Dutch authorities have arrested Gerrit Jan van Dorsten, a 67-year old father of six who allegedly kept his children isolated at a remote farmhouse located about 60 miles north of Amsterdam for several years.
The plight of van Dosten’s children came to light when one of them, Jan Zon van Dorsten, managed to escape and asked a barman at the village of Ruinerwold for help.
According to the Daily Mail, the cops are also examining “possible satanic links” as some of the uncovered evidence allegedly points at “occult practices”, with the key element of this investigation being a white board with strange drawings and numbers scribbled on it.
As one source explained to the newspaper, these scribblings “have mystified police”, as “there are so many different numbers on there which simply don't add up”.
“They are not mathematics, but more likely some weird occult materials. The numbers are all over the place written in black ink”, the source said. “'They go from top to bottom, side-to-side and run across each other without making sense. One possibility is that they are orders for the family members to walk around in circles. But there is also likely some other twisted truth behind them.”
The children were being kept at an "enclosed space" within the farm building divided "into small compartments", with investigators originally believing that the kids stayed there “after being convinced they were the last people on Earth”, as the Sun put it.
The van Dorsten siblings, some of whom allegedly lost the ability to speak coherently due to long isolation, are now being cared for at an undisclosed location where they are being assessed by counsellors.
The authorities also detained a local carpenter named Josef Brunner, an alleged former cult member who possibly had “common cause” with van Dorsten.
