Smile! Sick tourists turn Fritzl's sex dungeon house into ghouls' paradise

This group of ghouls are pictured outside the home of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who kept his daughter Elisabeth and the children he incestuously fathered with her imprisoned in its cellar.

Two police officers are now permanently stationed at the house in Amstetten in a bid to deter this sort of behaviour from visitors with a sick taste for the macabre.

Macabre: Tourists smile for the camera as they pose outside the house in Amstetten, Austria, where Josef Fritzl locked up his secret family for years

Late last week the officers let Fritzl's 68-year-old wife Rosemarie into her old home, where she had lived from the age of 17.

Mrs Fritzl, who has said she never wants to live in the 'tainted' house again, and another woman spent an hour gathering clothes and other personal effects.

They then drove back to the psychiatric clinic outside Amstetten where Mrs Fritzl, Elisabeth and her five cellar children are receiving therapy.

Among the items she picked up were toys for five-year-old Felix, the youngest child and the one who is said to be the least damaged by his incarceration.

Unimaginable: Fritzl locked up his own daughter, Elisabeth, when she was just a teenager and pretended she had run away to join a cult

Police say Mrs Fritzl was deceived by her husband into believing that Elisabeth had run away to join a cult when instead she was held in the cellar for 24 years.

One hospital insider said: 'It was mentally quite tough for Rosemarie to go back into the house. It has become something of a symbol of evil for her.'

Fritzl, 73, whose double life was exposed in April, remains in police custody. He is yet to be charged.

Torment: Elisabeth, now 42, was forced to live underground in this tiny dungeon lair with three of her children as the rest of her family lived normally above them