Is Brno more haunted than Prague?

I don’t know because I made it all up. And what concerns Brno, what concerns Prague. I didn’t want to repeat old legends or stories that are actually notorious. But I read various books about it to know what they wrote about, for example about Cinderella Biliánová, which has a memorial plaque in Vyšehrad… Legends like Staré povesti českého are notorious, I didn’t want to repeat or retell the stories, so I had to make it up .

And how do you figure it out? A person simply goes for a walk in Prague and sees an abandoned house, and thinks to himself – could I perhaps place this here?

When I wrote Haunted Brno, where I lived 54 years of my life, I know the city well and I connected it to various places there. And I don’t know Prague, where he has lived for 15 years, that well, even though I have been there often and I know my way around here quite well. And so I didn’t tie it to the places, just to the made-up stories. It’s so emotional, the history from Brno and Prague.

The very first fairy tale is about a boy who has scary dreams. So creepy that she’s getting thinner and thinner and disappearing before her eyes. That’s you?

No, not really, I’m not writing about myself. But the inspiration comes from me, or from the family. The day before yesterday I had such a strange dream that before I went to school I worked for a few years as a worker, for example in a foundry. And in that dream I walked around the factory all day with some iron pipe and pretended to work. And now I was terribly afraid that it would be found out, that it is such a trick, that I am walking around with the pipe… I have such persecutory dreams quite often. Once in a while, once a week, some kind of unpleasant dream overtakes me.

And then how to actually turn it into events for children, so that they are scary enough, funny enough?

When I write something like that, I don’t have children in mind at all. I imagine it will be read by children or their parents. But sometimes I remember a strange dream from my childhood, and I process it. I remember that when I was about eight years old, there was a murder in Brno. The Brno Bronx, that was a neighborhood where Roma lived, alcoholics… And I dreamed that there was some murderer there, whom he called the red Jožko, and who walked around with a thirty-centimeter knife. And in the evening, I stop at such a crossroads, there in the middle of the shouted neighborhood. And now I see that the red Jožko is approaching. No, but it ends peacefully, the child’s blanket falls in the night, the window is open, so he is woken up by the cold. And mommy comes, lies down next to him and comforts him.

How does Arnošt Goldflam remember Brno? And what is he working on now? Listen to the full interview.