The White Lady Stirs Golden Porridge

To the right of the road from Prague stands a Baroque château in a park, now badly damaged. Among its owners around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the eccentric Russian Countess Asbass. Her behaviour later inspired legends that her ghost returned as a White Lady. On stormy nights, when the wind whistles in the chimneys, she enters all the rooms and the great first-floor hall, then descends dark corridors and the broad staircase to the ground floor, where the laundry once was. With a piercing hiss she plunges a red-hot poker into a huge cauldron of golden porridge, stirring until the château clock strikes midnight. Then she fades away. She was also seen in the park, always on the far bank of the pond, standing motionless in darkness among the trees.