Skeleton in the Tavern General
Text
Anyone who has ever visited the tavern frequented by Kuttenberg’s poor, bearing the unflattering nickname of Hole in the Wall surely noticed a local peculiarity: a skeleton sitting at a table.
We borrowed it from the book Staré / Nové kutnohorské pověsti (Old/New Kuttenberg Tales) by Jitka Jelínková, who wrote that there used to be a gambling house in the Lower Town, where miners would go to drink and gamble. But the miners’ wives would not stand for it, so they hatched a secret plan. They bought a skeleton from the executioner’s assistant and hung it in the gambling house in the closet where the cards were kept. They hoped this would scare the men and make them give up their habit forever.
But instead, the drunk men pulled the skeleton out of the closet, sat it at a table and began to drink with it. To their dismay, the skeleton came to life as midnight struck and started to actually drink its beer while thrashing the inn.
For our purposes, we have taken the liberty of borrowing the first part of the story.
No Comments