The local legend from my childhood that still gives me chills
When I last visited Poland, I was eager to show my husband the Ducal Tower, the only attraction in my small village of Siedlecin in south-western Poland. This 14th-century Tower is well known for its fresco murals depicting the legend of Lancelot. My family’s house is about 600 feet from the Tower and I went there on numerous school trips as a kid. There are no strong storytelling traditions in the community where I grew up, but the legend associated with the tower is what I remember most from any local stories.
Photo: Tomoyuki Shibata
The legend was recorded in the book Legendy Karkonoszy i Okolic by Urszula and Aleksander Wiackowie published in 1984. We had the book at home, and I used to be terrified of its disturbing cover reminding me about the creepy legend it contained. I copied it so I could show it to my husband, and it still makes me feel a bit eerie after all these years. I'm sure this is amplified because the mythical events occurred so close to my home and in a familiar setting from my childhood. I'm curious to know if the legend evokes similar feelings in you:
THE BANE OF SIEDLECIN
The lord of the Siedlecin Tower had six daughters and was expecting the birth of a son. The son was to succeed him in Siedlecin and the knightly family was to be extended. Fate played a trick on him and a seventh daughter was born. The Lord healed his despair with wine and beat his wife, even though she was nobly born. A few Sundays after giving birth, the wife passed away.
Neighbors and relatives consoled the Lord, saying that the seventh daughter can bring great honor to the family. She must have two hearts like every daughter, and she will be a fortune teller and will see everything that is hidden from human eyes. This did not comfort the father, who had his daughter baptized and named her Morslawa because she reminded him of the extinction of the good knightly lineage [“mor” in Polish can be translated as “death”]. Her father called her Morka [abbreviation for Morslawa], and she was known as Dunka among the local people. It was a pretty child, but once, placed on a high bench, she dug herself out from her swaddling clothes and fell on the hard floor. Something must have broken in her, because she became limp and developed a hump on her back. She remained hunchbacked until the end of her life.
As a cripple, her father treated her with special consideration and prepared her to be an heiress after his death. He married his three eldest daughters, and gave the next three to the convent in Lubomierz, but he kept Morka and granted all of her wishes. Nobody wanted to marry a cripple, so she ended up a spinster and bitter. She enjoyed teasing healthy people, and she didn't care about her subjects. It got worse after her father died. She ordered her maids to be lash for trivia, and she knocked out the teeth of the more beautiful and the younger ones. People around her suffered, and they began to refer to her as the Bane rather than Morka. In Jelenia Gora and its vicinity, a proverb was coined - "Good as the Siedlecin Bane."
Many people breathed a sigh of relief when the Bane died one spring day. However, The joy of the subjects did not last long. Three days after the burial, she began appearing to people in Siedlecin as a ghost. People saw her scaring the horses on their way to the river and strangling the hens in the henhouse. The servants later saw her overturning their supper tables and pouring out the soup from their bowls.
The people of Siedlecin decided to dig up Morka's grave. They found the corpse in the coffin, but not the way they had arranged it. She was lying on her side, her eyes wide open, and the fingers of her right hand were chewed on the skin. They pierced her body with a linden peg, sprinkled it with holy water and buried it again.
The following spring, when the people were most hungry and weak, she began to scare them again. She brought about a lot of misfortunes for people. This happened for several years, always in the spring, during the pre-harvest season, and that is why people called her the Spring Bane. Until one day, when Witek Szelest's wife was strangled by the Bane, he sought assistance from the the canonry at the church in Jelenia Gora and asked the prelate for help. A few Sundays later, the prelate arrived in Siedlecin, accompanied by another priest who had performed an exorcism on the Bane. They went around the entire village singing devotional songs and carrying holy water. Upon entering the gate to the Tower, the exorcist sang something in Latin for a long time and approached the linden growing there with a clay wine bottle. He sprinkled the trunk of the tree with holy water and uttered a spell three times, which must have been powerful because the trunk of the tree suddenly broke longitudinally. Brown smoke began to come out from the crack in the trunk. The exorcist dipped the wine bottle he was holding in holy water, placed it towards the trunk, and began to gather the smoke inside the bottle with his hand. When all of the smoke had been hidden, the exorcist quickly blocked the vessel with a stopper, crossed it with a cross and said:
“Let there be peace in this village! The Bane will cause no harm. She is inside this wine bottle."
For a long time, the village peasants advised on what to do with the imprisoned Bane. It was Witek Szelest who ordered to drown the Bane in the river. They tied a large stone to the wine bottle with a strong rope and dropped it into the water. Shortly, the wine bottle flowed out without a stone or a string, much to everyone's surprise. People expected it to flow along the river to Wlen, Lwowek, or even to the Oder river, but the wine bottle floated on the surface and began to flow against the current towards Jelenia Gora. Everyone followed the bottle, not taking their eyes off the vessel. Suddenly…! People stood up and watched in horror as the wine bottle sped up and broke with a bang. The brown smoke it emitted reached the riverbank and entered the forest through the bushes. It looked as if it have wandered towards the Lipnik hill.
From that day on, the Siedlecin Bane no longer scared people, but it occasionally dropped large stones on people walking along the Bobr river from Siedlecin to Jelenia Gora. It is said to live as a damned soul in Lipnik or the ravine to this day, which is why the ravine is called "Tartarus" as part of Hades was in Greek mythology.
