The Ruins of Ehrenfels

I still remember the spooky night 40 years ago when my family slept in the tower of a medieval castle, the Burg Ehrenfels, along the Rhine river near the winemaking town of Rüdesheim am Rhein, in Hesse Germany.

That spine-chilling evening happened many years ago, but I still readily recall the day the Lilly six-pack - my mother and father, older brother, identical twin brother, younger sister, and I - loaded the family wagon with sleeping bags, blankets, pillows, ropes, clothes, food, water, wine, and a picnic basket and motored 75 clicks along the scenic autobahn 42 from our Frankfurt Am Main flat next to Grüneburg Park.

It was a beautiful, late summer's day in 1969. Neil Armstrong had recently performed the world's first moonwalk. Overjoyed and giddy with excitement, we arrived at the ruins filled with a great sense of devil-may-care adventure. The Ehrenfels Castle was and still is open to the public, but unscheduled or unapproved overnights by visitors to the 13^th Century stronghold have probably never been part of any official Castles of the Rhine guide book.

On the day of our visit, no guards stood watch at the bewitching fortification. We were greeted by no one, save for the souls and spirits of late medieval times. The empty castle courtyard was and still is surrounded by steep hillsides covered in all directions with the terraced vineyards of local winemakers. Today, the site of the one-time toll station is being used as a navigational station for ships passing along the famous river below.

Back in '69, the enchanting exterior of the Ehrenfels ruins appeared other-worldly from a distance. Upon closer inspection, the battlements were quickly exposed as dreamy facades of a long-gone age. Once inside, the ruins seemed small and insignificant, even to a ten year old boy. Despite its dilapidated condition the small fortress oozed with mystery and ghostly charm. Its thick stone walls were covered with light green mosses and the razor-sharp pieces of broken bottles. Since its extensive destruction in 1689, officials had no doubt cemented the glass shards into the walls to keep visitors from scaling its two remaining twin towers.

A creepy sense of evil pervaded the ruins. Alive with supernatural energy, Ehrenfels was the stuff of Gothic boyhood dreams. My brothers and I gleefully traipsed about the fort for hours, checking every corner, every nook and cranny inside and outside the historic rubble. Piles of boulders littered the grounds surrounding the crumbling stone and mortar curtain wall. Yet, something was missing. The gutted castle, which had once been a hiding place for the cathedral treasury of Aachen, paled in comparison to my mythic fantasies of feudal glory.

But all was not lost! We still had the western section of the forlorn fort, the last remaining tower keeps and corridors of the rocky relic, to keep alive our family dream of spending the night in a German castle high above the mighty Rhine.

It was a sunny, warm, picturesque day on the Rhine. Following an afternoon picnic of fresh baked bread, cheese and cold cuts, pasta salad, potato chips, and fruit washed down with applesaft and crisp German Riesling, my dad set to the task of figuring out how to get up and inside the nearest rectangular opening cut into the tallest tower.

The natural window sat about 20 feet up from the base of the ancient stone column. Since no other entrances to the towers existed (any entryways into the towers from the earthen ward had been cemented shut), the only way up and into the castle's enduring west wing was by scaling its sheer, dangerous walls.

My father used the rope. After securing one end inside the aperture with a metal pole, he painstakingly scaled the vertical steeple, pulling himself up hand-over-hand along the rope while inching with his feet between bits of broken glass until he was just below the porthole. He then somehow managed to hoist himself up and inside the shaft.

Unfortunately, no one else could follow my dad. When climbing the wall his way proved impossible for the rest of us, he came back down. Somewhere outside the main entrance to the hollowed out bastion my father had spotted an old rigid ladder. Devising a skillful arrangement of ropes and knots, he jerry-rigged the plain ladder into a rope ladder that hung from just below the opening to about five feet above the ground.

Using this teetering jerry-built system, we hoisted all of our gear and belongings up the wall and into the hole of the archaic spire. By late afternoon, with our belongings safely tucked away, we climbed the wall one by one until all six of us were snuggly cloistered inside our ominously enticing cylindrical bedchamber.

Under my mom's matronly tutelage, we arranged the sleeping bags, blankets and pillows atop the hard stone floor of our cramped but cavernous den. The damp smell of cool earth and aging rock filled the air. The stark, bumpy stonework rose up 30 feet or so to an arched, uneven ceiling. About halfway up the vault, on the same side as the second surviving tower, appeared a large, promising gap in the masonry.

That night, pigeons cooed and fluttered sleeplessly high up in the ghoulish towers. The wind whistled eerily through the secret stairwells and hidden passageways of the ancient alcazar. From a distance, along the foggy Rhine below, came the haunting blasts of shuddersome ship horns blaring repeatedly in the dark, chilly night. For a few nocturnal hours it was my castle, my own shadowy, moonlit portal back to the cold-blooded renaissance days of classical antiquity.

That night I felt the presence of beings outside the realm of the fifth dimension. They were there with me, with my entire family, as I starred up towards the ominous vaulted ceilings and drum towers filled with the hollow echoes of brutal, barbarous, and bloodthirsty times. I sensed the bloodcurdling screams of the cursed and unfortunate souls, the restless, hair-raising ghosts of Ehrenfels Castle. They were there, moaning in the lowest depths and howling in the highest reaches of the castle's cold, hard, unforgiving stones.

The next morning, we were all there, still alive. My dad had pulled the ladder up into our ghostly guest room during the night, after a group of rambunctious young Germans who were all liquored up invaded the inner sanctum of our castle walls with happy shouts of medieval madness. We used the ladder to climb to the next level, and found an open wall walk between the two towers. We explored several halls and antechambers no longer open to the public. We came, we saw, and we conquered. And the ghosts of Ehrenfels Castle live on.