Ghosts appear for a reason. Each of them has its own, sometimes tragic, history. We will tell you a few of these stories in this article.
Saint Anna
One of the most famous ghosts in England is the ghost of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII.
Heinrich married Anna out of great love and because he really wanted an heir, whom his first wife could not give him. Anna swore to the monarch that the heir was not a problem, after which, as soon as she put on the crown, she went all out.
No, she did not betray the king, because in those days, to change the monarch was tantamount to suicide. In any case, historians do not know anything about her betrayal. Instead, Anna began to actively spend the royal treasury: she bought jewelry without counting, every day she rolled lavish balls, in short, recklessly reckoned, compensating, as she believed, what she had received less in her youth.
Heinrich looked at his wife's squandering through his fingers, but insistently hinted at the need for an heir. And then came the happy moment when Anna gave birth. But who? Girl!
Here the king's patience ran out. He recalled his wife and her balls, and jewelry, and all her whims, and the empty treasury, and the fact that because of her he spoiled relations with the Vatican (there were categorically against his second marriage). After that, the monarch accused his wife of treason and he, the king, personally, and ordered his comrades-in-arms to cut off Anna's head, which was willingly done, since Boleyn, during her time as a queen, also managed to annoy them all.
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Since then, Anne Boleyn has wandered around Blickling Estate (where she was born), cursing God for not sending her a male baby and gently shaking her own head in her arms.
Party with the devil
Scotland is such a haunted country that there are not enough castles (despite their huge number) for all ghosts. That is why the Scottish ghosts sometimes huddle in several pieces in one place and at the same time do not feel constrained.
Take, for example, the medieval Glamis Castle located in the Angus area. One of the most ancient ghosts of this country lives there - the King of Scotland Malcolm II, who died in 1034 from wounds. The castle was then still a wooden hunting lodge, which was later completed, and the blood of the king, who was mortally wounded in a battle taking place nearby, soaked into the wooden floor. The local inhabitants of the building preserved this piece of the floor or, rather, restored it and now show everyone a brown stain of royal blood from a thousand years ago. They say that the ghost of Malcolm II also occasionally visits the room where such a clear evidence of his death is kept.
In the same castle, only in a different room, the ghost of the Earl of Glamis lives. The story of his transformation into a ghost is more intense than that of the Scottish king. The count loved to play cards, and one Saturday he played so hard that he stayed up until midnight. And when they gently hinted to him that gambling on Sunday was a great sin, the count sent well-wishers to hell, saying that he was ready to paint a game or two with the devil himself (apparently, the count went to the map). The devil did not fail to immediately materialize behind a green cloth and very quickly won everything from the count and his companions, including their immortal souls. The material part of the winnings of the lord of the dark forces was not interested, but he carefully preserved the souls in the very room where the game took place. And now in the castle you can sometimes see a luminous window, behind which, judging by the sounds, is clearly a gambling game. But nobody can find the door to the room where the window is lit. They say that the servants, as soon as they saw who their master was playing with, quickly walled up the entrance to the room and tried to forget its location, which they successfully managed.
Gray lady
It is also home to the ghost of Lady Janet, Countess Glamis, who was burned at the stake in 1537, accused of witchcraft and an attempt to poison the then reigning King James V. Countess Glamis, now better known as the Gray Lady, loves to wander the corridors and often prays in chapel of the castle. Usually her appearance is accompanied by dull knocks, reminiscent of the sound of axes, as if the peasants are again building a funeral pyre for Lady Janet.
In the same corridors you can meet a woman without a tongue - a servant who saw something inappropriate for her social position. So that she could not tell anyone anything, her tongue was cut off. But the maid decided that in addition to being deprived of her tongue, something much more terrible awaited her, and soon committed suicide. It is very easy to recognize the ghost of a woman without a tongue - her mouth is filled with blood and all her clothes are smeared with blood.
A certain knight lives in the same castle, who, it is not known how he got here, but, apparently, has taken root and is now having fun by looking into the faces of sleeping guests at night. Another man with a terribly disfigured body by torture loves to appear in the dungeons of the castle, where he was apparently tortured to death, and in the former royal bedchamber the ghost of a black page boy often sits at night, but no one knows who he is waiting for there.
Infantry Outfits
Let's leave Foggy Albion and see how things are with ghosts in Europe. For example, in the Czech Republic in the 15th century, the following story took place in the Rozmberk castle. The owner of the castle Ulrich Rozmberk had a daughter, Pecht, whom he actually forcibly married off to a poor but extremely arrogant nobleman Jan Lichtenstein.
Liechtenstein could not stand his wife, he mocked her in every possible way, in which his mother and sisters helped him. In short, Pekhta's life was not sugar.
For 25 years, Pekhta endured her husband's bullying, until he suddenly fell ill due to some kind of incurable disease at that time. Before his death, Yang decided to repent to his wife and ask her forgiveness. But Pekhta told her husband that there could be no question of forgiveness and that he would burn in hell for all the nightmares that she had experienced during 25 years of marriage. Jan got terribly angry, now for the last time, and cursed his wife forever and ever.
No one knows if Liechtenstein went to hell, but his curse worked. From the moment of death and until now, the unfortunate Pekhta (now she is called the White Lady) wanders around her ancestral castle of Rosenberg in a snow-white dress, causing no harm to anyone. Sometimes she changes into a black dress, which means that soon one of the neighbors will die. And once Pekhta was seen in a red dress, and soon there was a fire in the castle.
The path of betrayal
In neighboring Slovakia, there is a White Lady, although her name is White Lady there. Its habitat is the town hall of the town of Levoča.
An ugly story happened to the White Lady, who was called Julia Korponay during her lifetime, before which even Anne Boleyn's spree fades.
Julia was the wife of the local military commander, Captain Korponai, but she managed to fall in love with the leader of the rebels (or liberators, now it’s hard to make out), who at one far from perfect moment besieged the city.
Julia fell in love so much that she completely lost her head, and on a dark night, not without a hint from the object of her adoration, she opened a secret passage and let enemies into the fortress.
The betrayal did not go unnoticed. After a while, the defenders of the city caught Julia and solemnly executed her right in front of the town hall. Since then, she lives there, wandering through the dark corridors in search of a secret door that was supposed to lead her to her beloved, but in fact opened the way for the enemy.
The ghost of Paul I
Russia has its own ghosts, and among them there are even crowned persons. For example, the Engineering Castle is inhabited by the ghost of Paul I, on whose orders, in fact, this castle was built so that the emperor could hide in it from intruders.
Paul I failed to escape, the intruders nevertheless overtook him and strangled him in his own castle. It is interesting that, according to the existing legend, shortly before the violent death of the emperor, blessed Xenia of Petersburg predicted that Paul I would live for as many years as there are letters in the phrase: "The holy relic of the Lord in the longitude of days" that adorns the frieze of the southeastern façade of the castle is fitting for Your house. There are 47 letters in this phrase, and the emperor was really killed in the 47th year of his life. Now he wanders through the corridors of his so unreliable hideout, shaking his fist at the museum staff when he meets him and sometimes playing sad melodies on the harmonic (a kind of flute).
Konstantin Karelov
