Castle Frankenstein

Burg Frankenstein stands on a wooded spur of the Odenwald hills about 370 metres above sea level, looking out over Darmstadt and the Rhine plain. It was built before 1250 by Lord Konrad II Reiz of Breuberg, who took the name “von und zu Frankenstein” – an ordinary regional place name meaning roughly “rock of the Franks”. His descendants held it as a small free imperial lordship for four centuries until, worn down by quarrels with their Protestant neighbours, they sold it to the Landgraves of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1662. The castle then served as a refuge and hospital before falling into ruin in the 18th century; its two distinctive towers are a not very accurate mid-19th-century restoration.

Its fame rests on a name and a man. The theologian, physician and alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel was born at the castle in 1673 and later became notorious for his radical religious writings, his search for gold and an “elixir of life”, and the foul-smelling animal oil that still bears his name. In recent decades, local promoters and popular books have claimed that Dippel robbed graves and experimented on corpses at the castle, that Mary Shelley heard about him on her 1814 Rhine journey, and that he was the model for Victor Frankenstein.

Historians have examined these claims and rejected them. In a booklet titled “Six Errors about Burg Frankenstein”, the Eberstadt-Frankenstein local history society and academics from several German universities point out that no record places a laboratory of Dippel’s at the castle, that his surviving church-book entry accuses him of religious scandal rather than body-snatching, and that his later animal experiments took place long after he had left Hesse. Shelley’s journal records only a night stop at Gernsheim, from where the castle cannot be seen, and a supposed “secret diary” describing a visit has never been produced. The novel itself contains no castle and is set in Switzerland and Ingolstadt.

What is real is the castle’s second life as an American Halloween tradition. In 1952 the writer John Keel staged a live Halloween broadcast there for the American Forces Network, complete with a rigged statue that toppled in the crypt. In 1978 US airmen from the Rhein-Main Air Base launched a Halloween festival at the ruins that grew into one of Germany’s biggest, and in 2008 the team from Ghost Hunters International investigated the site. Today the ruins are free to walk around most of the year, with a restaurant below the towers and the chapel used for civil weddings.

Visitors and paranormal investigators report voices, footsteps and cold spots in the chapel and entrance tower. In 2008 the Ghost Hunters International team recorded sounds they interpreted as an Old German phrase meaning “Arbo is here” – taken as a reference to a knight named Arbogast – and another voice saying “come here”. Local folklore adds a dragon slain by a knight, Lord George, and a magnetic rock on nearby Mount Ilbes linked to witches.

Activity is said to centre on the castle chapel and its knight’s tombs, the entrance tower and the ruined walls at night; Halloween is when most people go looking for it.

The castle is a pilgrimage site for fans of Mary Shelley’s novel and the 1931 Universal film, whatever the historians say. Its Halloween festival, Horror Dinner nights and a long-running US Army running race made it a fixture of American military life in Germany for decades.