Eight years of darkness On March 2, 1998, while on her way to school, ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch was abducted. More than eight years later, on August 23, 2006, she escaped with a story that shocked and horrified the entire world. She spent the most delicate years of her life hidden in a cellar underneath an ordinary Austrian suburban home. How was she able to survive? What sort of woman had emerged? What kind of man was Wolfgang Priklopil, her abductor—and what demands had he made of her? Journalists Allan Hall and Michael Leidig covered Natascha's story from the beginning. The result of extraordinary investigative reporting, Girl in the Cellar gets to the heart of this very tragic case to reveal a truth no one would have imagined. “In this thorough account, journalists Hall and Leidig uncover the details of the disturbing abduction and entrapment and the surprising strength of the young captive.” - Daily News Eight years of darkness On March 2, 1998, while on her way to school, ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch was abducted. More than eight years later, on August 23, 2006, she escaped with a story that shocked and horrified the entire world. She spent the most delicate years of her life hidden in a cellar underneath an ordinary Austrian suburban home. How was she able to survive? What sort of woman had emerged? What kind of man was Wolfgang Priklopil, her abductor—and what demands had he made of her? Journalists Allan Hall and Michael Leidig covered Natascha's story from the beginning. The result of extraordinary investigative reporting, Girl in the Cellar gets to the heart of this very tragic case to reveal a truth no one would have imagined. Allan Hall has been a journalist for thirty-one years. Now based in Berlin, he was formerly the New York correspondent, first for the Sun and later for the Daily Mirror . He co-founded the Big Apple News media agency and has covered German-speaking Europe for the last eight years for newspapers such as the Times , the Scotsman , the Independent , the Mail on Sunday , the Daily Mail and the Age in Australia . He is the author of several encyclopedias of crime in addition to a number of other books, including A History of the Papacy and Nostradamus and Visions of the Future . Michael Leidig has worked as a reporter for newspapers, magazines, radio and television since 1988, and has been covering Austrian affairs for the London Daily Telegraph as a foreign correspondent since 1995. He is the founder of the Vienna-based news agency Central European News, which has correspondents in all the Central and Eastern European countries, and has founded and edited Austrian newspapers—the Vienna Reporter , Austria Today and the newly launched Austrian Times .