that he was getting strange calls to his room without anyone on the other end. The hotel didn't have any records of anyone linking those calls, but his phone seemed to be getting calls from what he thought was his old childhood home. Furthermore, when he explored the old house, he recalled finding an old style Bell rotary phone with a frayed wire on the first floor. It wasn't hooked up to anything, but when he started strolling upstairs, he heard it ring.

"A telephone has a very distinct ring ; this I'm sure of, and being an old-style house, it only has one phone line in the entire place so there is only one phone. How does an old ruined phone not connected to anything... ring?"

Overall, Kai described a very perceptible sense of dread in his mother's old house. With the bare walls and broken dolls and piles of broken doll parts, the location felt cold and distant. He had a sensation of being watched, and a wavering curtain in a doorway gave him the impression he was being watched despite the fact that he was very much alone. His own footsteps echoed through the old place, increasing the feeling the place was abandoned, but not the feeling that there was something else odd about the place. Even Kai confesses, "I felt as if I was somewhere I shouldn't be."

Whatever it is about the house that affects everyone who goes near it, that something seems to extent to lights and orbs drifting through the trees nearby the residence. Breeschooten remarks: "For as long as I can remember, there have been accounts of teenagers coming here and committing suicide in the forest here. Others claim the woods are haunted by a dark cloaked figure luring people to their deaths. The authorities have found couples camping here bludgeoned to death in their tents. It's believed the area is cursed. Shadows and strange figures wander through the trees." 

Guests at the Great Northern Hotel bordering the woods and waterway nearby have described seeing such lights near the house and through the woods. Many of them are adamant that what they're seeing isn't moonlight or headlights being reflected, instead describing them as moving luminescent lights with "a life of their own," moving through the trails and along the tree-line along the highway. Not everyone agrees these lights are connected to the hauntings in the house, instead linking them to several suicides, mysterious deaths and drownings in the area going back to the Fifties and Sixties.

Since 2009, Kai Koss tried to sell the house to several buyers, but it was more the reputation of the murders than any ghost stories that kept the house from being sold. In 2012, he finally sold it to Jonas Leitzer, a Dutch investment broker who announced plans to restore it into a summer home and company retreat, but what he actually started doing was using the house as storage for furniture and antiques from acquired properties. Once again, there were rumors of someone living in the house, but whether this was a supernatural presence or an illegal squatter is unrevealed. 

In October 2012, SWR4 radio station in Heidelberg, Germany requested callers to call in with their ghost stories, and among them, an anonymous male listener reported a harrowing story near the falls of a waterfall in Norway, a description that sounds very much like the Koss House. He describes traveling near Bergen and being broke and tired breaking into a house full of furniture and boxes through the cellar and making his way up to a bedroom. Shortly after entering, he heard the sounds of someone coming up the stairs to a room and the angry voice of a woman grumbling and breathing heavily getting closer. Peeking out, he saw a woman in dark clothes covered in a gray mist ascending the staircase, striking the steps with what looked like a long ruler. Terrified, the squatter locked the door and pushed and piece of furniture against it, listening to the sounds through the night of pounding, cursing and the sound of the stick hitting the floor.

Sometime during that night, he drifted off, later awaking feeling unsettled and disturbed. When he looked, the door was open and the huge oak dresser he had moved was back in place. Grabbing his pack, he charged out the front door into the early morning dusk, hearing the door slamming shut behind him as his hit driveway and too scared to look back...

History: The house has had a legacy of scaring kids back to the Late 1960s. It was first known as the Old Koss House in the 1950s, but it is unclear whether the Koss family are its original owners. The former owner, Kai Koss, inherited the house in 2009, after the death of his mother and nineteen years after  he was adopted and placed with foster parents in 1985. It has been reported that Koss had been violently abused and neglected here as a child which explains his reluctance to lay claim to the house, plus in the early '00s, it was witness to numerous attacks and murders in the woods along the highway beneath the house. Local law authorities, however, frequent the house to chase off homeless people and vagabonds trying to illegally squat in the residence. Vandals often exploit the structure to carry off pipes and light fixtures. 

Identity of Ghosts: The ghost of Anna Koss, the mother of Kai Koss, is said to haunt the house. A strict religious woman, she traumatized and tortured her son with punishments for both accidents and minor incidents that were both cruel and vindictive. Kai says she once poured a pot of boiling water on him and left him locked in a downstairs basement room for hours at a time. However, in his murder trial, Kai alighted to another presence he believed he was haunting the house, that of a young man named Peter Vogt.

Kai confesses that the night he escaped his mother's cruelty that he emerged from the woods on the highway and accidentally distracted a truck that veered off the road and hit a parked vehicle containing Paul and Hester Vogt, an incident confirmed in the local records. Although, this account doesn't mention what happened to their son Peter who Kai believed was adopted by his mother and similarly mistreated. Peter living in the house by himself would explain much of the so-called activity in the house that occurred afterward, and according to Kai's public defender, deflect the blame off Kai to another suspect committing the local murders. However, no one knows if Peter is still alive in the area or if he is dead at the base of the waterfall near the house where he supposedly fell to his death. 

Source/Comments: Skjult (The Hidden) (2009) - Activity and history based on the Old Mealey House in Monticello, Minnesota, the Old Gein Farm in Plainfield, Wisconsin, Franklin Castle in Cleveland, Ohio and Baskin House in Riga, Lithuania.