Couple move into dream home and start getting sick – then they make horrifying discovery

Kaija and Bryan Bretzius made several grim discoveries while dismantling the walls in their dream property, after realising the house required an insulation upgrade

A family’s dream home swiftly morphed into a house of horrors when they unearthed a series of bizarre items hidden within the walls. Kaija Bretzius, a mum-of-three, and her husband Bryan bought their new abode in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, under the impression it wouldn’t require much renovation.

Kaija explained: “We didn’t want to do a lot of home improvements. We didn’t have a large budget. This house was by far in the best condition for all the ones that we had looked at at the time.”

However, it wasn’t long before they realised the semi-detached property needed an insulation upgrade, leading Bryan to start dismantling some of the walls. That’s when the unsettling truth about their new home began to emerge. It’s not the first time a dream home had turned into a horror show, with a mum recently being left horrified over finding a room that “looks like hell”.

As Bryan ventured into the loft to check the insulation, Kaija recalled: “He says that he can see some things are shoved down in the wall. And he comes back with some old bottles.”

Before things got worse, Kaija was thrilled with the vintage bottles and eagerly asked her husband what else he’d found.

Reluctantly, he revealed there were several adult magazines from the 1980s. But a far more disturbing discovery was still to come.

The couple decided to probe further into the gap between the building’s inner and outer walls to uncover any other hidden secrets.

“We grabbed a torch, because it was hard to see,” she revealed on the What It Was Like podcast. Among the next items they unearthed in the murky, dust-laden wall cavity was an aged sack.

“I thought horribly, initially, I thought that it was possibly a baby in the wall,” Kaija recalled.

She clarified that she’d leapt to this disturbing conclusion because the bodies of some infants had been previously found beneath another nearby property. She went on: “I just couldn’t think of what else it would be in, and what you would wrap in a burlap sack and put down in the wall.”

Yet, the truth behind Kaija’s find was less sinister, though perhaps even more peculiar. She disclosed: “It was a chicken carcass. It was wrapped up and shoved down into a wall in this burlap sack.

“Further investigation uncovered at least 20 chickens’ bodies, along with the remains of several other small animals.”

Some of the bones were wrapped in newspaper, dating them back to the 1920s and 1930s. Unfortunately, Kaija and Bryan hadn’t taken adequate precautions when handling long-deceased animals.

She added: “We got fevers, we were acutely sick. We inhaled something and it made us sick, for three or four days. “.

She described how the mummified remains of the chickens had “aerosolised” as they were being extracted from the wall – unleashing countless dormant bacteria.

Kaija believes that the animal remains had been employed in some form of occult ritual that she describes as “a pow-wow, or Dutch magic”. “We were shocked, horrified and disgusted,” Kaija told WNEP.

Despite commissioning a thorough survey before buying the property, nothing suggested any link to occult practices.

She added: “We got the radon inspected, we did everything. But we didn’t know we had to look for chickens.”

The pair have been compelled to entirely strip out and reconstruct all the walls at considerable expense. Their insurance wouldn’t cover the remedial work, forcing them to shell out $20,000 (approximately £15,000) to date, with the project still ongoing.

Kaija suggested that whoever carried out the rituals became more skilled as time went on. “It seemed like whoever was doing this was doing this over years and years and years, just building up layers,” she said, before suggesting: “And then he was sharpening his technique.”

Family members of the property’s 1920s occupant, who allegedly wielded his powers to treat conditions including fevers and whooping cough, continue to live locally.

Yet according to Kaija, remnants of what they uncovered still haunt the dwelling. During pregnancy, her enhanced sense of smell picked up a peculiar stench seeping from the walls.

“It just smelled like death,” she described.

“If you ever have a mouse die in your wall, and then your house kind of stinks for a month until it dries out. So it was not a good smell.”

The mysterious artefacts, now largely overlooked in American history, are presently stored in a local museum. However, given the potentially dangerous nature of the preserved animal remains, it’s probable that the items from Kaija’s walls will never go on public display.