Our Ghost Walk of Zurich

I grew up being taken on tours. When I was a child, my parents made the most of every opportunity to TAKE A TOUR. Be it a bicycle factory, the chocolate manufacturing town of Hershey in Pennsylvania, a steel mill, the Ford auto plant, or even a local scenic walk, if a tour was possible, we went on it. And I continued this tradition: in my first job out of college as a youth director at the Merriam Park Community Center in St. Paul, I started a summer program called “Twin Cities Tours for Kids”.

‘Taking tours’ is as ingrained in me as having pumpkin pie on my birthday!

So it was no surprise when Doug and I quickly found a walking tour that we could take here in Zurich. On Friday evening, November 28th, we caught the season’s very last GHOST WALK OF ZURICH!

With ten others, we began queuing up in the dark about 7:30pm, by the fountain in Paradeplatz, which is a tram stop near the oldest part of Zurich. Our tour guide, a British chap who hails from York in northern England, arrived wearing a dark wool overcoat and a bowler hat (also known as a derby, or billycock). He carried a black leather surgeon’s grip and flourished a skull-tipped cane, and we were soon to learn that he was both a gifted storyteller with a deep sense of the macabre and a humorist with a superb sense of timing. He took us on a ninety-minute walking tour of the ancient inner city’s dark alleyways, haunted corners, and church crypts.

These are just a few of the hair-raising stories he told us:

... The city’s headless patron saints Felix, Regula and Exuperantius, who attempted to convert its citizens to Christianity in the 3rd century AD. According to legend, the Roman governor of Zurich (which was called “Turicum” in those days) made them drink molten lead and plunged them into boiling oil. They survived and still refused to renounce their faith, so they were beheaded. That didn’t stop them: they picked up their heads, carried them to the top of a hill, and waited to be buried. The site of their graves is now Zurich's most famous landmark, the Grossmünster church.

... A 14th century city mayor, Rudolf Brun, is buried just below the clock tower. He died a terrible and mysterious death, which some attributed to poisoning. In the 1970s his remains were exhumed and examined, and they tested positive for arsenic. But as the substance was often used in earlier times for medicinal and recreational purposes, the result was inconclusive. His ghost has been seen to walk through walls.

... The folk tale of the ghost of a peasant girl who hanged herself from a beech tree on the Uetliberg hill after being betrayed by the cruel and lustful Duke of Manegg,

... The poltergeist who drove a young family, with their ten-year-old twin daughters, out of their home in the Shipfe quarter.

... The eerie sounds of nearly 70 drowned Christians who fell into the river during a medieval procession over an old wooden bridge, and whose shrieks can still be heard today.

We had a gripping adventure that Friday evening. Doug and I were the only Americans; the others were from England, Ireland, and Zurich itself.

We capped off the evening with drinks at the Aelpli Bar, in the oldest quarter of Zurich, with our new friends from Meilen in the canton of Zurich, who we met on the tour. But that scuttlebutt is for another blog … ☺

To learn more about the ghosts of Zurich … 

Check out this article that appeared in the SwissInfo.ch in 2006
Ghosts Haunt Zurich Streets

And view a clip of the tour on YouTube.com at

Ghost Walk of Zurich