2024-03-14 17:12:33
There was a gate, behind it a garden, trees in that garden, let’s play in it, sounds in the opening of the film The Garden, which was drawn by Jiří Trnko in the 70s of the last century, and the Prague cemetery in Bohnice is reminiscent of it. There is not even a living creature in front of the gate, ivy creeps over the ground and trees, and the brick wall is so long that one wants to know what is behind it.
Just as the children were afraid of the cat in the Garden, the adults are afraid of the dark in the Bohnice cemetery. There are many legends about the place, which since the beginning of the 20th century was used to bury dead patients from the nearby psychiatric hospital. Esotericists, ghost hunters and occultists search here for paranormal phenomena and apparitions that cannot be logically explained. The cemetery has been attracting them since the 1960s, when the hospital stopped burying the dead there.
“Someone feels some energy here, which may be related to the fact that those people left the way they probably shouldn’t have left. I used to have respect for this place myself, and maybe I was even slightly afraid,” says the administrator of the largest cemetery for the mentally ill in Europe and the deputy mayor of Prague 8, Jiří Vítek, who started taking care of the site as a volunteer firefighter. At that time, he also founded the Mysterious Places website, which once again attracted the curious and believers of negative forces.
Photo: Magdalena Medková
Most of the total of 4,300 graves are not marked. The remains are buried in three layers under deposits of clay covered with ivy and fallen tree leaves, which together form small green mounds. The town hall of Prague 8 wants to revitalize the road that leads from gate to gate in the coming months. He also plans to repair the funeral chapel, which was sought after by followers of Satanism a few years before the Velvet Revolution.
“A group of young people led a ritual here, during which they allegedly sacrificed a piece of cattle. The state security then made a large number of arrests in front of the cemetery. In 2008, the occultists headed here again, but in smaller numbers and probably with a different intention,” says Vítek.
In addition to the negative forces, adventurers are drawn here by the very knowledge of who is buried there. In addition to the weak-minded, soldiers, murderers and suicides found rest here. The assassin Gavrilo Princip or the war veteran who murdered Otília Vranská in the 1940s, dismembered her and sent her in a suitcase by train from Prague to Košice is said to be here. Captain Josef Pěkný, who could not bear the burden of guilt and ended up in a psychiatric hospital, was convicted of the murder only last year thanks to a DNA test.
Take a walk with us through the “scariest place” in the Czech Republic.