At the turn of 2015-2016 our association was contacted by Mrs. Krasava Šerkopová, who works as a volunteer castellan and guide at the New Castle near Lanškroun. Familiar with our activities, she decided to ask us to do research on one of the smallest castles in our country. A place that has a troubled past and many secrets in store.

Thus began our cooperation on the case: New Castle near Lanškroun.

On April 29th, we arrive at the New Castle. Here we unpack our equipment and shoot daily footage for a historical and mystery documentary.

We get acquainted with the size of the rooms in the castle and in the cellar. And although the castle looks really small, it has incredible spaces full of cold that passes through us, both day and night.

History

The new chateau near Lanškroun was built in 1700-1712 by the Liechtenstein family. It was a four-winged monumental baroque building with a four-storey facade. Each floor contained fourteen halls, decorated with Baroque stucco and wall paintings. But only one wing of this beauty has survived to this day. Why?

It's 1714 and carpenters and boilermakers are repairing the roof and gutters of the castle. However, one cold day, an ordinary work activity turns into a tragedy. As a result of a fire started on the construction site (so that the workers would not be cold), one of the unattended embers ignites the wooden structure, from which most of the castle catches fire.

The tremendous heat destroys not only everything flammable, but also stones that crackle with heat. To make the tragedy even worse, the entire castle is at that time surrounded by wooden scaffolding, which not only spreads the fire faster through the building, but as a result of its collapse, the pillars at the back gate are damaged.

Repairs to the castle after this devastating fire have been ongoing for years. The rafters, roof, and interiors are restored and the castle can once again be fully functional... for three months.

Then one day, storm clouds appear in the sky. It only takes one single lightning strike to the central part of the castle, and years of work take their toll in a new major fire in the central part of the castle, where the main staircase burned down and the stone vases and perimeter columns on the ground floor cracked due to the excessive temperatures of the fire.

Thirty-five years after the second fire (in 1754), the third fire came. This again stripped the castle of its roof and roof trusses and destroyed most of the palace.

The Liechtenstein family did not have the same financial resources as before. A

 so he uses the New Castle near Lanškrun as building material for other buildings in the area. Only one small wing of the large castle remains. And the spacious cellars were used by the Liechtenstein brewery in Lanškroun.

And the cellars are still a beautiful example of how monumental the whole castle was.

The three fires in the history of this building alone are mysterious enough to warrant a documentary. Of course... that's just the tip of the iceberg of the mysterious Lanscrount site. The new castle has other mysteries and secrets in store...

Mystery 1. Ghosts

The new chateau near Lanškroun is surrounded by many interesting sights. Several of them could be classified as ghost mysteries.

Inside the spacious cellar there is a room with a carving of a skeleton and a naked lady next to each other. Both engravings were probably made in the mid-1980s by the brother of a visitor who confided this information to Mrs. Krasava Šerkop.

It was in this room that Mrs. Sherkop witnessed an incident where she was guiding a mother and her little girl through. It was the little girl who allegedly saw the lady in the white dress as she was leaving.

A similar mysterious figure was allegedly seen by some people at one of the entrances to the cellar, where she was standing outside pointing somewhere.

Mystery 2. Second basement floor

The new castle near Lanškroun was a large complex, which had not only one cellar floor, as it is seen today, but two. The second cellar floor has become a traditional legend, according to which an underground road was supposed to lead from Lanškrun to the castle.

The Nazis were even supposed to use the second floor as a kind of warehouse. And when they left the premises, they broke through the side walls and let the underground water into the cellar.

What the truth is, we don't know. The whole thing would be a nice story without the facts if.... geological radar hadn't really confirmed the existence of a second castle cellar. And it's not small. It's a several-metre-high, flooded room with a vaulted ceiling. The fact that the vaulted ceiling is preserved may indicate that the water really started to flood the cellar because of the breached walls.

However, it remains to be seen whether this is true until further excavations will hopefully reveal the full truth about what the New Castle still hides.

Research

With all this information, we decided to undertake research in the cellars of the New Castle. These are the boundaries we are setting.

We deploy cameras, prepare dictaphones, electromagnetic field meters, thermometers and a parabolic amplifier.

Before turning off the lights, we test the electromagnetism in the natural environment where the current is running.

The entire basement is permeated with moisture. This can affect electronic equipment, which can often be short-circuited. This would cause strong electromagnetic deflections that could affect some individuals. They would experience nausea, headaches, various sensations they cannot rationally explain, including delusions and, in rare cases, hallucinations.

Measurements on two types of EMF (electromagnetic) meters show that the lights are shielded well and therefore the fact that some people feel unwell here is certainly not of this origin.

So we turn off all the lights, turn off the cell phones and start the main investigation.

Investigations, Part 1. K2 EMF Meter and Parabolic Amplifier

In the first part of the investigation, we go through the entire basement with the EMF field meter that we have previously used for measurements under normal conditions. If this meter didn't register anything before, it shouldn't now.

And this prediction is coming true. The K2 EMF meter really doesn't register a single deflection. Not on demand, not even when left in one place for long periods of time.

On the contrary, we celebrate great success with the parabolic sound amplifier. With it, we record sound in one part of the corridor adjacent to the one where the little girl saw the woman in white. At first, the anomaly seems to occur when we wish to be contacted. But with increasing empiricism, we have to conclude that the disturbance in question occurs quite randomly. We rule out our technology or the Wi-Fi on the ground floor of the castle as the originator. Everything takes place in a single corridor, which is the only one that ends in a passageway through which we can see the outside. We have not been able to confirm that the sound anomalies are more frequent or stronger the closer we are to a given hole in the wall.

Investigation, Part 2. Metal detector

It's about 1:00 in the morning when we monitor the interior of the basement with a metal detector. According to the castellan, the walls have an iron admixture, which is not confirmed in the introduction, as the instrument shows normal metal values on the record, as in the surrounding area. However, there is virtually no place in the cellar floor where there is not some rusting or rust-free metal. From old cans, wires, to the rarer non-rusting metals (shards) we are unable to clearly identify them. At this point, the New Castle's dungeon really has a huge supply of surprises that can have their effect on instruments, or even possibly humans.