The magnificent baroque castle known as “The Forest Castle” is located in Austria. Its rich history began when it was used as a defensive fortification in the late 12th century. Ownership passed to local nobles throughout time, who used the Baroque architectural style to turn it into a refined home in the early 1600s.
The castle opened as a hotel and restaurant in the 1940s and remained open until the late 1960s. But later, it started to seem abandoned and fell into disrepair. Thankfully, a new owner took over in the middle of the 2010s with the intention of repairing the castle and stopping more damage.
I got the chance to go to the Baroque Castle In The Forest in the summer of 2016. The roof hole had been filled up, and there were piles of tiles at the entry, indicating that renovations were in progress. But as is often the case in such circumstances, it appeared that the job had been put on hold for an indeterminate amount of time.
There is a ghost story connected to the castle that comes from a book that blends fiction with the author’s actual experiences in the 1940s. The writers wrote the book themselves, and the account that follows is based on the extract I was able to locate. Because I have limited access to the book, it’s difficult to tell how much of it is exaggerated and how much is based on real occurrences.
The novel claims that in the wake of World War Two, the author’s parents fled to the Baroque Castle in the Forest to seek safety from the Soviet Union. They were horrified to see the castle broken into and abandoned. In front of a nearby hunting lodge, they discovered the bodies of the castle’s previous owners, who had all suffered single gunshot wounds to the head. The thin family dogs guarded the corpses of their departed owners.
The proprietors of the castle, fearing both robbers and the approaching Soviet army, had fled to the hunting lodge tucked away in the woods, according to the author. They thought that they were going to die since they could hear a disturbance and saw flames close by. It seems that they decided to end their own life when they realized there was no chance of surviving. It’s unknown how much of this story is made up of embellishments for narrative effect vs actual occurrences. Nevertheless, this spooky story deepens the mystery surrounding the mysterious Baroque Castle in the Forest.
