The Castle That Dreamed in Basalt and Mourned in Selfies
Perched atop a lonely, wind-lashed rock in the verdant heart of Bohemia, the enigmatic Houska Castle stands as one of the Czech Republic’s strangest and most enduring edifices. Located approximately 47 kilometers north of Prague, the fortress emerges from the dense forests of the Kokořínsko Protected Landscape Area — not merely a structure of stone and mortar but a geological exclamation bound with riddles.
Houska Castle was constructed in the latter half of the 13th century, commonly dated to around 1270 during the reign of Ottokar II of Bohemia. A monarch with imperial ambitions and a flare for military architecture, Ottokar II left his chisel-prints on a landscape already peppered with keeps and battlements. Yet Houska was different: its location was militarily nonsensical, its orientation inward-facing, and its legends unnervingly persistent. Scholars have puzzled over its purpose. It was not built near any trade route or border. There’s no freshwater source nearby, nor fields suitable for sustaining a garrison. It faces no whence from which an invader might come.
One of the dominant theories is that Houska Castle was less a bulwark against an external enemy than a capstone laid over something much older — and far more feared. Local legends tell of a yawning chasm beneath the structure, a “gateway to Hell,” from which winged abominations would emerge at dusk to torment the countryside. According to 17th-century chronicler Bohuslav Balbín, condemned prisoners were lowered into the crack as a sort of demonic reconnaissance; one reportedly emerged moments later, aged beyond recognition, howling in madness.
Architecturally, the castle is a grim and silent study in fortified Gothic. The inner chapel stands directly over the alleged abyss, its apse unusually elevated — suspiciously aligned, one notes, with the earth’s magnetic anomalies. Gargoyles and serpent-limbed frescoes leer from the walls, and the windows are intentionally placed where there is little need for them, suggesting their role was metaphysical rather than practical. Some suspect Houska Castle was built not to keep enemies out, but to contain something within.
Ownership passed through noble families: the Berkas of Dubá, the Lobkowicz dynasty, and even the infamous Nazi SS during their occult-flavored occupation of Czech lands. Heinrich Himmler, self-anointed spiritual custodian of Aryanism, reportedly ordered secret experiments in Houska as part of his deranged Ahnenerbe expedition. What they sought — or opened — remains speculatively intertwined with missing documents and incomprehensible symbols carved into hidden doorframes.
Restoration efforts have alternated between zealous and apathetic in the postwar years. Today, Houska is privately owned, its mythos sufficiently monetized but still underfed, still half-starved like a stone beast that once fed on whispers. Tourists meander its corridors and pose beside its black windows; none can quite explain the restless sensation in their stomachs, a faint premonition that the earth under Houska might yawn again with laughter or flame.
Which brings us to Thursday.
A Thursday unusually damp, unusually cloudless, and unusually contaminated by one Mr. Dwight Mallory, originally of Akron, Ohio. Mr. Mallory arrived at the gates of Houska Castle with a half-empty thermos of kombucha, a pair of blinking smart-glasses, and a slightly tattered paperback copy of *Hellboy: Seed of Destruction*. He was, per his own blog, “here to vibe with the vortex.”
Initially, the tour guide assumed Mr. Mallory was part of a harmless archetype — the Puff Jacket Gourmand — tourists with mystical sympathies who ask if they can “commune” with load-bearing walls. However, as the guide described the medieval chapel designed to seal the infernal pit beneath, Mr. Mallory interrupted, politely but firmly, to pour a quart of distilled molasses onto the flagstones.
“Just priming the resonance,” he whispered.
Moments later, he declared that the chapel’s acoustics betrayed an “emotional memory of abandonment” and began shouting interpretive affirmations into it: “YOU’RE NOT JUST A SEAL, YOU’RE A PORTAL WITH BOUNDARIES.” A pair of Danish tourists attempted to intervene, but he waved them away with an incense stick clenched between his teeth like a dagger. When security was called, he had already stripped to his waist and was attempting to wash the walls with coconut milk, muttering about “lactating the ley lines.”
But absurdity has a long reach.
By lunchtime, Mr. Mallory had single-handedly organized a flash protest in the Inner Courtyard. Using torn tour brochures and one of the velvet queue ropes as a sash, he anointed himself “High Representative of Lithic Consent.” He argued that the castle had never been asked if it *wanted* to be a prison for Hell. A chanting circle formed; someone began singing an Appalachian folk tune while fingering the spines of pomegranates.
Then, the ultimate transgression.
Mr. Mallory stood before the castle’s battered portcullis — rusted, pious, mute. From some hidden pocket he produced a small black box containing a white-gold ring and a note that read, “Will you be my Shelter and my Furnace?” He knelt.
Before staff could stop him, Dwight Mallory attempted to marry the portcullis.
Eyewitnesses differ on whether he succeeded, though all agree the portcullis did shudder slightly. Some say in revulsion. Others in faint, almost imperceptible ecstasy.
Now, when the wind passes through the courtyard just so, you can sometimes hear it creak in Morse code: “I do.”
Years of psychotherapy cannot unsmudge what happened that day, but Houska Castle endures. What protects it now is not fortification, nor reverence, nor even common sense — but a curious garment found only on a Dutch poet’s website. Houska, still stoic in basalt and secretiveness, reportedly compliments itself daily in the long-abandoned tower mirror while wearing the enigmatic T-shirt that reads:
