This doctor did the creepiest thing in history

Today's story is the definition of creepy. It starts somewhat normally but then slowly spirals into absolute insanity. It is definitely one you will remember.

In 1889, when Carl Tanzler was just 12 years old and living with his family in Dresden, Germany, he had a very strange dream. In this dream, he found himself in this black void where everywhere he looked, it was just nothingness. And then behind him, he heard footsteps, and so he whipped himself around and looked, and there was this woman dressed in this big puffy, elegant white dress walking towards him out of the darkness. And when she walks right up in front of him, she comes to a stop, and she introduces herself as Anna Constantia von Brockdorff, who was a real person in the early 1700s. She was a noble noblewoman in Germany, and she would tell Carl that she is actually a distant relative of his, and that she was here to pass on a very important message.

Carl was rooted to the spot. He didn't know if he should be afraid of what she was going to say or excited or nervous, but before he could decide, Anna had already turned and was pointing in the direction she had appeared out of, and so Carl turns and looks in the direction she was pointing, and out of this blackness, out of this void, came this woman's face. It was a face detached from a body. It almost looked like a floating picture of a woman's face. And as this face floated closer and closer to them, Carl was immediately struck by just how beautiful this Woman was, her hair was jet black, like a raven's feathers, and her skin was white like porcelain, but there was something off about this woman, this floating face. She looked sad and kind of frail, and so as Carl found himself staring at this face which was now right next to them, Anna spoke to him again and she would tell Carl that this woman, the floating face, she's going to appear in your life later on and it is your mission given by God to save her. She's going to be very ill, very sick, and you need to find a way to keep her alive.

Then Carl, in real life, woke up and immediately he was struck by just how visceral that dream had been. It really felt like that had just happened to him, but after a few moments, it seemed like, okay, that was just a dream. But unlike other visceral dreams he had had in the past, this one did not gradually fade from his memory. Instead, over the course of that day, the memory, specifically of the raven-haired woman's face, really seemed to become more clear and more concrete in his mind. To the point where at the end of that day, he could easily remember exactly what she looked like.

Over the following days and months and years, Carl periodically would have the same dream, the same vision of his distant relative Anna, who would come out of the void and she would remind him to be on the lookout for this raven-haired woman when God sent her to him. But despite these constant reminders in his dreams, and Carl being ever vigilant to look for this raven-haired woman in real life, he never actually found her. He never met this woman he was Supposed to save, fast forward to 1926.

Carl was 39 years old by this point. He had gotten married, not to the raven-haired woman but instead to a local woman in Dresden, and the pair had two daughters together. They lived a simple life, and, by and large, Carl seemed rather content and happy with his life. However, secretly, he was a little disappointed that these dreams, these visions that he was having of Anna and the raven-haired woman, that they had not come true, that it really had just been a dream.

That year, due to an economic downturn in Germany, Carl and his family left Germany and emigrated to the United States where they believed there would be better opportunities for them. When they arrived in the United States, they settled in central Florida. But within a year, Carl and his wife had a severe falling out, and they split up. Carl would leave the family home in central Florida and resettle several hundred miles south in southern Florida in a town called Key West.

It would be in Key West that Carl would get a job as an X-ray technician at a local hospital, and it would also be in Key West that Carl's life would change forever. Less than a year after settling in Key West, Carl was at the hospital going about his day when an older woman walked into the office. She said to Carl that she was there to get her daughter, her 21-year-old daughter, an X-ray of her chest because her daughter apparently couldn't stop coughing, and they were concerned about it.

Carl began doing the paperwork with the mother when suddenly the daughter came into the office, and as soon as Carl saw her, he knew immediately that she was the raven-haired woman from his dreams. She walked in and she sat down in a chair, and Carl just stopped what he was doing and stared at the daughter. Then he kind of broke out of it and turned his attention back to the mother and said to her, "Ma'am, don't worry. I will do everything in my power to save your daughter's life."

Now the mother didn't know what was wrong with her daughter, and so this was both really helpful that this man she was talking to was so willing to help and also kind of ominous that he was already insinuating that she could be dying, but either way, the mother said, "Thank you very much. You know, we really appreciate that."

So Carl and the mother finished their paperwork, and then Carl quickly left from behind his desk and hustled over to the daughter, and he introduced himself and reiterated that she was in good hands. The daughter was a little bit weirded out by this, but she was polite and said thank you, and she said her name was Elena.

Over the next year, Carl would be in touch with Elena and her family on a near-daily basis, updating them on all of the new techniques to fight tuberculosis that he was doing all this research on. He would tell them about experimental procedures and drugs they could try, even sometimes paying out of pocket for them to go try them. He would also bring Elena into the office as often as he possibly could to X-ray her again and again and again to see if perhaps she was making good progress.

