The stink of urine here is a reminder that the place is used by visitors not on the ghost tour. “Here, you will encounter the ghost of the old tanner,” says Jelínková. Even the street name Kozna, which means “skins,” recalls the tanner’s presence.

“He distinguishes himself by his awful smell—now as in his earthly life,” our guide explains. “It was said that he sneezed and broke wind at the same time.”

The tanner lived in the early fourteenth century. He rented an apartment here in the same building that served as a jail for the city’s convicted criminals. The prisoners had befriended a stray dog that was valued as a good catcher of rats and mice. But the dog’s barking and howling kept the tanner up all night.

Finally, the tanner could take it no more, and he killed the dog with poisoned scraps of meat. Afterward, however, the rats multiplied as never before. “It is said that the tanner is responsible for bringing the plague to the city,” Jelínková concludes.

A city’s phantoms

The ghost tour is a relatively new service, I learn. It was first organized by Jitka Simkova, a Prague entrepreneur, in 1995. That same year Jan Vanis published A Guide to Mysterious Prague, which claims to be the first guide to the city’s supernatural beings. Vanis says that nowhere in Europe will one find as many people telling of ghosts, apparitions, and phantoms as in Prague.

It is enough for the tourist to enter the twilit little streets of ancient Prague in the evening, and the same mood will breathe on him as has been felt for centuries by those who tell of the ghosts in Prague houses . . . .It will not seem impossible to him, as he walks the winding alleys, that some of the strange inhabitants with which fantasy has peopled Prague should emerge from the flickering shadows.

According to Vanis, the Prague ghost stories tend to convey the timeless moral that crime does not pay, and they fall into three categories. First, there are stories of persons wronged.