Old Town’s prettiest house is also home to legends of greed and murder
One of the most striking facades on the route from Charles Bridge to Old Town Square is the House at the Golden Well.
And such a beautiful building would be sure to attract a handful of stories over the years. There are two separate ghost stories set there, in addition to a rather overwritten novel from the 1890s that uses the house as a main location. The Witch of Prague, published in 1891, features a mysterious woman who sought the secrets of immortality and who hypnotized men into devotedly serving her.
On top of that, there is another House at the Golden Well across the river in Malá Strana with its own legend.
The pretty house at the corner of Karlova and Seminářská Streets in Old Town long ago was known as the House at the Red Chair, due to a papal nuncio named Philip Cardinal Spinelli living there during the time of Emperor Rudolf II. The house has passed through many hands before and since.
A housemaid named Ľubomíra was cleaning in the basement and she bent over to look down the well and get a better glimpse of the golden glow. But she slipped on the wet floor and fell down the well. Her desperate cries for help went unheard and she drowned in the well.
By the time he got to the basement his mood was foul. He found the maid dead and floating in the well. He yelled at the corpse for ruining his day and forcing him to have a cold dinner. He toyed with the idea of simply burying her quietly but decided the risk was too great. He contacted a doctor to come and examine the body and take it away.
The law required that the well be cleaned thoroughly so as not to spread disease. Plagues and cholera were common at the time. The master of the house cleaned it himself so as not to have to waste any money.
He was having no luck getting a new maid, as the circumstances of the death of the former one were a bit suspicious.
The drowned maid Ľubomíra began to show up that night, soaking wet from head to toe. Her nightly rounds took her up and down the narrow stairs looking for the treasure so she could return it to its hiding place.
The master of the house soon found himself regretting his good fortune, but the treasure was gone and could not be replaced. He had to live with the dripping ghost from the well wandering the halls to the end of his days.
Another rather cryptic legend says that a Spanish knight and his wife were both murdered in the House of the Golden Well when it was serving as an inn for travelers.
The headless ghosts wandered the house at night for years, but nobody knew how to set them free, or any details of how they were killed.
Eventually, a baker moved in and made gingerbread in various shapes of animals and houses. He kept trying to make new and different ones to keep his customers coming back.
One year around All Souls Day he made his gingerbread in the shapes of rumored local ghosts, including the Spanish knight and his wife. But he put heads on them.
In the morning, those gingerbread figures were broken and the heads were gone. He tried again the next night, and the results were the same. He asked everyone in the house, but nobody knew what happened to them.
On the third night the baker stayed in the kitchen to catch the vandal.
The baker was frightened nearly to death, but made a new tray of Spanish knights and ladies.
The spectral couple said they were pleased with the results. The knight then told his story. He and his wife were coming from Spain, which was also under Hapsburg rule at the time, to pay their respects to distant relatives in the Bohemian court and the visit the Infant of Prague, a miraculous statue that had its origins in Spain but was now in a Prague church.
But the joke was on the innkeeper. The couple had carefully hidden their traveling money and their lavish gifts for nobles. The innkeeper got nothing for his murderous ways.
The ghost of the knight said that if the bones were finally moved to a proper cemetery, then he could finally be freed and have eternal rest. The baker would even receive a divine reward for helping, the ghost promised.
Shortly after the bodies were given a belated burial, the baker decided to make renovations to expand the kitchen. When he knocked down part of a wall to make room for another oven he found the long lost treasure.
The Spanish knight and his wife have not been seen in the House at the Golden Well on Karlova Street since.
Another legend says that the well and small house belonged to Emperor Rudolf II, and that he let the astronomer Tycho Brahe use it. One night, the astronomer saw a vision of the Virgin Mary at the well. Because of that, he had the well lined with gold leaf. The house, though, is not counted in the usual list of places that Brahe lived.
The house was expanded several times, becoming a tavern and in more modern times a luxury hotel.
The wells no longer exist at either location as they are described in the legend, if they ever existed at all. There is a fountain on Karlova Street next to the house there, and a courtyard with a central fountain at the hotel in Malá Strana.
Background
The House at the Golden Well (Dům U Zlaté studny) in Old Town has been at its location since even before the current street names. The former names for Karlova Street were Nožířská and Ševcovská. The house is also older than the current Baroque facade, which dates to 1713 and is the work of sculptor Jan Oldřich Mayer. The first mention of the building is in 1354, when it changed hands. It was remodeled extensively in the 17th century.
The figures on the facade are the same ones that are usually found on plague columns in the Czech Republic, monuments put up to thank the heavens for the passing of an epidemic. The lower four saints depicted on the building are St Sebastian, St Rocco, St Wenceslas and St Jan Nepomuk. These are placed around a golden eight-pointed star flanked by two rather frightened lions. Above them are St Ignatius of Loyola and St Charles Borromeo (or Francis Xavier or Francesco Borgia, there is some dispute), and at the very top in a resting position is St Rosalia, the patron against epidemics.
The scared lion can be found on the Two of Swords card in The Tarot of Prague. St Rosalia can be found on the Ten of Swords.
The house currently has a hotel and an exchange office. It is not open to the public as a tourist attraction. The outside, though, is right on the main path from Charles Bridge to Old Town Square, and very hard to miss.
The name Unorna is derived from the Czech word for February. The other main character is called The Wanderer, and he is looking for his lost love. Instead he finds himself turned into the witch’s pawn as she tries to crack the secret of immortality through a mix of hypnosis and transfusions.
The description continues: “The main entrance takes in all the scant breadth of the truncated angle which looks towards the monastery. Immediately over it is a great window, above that another, and, highest of all, under the pointed gable, a round and unglazed aperture, within which there is inky darkness. The windows of the first and second stories are flanked by huge figures of saints, standing forth in strangely contorted attitudes, black with the dust of ages, black as all old Prague is black, with the smoke of the brown Bohemian coal, with the dark and unctuous mists of many autumns, with the cruel, petrifying frosts of ten score winters.”
The house has been cleaned up since then, and is now a shade of beige for the most part. In the novel, the inside of the house has large rooms and even a garden. It is hard to see how they would fit in the narrow space suggested by the exterior.
Crawford likely really did visit Prague, and wasn’t just basing his account on a map and a guidebook.
He was born in Bagni di Lucca, Italy, in 1854 and spent much of his life in Europe.
He also came from artistic roots. He was the only son of the American sculptor Thomas Crawford and Louisa Cutler Ward, the brother of writer Mary Crawford Fraser (aka Mrs. Hugh Fraser), and the nephew of poet Julia Ward Howe.
He married Elizabeth Berdan, the daughter of the American Civil War Union General Hiram Berdan, in October 1884. He died in 1909.
Most of work is about Italy, and The Witch of Prague is not among his most highly regarded works.
An article by Baba Studio with Raymond Johnston. Copyright Baba Studio, all rights reserved. Please contact us if you would like to syndicate or otherwise use this article.