Cher in Florence

I am always at attention when someone is telling me a story that I half-believe–or rather, that I want to believe but if I did I’d have to revolutionize my worldview, and so I’m afraid to believe because that would require so much work. I stay in a kind of limbo of belief. I fully admit that I am lazy. For instance, I was raised Catholic, and rather than fully believing, I keep my suspicions up, and yet, I’m not above feeling awe.

The same is true with ghost stories. The other day I was interviewing my friend Alberto, who manages the 12th-century Castello del Trebbio outside of Florence. I wanted to find out more about the Pazzi family, who lived there in the 15th century. I just happened to ask him if there were any legends about the castle. (I like legends.)

He perked up and told me about a former owner of the castle, Antonio Baldini, who had lived there in the early 20th century. He lived with a ghost in the castle, Alberto said. The doors would slam, the furniture moved, you know. Sure, I thought, everybody knows what ghosts do. Their behavior is more or less consistent, even if they are not believed in.

I wondered if the ghost were still here.

As if answering my question, Alberto told me that the ghost disappeared when Baldini sold the house. I didn’t understand. Didn’t ghosts haunt buildings?

“You have to know that it’s not strange because there are two kinds of ghosts–what you call ghosts and what you call spirits. The difference is that the spirit is connected with the family; it is one of the family and it has nothing to do with the building . . . But a ghost is in a building forever. When you say a house is haunted, that’s because new people come and go; [the owners] don’t tell you that there is a ghost in there. But in this case it was a spirit. When the [Baldini] family sold the castle, this spirit disappeared. So today there are no spirits in the castle.”

So simple.

As Alberto told me this story, we were sitting in his office, a modern loftspace above the wine shop (the property includes vineyards and olive groves). Keyboards clicked away, the lights shone bright. I wasn’t too spooked. But then he asked me if I wanted to go see the dungeon where the prisoners were kept? Oh yes!

He took me first to see the private chapel in the castle. Memorial plaques of previous owners line the walls. Stones for the Baldini family were there, including several infants’, some who died only days old. It’s strange, how distance in time can cast a macabre shadow over a story, when really the mother of these poor children surely felt something akin to what my own mother must have felt when she lost her baby, after he was born, before me, in the late 1960s. Just a human being, suffering.

We walked through many beautiful but chilly rooms. In the dining room, family photos decked the side table and on the ceiling someone had painted coats of arm of all the former residents. We then stood for awhile in the “Conspiracy Room,” where, legend has it, the Pazzi family members conspired to kill two Medicis. Alberto stood over a spot in the middle of the room, under a thick rug, and started jumping a little. “Ah, I think this might be one of those trapdoors,” he said. He’d told me earlier that the Renaissance owners of the castle used to invite their enemies to dinner, and then, at just the right moment, press a button and “pop,” deposit them swiftly into the dungeon. He also showed me where the family spends most of their time, in a cozy room about the size of a spacious studio in Brooklyn, complete with a kitchen and warmed from the recent use of the large stone fireplace. Finally, we walked through the bright courtyard, and descended the stone steps that lead to the wine cellars and the dungeon.

Immediately what grips you is the cold, the dankness, and the dark. It is a cellar, after all. It feels like a cave. It must have to do with the switch from the high ceilings above to the low ones down here. We walk by rows of huge wine barrels, each bordered by a cherry red line, and the wine’s specific varieties are written in big, black handwriting on the front. This adds some normality.

But it’s the other rooms that get me. To get to the dungeon, we have to walk through darker, smaller rooms, filled with stacked layers of unlabeled, dust-covered wine bottles. You might bump into a one if you’re not careful. Poe and his Cask of Amontillado instantly come to mind. There is a room off to the side of one of these rooms, with a door half-open. I can’t explain why but I want to see what’s in there. I have a feeling that it isn’t just more wine bottles. I sense it’s an even smaller room. I ask Alberto if it’s okay if I check it out, and he says, yes, sure. He doesn’t tell me what’s inside. I approach slowly, as if I were the wife in Bluebeard, dangerously curious about the most secret room in the house.* When I get to the entryway, all I can see are dark shapes, maybe storage for materials or equipment? It could be anything. I feel for a light but don’t find one, so I walk back to Alberto, my curiosity unquenched.

As we enter the dark dungeon a few rooms away, actually a small room, Alberto reaches for the light but it’s not working. “Huh, that’s strange.” He fidgets with the bulb. This is a classic moment. For all of you writers out there, or horror/suspense aficionados, you’ll recognize this as the moment in the story just before everything goes horribly wrong. It’s formula, but it works every time. His lighthearted “Huh, that’s strange,” is the perfect setup for the quick disaster/death to follow.

“I’ll have to get Mario** to fix that,” he says with a smile. “Anyway, see, here are the rings where they used to fasten the prisoners to.” Iron rings punctuate the walls, and are placed at a height where the prisoners’ arms would be reaching up, slightly. I remember the rings being rusty, but I think that’s more my rusty, shadowy memory.

And of course, nothing unusual happens. We stay there only a moment or two, and then move on to happier rooms, and soon upstairs out into the bright sunshine again.

The imagination is an exciting place. Even if no spirit roamed that castle, the fact is that babies drew their last breath there, conspirators plotted murder, and men’s bodies languished on iron rings, their wrists bloody from the chains (I imagine). All beyond horrible. Time may conjure spirits out of the stories, but isn’t that just a safe way to look the dark in the face? Is there a difference between my imaginings and a spirit?

Both my imagination and the idea of a spirit are definitely more fun to believe in than believing we live in a cold, meaningless universe whose creatures have a penchant for cruelty. I really don’t know. Either way, I’m uncomfortable, and spooky stories keep me on the edge of my seat.

*She discovers in this room the corpses of all of her new husband’s ex-wives, positioned on various horrific torture contraptions.
**Mario is the gamekeeper, who has worked for the castle since 1953. He is also the keeper of the legends, Alberto tells me. He is worth another story altogether. He did tell us about a previous resident who was so cherished by his family that his body was preserved (from the torso up to his head) in a glass case and kept on the chapel’s altar for 40 years. These are moments I wish I were fluent in Italian so I could listen to all of his stories and write them down.