Long after Rudolph’s reign, Prague’s reputation for magic and oddity has remained. This sense of strangeness has produced writers like Kafka – full of threatening and claustrophobic surrealism. But it has also produced writers like Jan Neruda (1834-1891), who had a more warmly human sense of Prague’s oddities.

Nowadays, in spite of electric light and friendly bars (or perhaps even because of the latter) on the small, confused and winding streets of Old Town and Lesser Quarter, people often claim to see strange figures and phantoms. Most of the castles in Czech Republic seem to have a "White Lady" and in Prague, almost every street in Mala Strana and Old Town seems to have its ghosts, sometimes threatening, but sometimes simply bizarrely peculiar. One of the oddest is the huge dog with glowing black eyes which apparently emerges from the Martinec Palace in Novy Svet on the stroke of eleven at night. He accompanies any passing walkers as far as the Loretta Shrine, which sounds like a truly terrifying experience. However, at the shrine he simply turns back the way he came, presumably leaving his erstwhile companions very relieved. An equally disturbing figure is the ghost of a Turk who can be found behind the Tyn Church. He carries a jewel box, and will, if you let him, open it to show you its contents; the head of his mistress. Beware!

As a change from the hauntings by people, there are also hauntings by a terrifying goblin (reported numerous times at Portheim Palace in Old Town), and by dwarves (at the erstwhile home of one Josef Pisinger). Not to mention several hauntings by a variety of animals from cats and dogs to horses and, oddly enough, polecats. As a recent articles says of modern-day Prague:Don't be fooled by first impressions. The ordinary does not exist here. Take the colourful house signs you see on the hillside street of Nerudova, used to mark a home before the more practical numbers.
At No. 12 there are three criss-crossed violins. The home of an elderly violin maker? Too banal. Prague legend says it is the calling card of three crazed fiddlers who play a Czech mazurka before descending to the bowels of the city before sunrise.
"Poltergeists of Prague"
November 2 2002, The Age