The White Lady’s last appearance

The White Lady of the Rožmberk family also appeared at this ancestral seat of the Lords of the Rose. The White Lady’s room still survives, as does a portrait of Perchta depicted as an enchantress pointing a wand at the zodiac. The halls contain Mannerist paintings and grotesques with allegorical subjects. Tradition holds that an apparition was seen here as late as the Second World War. During the occupation, the castle was taken over by the Nazi youth organisation “Bund deutscher Mädeln”, which held its summer camp here. Two broadly similar versions of the event are known. One, also recorded in a 1970 promotional booklet about the castle, says: “Every morning two of the girls raised the flag on the castle tower while the others assembled for morning roll call. One day the girls ran screaming from the tower. They claimed to have seen a white figure up there threatening them. The leader went up herself with volunteers. They came rushing back down. A white figure really was standing on the gallery, they said, beckoning to them with its finger. The castle custodian then had to go up alone. On his return he declared that he had seen the apparition, but could suggest nothing except waiting until it disappeared of its own accord. The leader called the Gestapo, but they had other work just then. Thus the flag never appeared on the tower again.” A second version, recorded and passed on by the regional researcher J. Kočnar, agrees in general outline but differs in certain details. In this account the girl assigned to raise the flag suffered a heart weakness after seeing some kind of phantom. (The flag was raised on the square tower of the so-called Lower Castle.) The threatening white phantom was then seen by several girls, including their leader, at the highest point of Jakobínka, the oldest round tower surviving from the original Upper Castle. In this version the Gestapo did arrive to investigate, but ultimately found nothing. Curiously, Jakobínka had neither stairs nor a ladder inside, making it impossible for an ordinary physical person to reach the top unnoticed.