Gold Burns in the Golden Well

One of Prague’s most beautiful houses, the House of the Golden Well at the corner of Karlova and Seminářská Streets, has a richly stuccoed façade with figures of many saints, including St Sebastian and St Roch. St Roch is shown with his emblem, a scallop shell, the sign of pilgrims to St James’s tomb in Compostela. The stairs are so narrow that coffins had to be lowered out of the windows. People say that gold could be seen burning in the well here. Ghosts of a headless Spanish knight and his wife, murdered here long ago, also appear. The English author F. M. Crawford set his Gothic novel The Witch of Prague in the House of the Golden Well. In the book, the magician Keyork Arabian declares that the Czech capital’s winding lanes resemble the convolutions of a human brain.