Czocha Castle

Czocha Castle rises on a gneiss crag above Lake Leśnia and the Kwisa river in Lower Silesia, close to the borders with Germany and the Czech Republic. King Wenceslaus I of Bohemia ordered a stronghold here between 1241 and 1247, and over the centuries it passed between Bohemian kings, Silesian dukes and noble families. The Hussites captured it in 1427; the Nostitz family held it for 250 years from 1453 and strengthened it enough to beat off a Swedish siege in the Thirty Years’ War. A fire in 1793 gutted the complex.

Its present storybook appearance is largely the work of Ernst Gutschow, a Dresden cigar manufacturer who bought the ruin in 1909 and had the Berlin architect Bodo Ebhardt rebuild it from an 18th-century painting. Gutschow fled in March 1945 with his most valuable possessions. After the war the castle was looted, sheltered refugees from the Greek Civil War, and in 1952 was taken over by the Polish Army, which used it as a resort and removed it from public maps. Since 1996 it has been a hotel and conference centre open to visitors, a popular film location and, since 2014, the home of the College of Wizardry live-action role-playing game.

Czocha’s ghosts are told to every tour group. The White Lady is said to be Gertruda, a noblewoman who, according to legend, let the Hussites into the castle out of spite against her brother and was beheaded in the courtyard when it was retaken. A well in the inner courtyard is known as the Well of Unfaithful Wives, into which jealous lords are supposed to have thrown wives suspected of adultery; some claim to hear crying from it at midnight. The castle’s own night tour tells of a baby walled up alive by a cruel lord and of its mother still wandering the cloisters in search of her child, and a trapdoor beside the marriage bed in the Gutschow bedroom is linked to a bride who, in the story, was dropped into the dungeon on her wedding night.

None of these tales is tied to a documented event, and most read as classic European castle folklore. The castle’s secret passages and the army years have added a modern layer of rumour – about hidden wartime archives and a spy school – that local writers acknowledge has never been proven. What the stories do show is how a castle rebuilt as a romantic dream in the 1910s has grown a past to match.

Hotel guests and visitors talk of a pale female figure in the courtyard and corridors, a baby crying inside the walls, women’s voices or weeping rising from the well at midnight, and footsteps in the secret passages.

The inner courtyard and its well, the cloister galleries, the bedroom with the trapdoor bed and the hidden passages that run through the walls. Night tours visit all of them.

Czocha has starred in films and series such as Gdzie jest generał? (1963), The Hexer (2001–2002) and The Secret of the Cipher Fortress (2007), and was voted one of National Geographic Poland’s Seven New Wonders of Poland in 2012. Its role as a real-life wizarding school for College of Wizardry has made it famous among LARP fans worldwide.