Why are there 17th-century blood stains on this facade in Amsterdam?
The ghost story (as it is told on TikTok) that partly goes as follows: the red signs are said to have been placed there towards the end of the sixteenth century by ex-mayor Coenraad van Beuningen (1622-1693), who unconsciously lived in the house. He is said to have walked along the water screaming and raving, dressed in a grimy nightgown, and splattered the wall with his own blood β until his own servants overpowered him and dragged him inside, back to the lonely and closed existence that he there is higher. On some nights, the story goes, you can still hear his frenzied jeers echoing.
To find out more about this I call Richard Meijer, psychologist and lover of ghost stories. He included the legend about Van Beuningen and his bloodstained facade in his book Ghost houses in Amsterdam (2002), a tour of occupied places in the capital. Meijer tells me that when he was researching the municipal archives and library of Amsterdam, where he searched through old newspaper reports and also came across the ghost stories written by Justus van Maurik, a writer who later became known as a cigar merchant, at the beginning of the century five. He started doing that after he From hell had read, a graphic novel by Alan Moore about Jack the Ripper that features many haunted house locations in old London. “I thought then, we should also have that in Amsterdam, because that doesn’t exist yet,” says Meijer. More than twenty years later, his interest in ghost stories has not disappeared. βIn the meantime, there are all kinds of new sightings,β he says, citing as an example Shelter, the club in the basement of the A’dam Toren in North Amsterdam β which is said to have been built on the spot where the corpses of the gallows field were thrown into a well.