Meanwhile, Back at the Zamek

Most villages and towns in the Czech Republic have fish ponds and/or have rivers. Vodniks guard them both. You can always recognize a vodnik: seaweed hangs from him, and green slime covers his body and his hair and clothes are wet – one coattail drips water. He loves to catch children, pulling them under water where he holds their souls in covered clay pots so they can´t escape. If the villagers are bad people, their fish pond has no vodnik. Do you think this is good? No, it´s certainly not, because no one is guarding the pond, no vodnik scaring away children who could fall in the water. Sometimes a vodnik floats a yellow ribbon on the pond to attract children. Do not be fooled by things you might see floating on the pond, and do not go close to the vodnik or his pond.

About once a year fish ponds are cleaned out, by men, never by children.  The men pull the plug to let the water drain away, netting the fish which they toss into barrels of water. Then they clean out mud and rubbish and  plug the pond again. The owner of the pond and everyone who helped clean it take home fish for their families. Often a wooden-slatted cage was placed in the deepest part of the pond and filled with some fish making it fairly easy to take out fish for dinner during the winter.

A noble family lived in the beautiful Bohemian Cesky Krumlov Castle. The mother and servants noticed that the children had an extra playmate who was a kind woman ghost called The White Lady. She loved children and played with the children of the family for generations. The last child, Peter, she visited often because he was an only child. Now you can visit the castle in Cesky Krumlov to see the rooms full of elegant furniture and old paintings. You can also see the bears in the moat. But you will not see families with children living there. People say The White Lady is very sad and sometimes walks through the castle rooms searching for children to play with.

Below the Zamek, on a cliff side above a pier, a little boy found a niche he enlarged with a chisel and hammer. One day he showed it to a young man who immediately used the tools to hollow out the niche more. After that, whenever strong young men visited, the little boy invited them to his cave where they worked on it. If you come to visit and are between the ages of four and ten, we will take you to see the cave.