Interlude Magazine

Inspiring | Interlude Magazine

AUTUMN
2021

 

Ghosts, devils, rumors and oddities

The charm of the unknown dominates everything, said Homer, and in fact, we are all often attracted by the stories, by the legends, by the myths around this or that place, as if the story itself was not enough to satisfy our desire to know, and our excitement with fear.  
Everyone knows that where there is a castle there can only be a ghost with lots of moans, footsteps, and screams, souls who, due to the terrible crimes of which they were victims, cannot find peace and are forced to wandering eternally within the walls of the places that have seen them as protagonists. 
Sicily has its dark side, it hides secrets, rumors, and oddities. 
A journey through the castles and mansions that have been places of atrocious murders and that legend tells as haunted by ghosts. 
In the Palermo area, there are several residences that are said to be haunted by ghosts, as well as disturbing places to visit. The Castle of Caccamo with the ghost of the owner Matteo Bonello, the Castle of Carini, with the ghost of Donna Laura, the Catacombs of the Capuchins and Palazzo Steri, the seat of the court of the inquisition. Except that the Catacombs of the Capuchins which are the burial places of religious, children, single women, soldiers, and nobles, the other places are all witnesses of bloody deaths, deceptions, and torture. Thus, the ghost of Bonello still wanders in search of revenge against those who tortured him and left him to die in the castle of Caccamo, the imprint of Donna Laura's bloody hand, appears on December 4th on a rock of the castle of Carini, and the writings on walls of Palazzo Steri make us understand what terrible fate befell the unfortunates of that prison. 
But even in the quieter Catacombs, the presence of stories and legends is inevitable. Above all, it is said of "presences" who walk through the catacombs and continue to visit their loved ones. Among these, there would be the spirit of Count Cagliostro, who every 25 years would roam the corridors in search of the remains of his beloved. It is a place of great charm and emotional impact, which deserves respect and seriousness. However, it is a full-fledged cemetery and not a horror museum. 
In the Catania area, we find stories of strange phenomena already at the Ursino Castle, laments, doors that close, and even strange figures that materialize in the photos of visitors, tell of this place that was a prison until 1838. In Bronte, instead, at the Castle of Nelson, a ghost wanders the corridors emitting deep moans. But the castle is also famous for another legend. It is said that when Elizabeth I died, due to the debauchery with which she had lived, the devil wanted to take her to hell by passing through the crater of Etna. Flying over Bronte, the queen lost a shoe that was collected and kept in Nelson's castle and it is said that every now and then the queen comes to look for her precious shoe. 
Certainly to arouse greater interest in fans of stories and legends full of mystery is the Devil's Letter, a letter written in incomprehensible characters, kept and exhibited in the tower of the Cathedral of Agrigento and in copy at the Biblioteca Lucchesiana, also in Agrigento, and at the monastery of Palma di Montechiaro.
Although in Sicily this story has always been alive and talked about, it was thanks to illustrious writers, such as Andrea Camilleri, that in the 1960s competition to translate this epistle of 1676 was launched through the magazine Domenica del Corriere. Many experts have tried, but no one has ever managed to understand what was written there because the characters used were not in a single language, but had symbols of different alphabets of the time. 
The letter was written by Sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione (the name that Isabella Tomasi had as a nun), a Benedictine nun of the cloistered convent of Palma di Montechiaro, in the province of Agrigento. She called it the "Devil's letter" because she claimed to have been tempted by the Evil One, who had asked her to sign it.
That letter soon became the center of a very dense mystery because it was written in an incomprehensible language and contained 14 lines written in an alphabet between Classical Greek and Cyrillic, but whose characters, placed in that sequence, did not create any known words except for the word "ohimé". 
Isabella said that she had written it on the orders of the Devil himself and that only she was allowed to understand the text. She said that that word "alas" was the only one she had written of her own free will and that otherwise she had been forced to report what he had dictated to her. She refused anyway to translate it.

Credits to LLM

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