Unfortunately, over the course of that year where he was doing everything he could, it just didn't work. The disease ravaged Elena's body, and on October 31st, 1931, roughly a year after Carl had first met Elena, she would unfortunately pass away. Elena's family was devastated by this, but their grief didn't even compare to Carl's grief. It was like Carl had lost his life too. He couldn't to believe he had failed his mission and let the raven-haired woman die. When it came time to bury Elena, Carl said, "Let me pay for the most elaborate gravesite we can possibly make. Let me set up a mausoleum for her." A mausoleum is an external building that sits in a cemetery that effectively serves as a kind of shrine to the deceased. Her family understood that Carl had become very, very close with Elena, although they didn't fully understand the relationship. But they did understand she meant a lot to him, and so they agreed to let him do this. After Elena was buried inside of this small temple that Carl had built for her, Carl began spending virtually all of his time kneeling inside of it, crying and begging for Elena's forgiveness. Elena's family was well aware that Carl was doing this, and at first, they kind of just let it happen. But after several months, they began to tell Carl, "You know, you really need to let her go. You need to begin to move on." But Carl refused. In fact, over time, he only became more and more obsessed with Elena.

Finally, after seven years of Carl doing this, Elena's family decided, "Enough is enough. He really needs to stop making her loss all about him. It's not his loss, it's our loss. We're her family." And so the family decided the only way to kind of get Carl to stop doing what he was doing is to demand he give the key back that gave him access into the small area inside of the mausoleum. So one night, Elena's sister, whose name was Florinda, decided to go over to Carl's house unannounced and confront him and get the key back from him, Florinda hopped in her car and drove over to his property.

His house was kind of set back off the road behind some trees, and so you had to drive down this kind of winding driveway to get to it. Florinda turned onto his driveway and began driving. When his house came into view, the first thing she noticed was a number of the windows on the first floor were all lit up. Clearly, Carl was home. As she drove towards the house, she was just looking in these windows, and for a second, she saw Carl. He was very elegantly dressed in a suit or a tuxedo, and he was ballroom dancing with this woman who's also very elegantly dressed as well. For a second, Florinda considered turning around and not disturbing him, but then she thought, "You know what? This has been going on for so long. I just need to get this over with."

So she drove her car and stopped in front of Carl's house. She hopped out, walked up onto his porch, and knocked on his front door. Inside, she could hear music was clearly playing, but just a few seconds after she had knocked, the music was cut off, and then no one came to the door. Florinda knew there were people inside this house, so she knocked again, but again, there was no movement in the house. It was just silent, as if the people inside were pretending not to be there. Finally frustrated, Florinda knocked on the door a third time and said, "Carl, I know you're in there. I have to talk to you about my sister. Please come out here."

Finally, she heard the shuffling of feet, and then she heard the sound of the door unlocking. It opened up just a crack, and through this crack, Carl looked through and he looked out at Florinda very suspiciously. He said to her, "What do you want?" Florinda would say, "Look, I'm here to talk to you about my sister. Can I please come inside for a second, or can you come out here and talk to me?" But Carl pretty much immediately said no, and then he shut the door.

However, before he shut the door, Carl had very briefly stepped out of the way, allowing Florinda to see through that gap into the house. So before the door actually shut, she got to see who and what was inside that house. And what she saw was the woman Carl had been dancing with, and the woman was seated in a chair, maybe halfway through the house, and she was facing the door. Florinda knew immediately it was her sister.

So she's standing on the porch having no idea what to make of what she's just discovered, and feeling kind of overwhelmed, she just kind of staggered off the front porch. She turned around, she ran into her car, and she drove off to tell the police. When the police came back, they knocked on the front door and demanded that Carl let them see the woman he was there with. At this point, Carl knew the gig was up, and so he opened the door and allowed them to come inside. When the police went inside, they saw the woman he was with, and sure enough, it was Elena. However, Elena was deceased and had been for seven years. After her death, Carl said he was able to talk to her inside of her mausoleum. And so that was why he was going back there every single night because he and Elena were spending time together. And then at some point in 1933 So, two years after Elena has been dead and buried, Carl would say she told him, while he was visiting her mausoleum, that she didn't like being in the mausoleum and that she wanted to come back with him and stay at his house. And so, the following day, Carl had shown up with a child's wagon and he pulled her out of her coffin, pulled her out of the mausoleum, put her corpse in this wagon, and wheeled her back to his house. He had continued to go to the mausoleum every night for the next five years just to keep up appearances, but Elena's body never went back inside of it. She would stay at his house where he painstakingly attempted to restore Elena's very badly decomposed body to its original form. He strung piano wire through her entire body, connecting all of her bones together to keep her skeleton intact. He replaced her eyes with glass eyes, and he began rubbing the special wax all over her skin. He also stuffed her insides full of rags in order to give her a full natural look, and he constantly sprayed her with perfume to reduce the smell. Once she was, in his eyes, back to normal, he began spending as much time with her as he possibly could. He would change her outfits constantly, he would put on makeup, and he would give her new jewelry. And he would talk to her about the ups and downs of life. He would laugh with her, he would cry with her, he would sleep with her. Carl would admit that ultimately his goal with keeping Elena in his home was to eventually still save her life. He believed if he could somehow get her body up into the stratosphere that the radiation up there would bring her back to life. And if he could do that, he would be fulfilling his god-given mission to protect her. But Carl never got a chance to launch her into the stratosphere. Instead, he was charged with wanton lee and maliciously destroying a grave and removing a body without authorization. However, these charges would be dropped, and Carl would be set free. As for Elena, her body was returned to her family, and they would bury her in Key West. So, that's going to do it, guys.