With autumn in full swing and the nights growing longer, the minds of many of us start turning to seasonal pastimes like drinking pumpkin spice lattes and enjoying Halloween, also known as the most ‘spooktacular’ day of the year.
Delen
While not too many Dutch people celebrate the holiday, that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of spots in Delft that can send a chill down your spine. Here are some creepy local historical facts and legends. Feel free to share them with your friends but a word of warning: they aren’t for the faint of heart!
What Lies Beneath the Delftse Markt?
These days the Delftse Markt, the large public square that sits between the Stadhuis and the Nieuwe Kerk, is a great place to hang out on a sunny day. In medieval times, however, it served as a large cemetery. According to Vanessa Brussée, who hosts a weekly ‘Dark and Creepy’ historical tour of Delft’s city centre, when it came time to construct the square the gravestones were removed but the thousands of bodies below them were not. The remains of hundreds of former Delft residents were discovered in front of the Nieuwe Kerk in the mid ’00s. Eight more were unearthed by archaeologists during a construction project last winter.
The Ghostly Sisters of the Monastery of St. Agatha
Whether or not you believe in ghosts, you might encounter one if you take a nighttime stroll past the Museum Het Prinsenhof. If local legends are to be believed, the spirits of several former nuns still wander its corridors and the surrounding streets. The building that now houses the museum once served as the Monastery of St. Agatha. It opened in 1404 and, at one point, it was home to as many as 125 nuns. The spirits of at least a few of them may have never left.
The Tower of Terror
The Stadhuis’ photogenic tower dates back to the 14th century and local residents often refer to it as ‘De Steen‘ (‘The Stone’). The tower was once part of a small prison and Balthasar Gérard remains, perhaps, its most notorious former inhabitant. In 1584, the French assassin killed William of Orange, the infamous Dutch monarch. Gérard was captured soon thereafter and spent the following three days being brutally tortured in the tower before he was executed. Plenty of other former prisoners were treated in much the same manner and nearby residents often complained to the guards about their loud screams.
If this wasn’t grisly enough, the bodies of many executed prisoners were later harvested for other purposes. Human fat was converted into an ointment that was thought to cure various aches and pains. Supposedly, bottles of the stuff, complete with prisoners’ names written on the front, could be purchased from an apothecary that once operated out of the storefront that’s currently home to De Salamander, a local drug store.
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