An Austrian teenager who was held captive for 8½ years said she wants ownership of the house she was kept in so that it doesn’t become a tourist attraction, and her captor’s mother can live there, a newspaper reported Tuesday.
In an interview with the newspaper Kurier, Natascha Kampusch said she wanted the house so that “people don’t turn (it) into an odd thing, a type of pilgrimage site where ashtrays and coffee mugs are sold.”
Kampusch said she would let her captor’s mother live in the house, located in the semi-rural Vienna suburb of Strasshof.
Wolfgang Priklopil, a 44-year-old communications technician, snatched Kampusch — then 10 — off a Vienna street while she was on her way to school. She was largely confined her to an underground, windowless cell in his home. He killed himself by jumping in front of a commuter train within hours of her escape on Aug. 23.
Kampusch said she had not met Priklopil’s mother but that she planned to “when the time is right.”
Kampusch fled to freedom when Priklopil was distracted by a cell phone call while she was vacuuming his car.
The teenager spent several weeks in the hospital and is now living in an apartment with special carers in the Austrian capital. She said that after her years of isolation, she had caught feverish colds twice in the past few weeks and always had ear plugs and sunglasses ready to keep out noise and light.
Kampusch, who found herself at the center of a media frenzy after her escape, said she had had little time to herself.
“Free? No, I am not really free. Much to the contrary,” she said. “But that only bothers me occasionally. I actually like to have something to do all the time.”