Hysterics on the hillsides of east Bohemia

After several years in this country I finally, finally had my first proper Czech chata (country cottage) experience a couple of weeks ago. The whole thing was a bit like a log-cabin version of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, with me going into this weekend in the hills with a head full of horror movies, and primed by literature, well, like Northanger Abbey.

An idyllic, snowy trek to the cabin, some two or three kilometres away from any accessible public road, only seemed to frame what was bound to be a weekend of intrigue and terror in the Krkonoše mountains. The fact that everyone was getting on so well surely had to bode ill, I thought to myself as we climbed up the hill. This sense of foreboding was accompanied all the while by a guilty feeling I was being an utter killjoy in such very garrulous company. A perfect mindset for a character in a book, I thought to myself, before consciously dismissing my fears.

Upon arrival, our chata was - you guessed it - beside a little-used old church. I wasn't sure if, as the plot developed, this would provide a necessary shelter from un-baptised ghouls, or prove the source of some other-wordly nasties all of its own. It certainly furnished the weekend with a suitable backdrop, and the fact that it remained locked up the whole time further heightened the building’s mystery.

The other prop that set alarm bells ringing from the outset was the seemingly pointless set of unused meat hooks in the larder. Having seen what happened to a fellow countryman, albeit at the hands of a Ugandan dictator, in the film 'The Last King of Scotland', I skirted uneasily around the food store for the lion's share of the weekend, and failed to disguise my horror each time I was asked to go and fetch the honey or the bananas or some such other foodstuff.

I kept on waiting for a petty theft to take place, knowing this would be the catalyst for all hell to break loose. The biggest thing that went missing in the end was my set of glasses, though that was for reasons all too apparent to myself the following morning – I can't, I'm afraid, attribute that to any axe-murderer, just slivovice, alas.

And then there was the creepy story of the nearby cabin built by political prisoners for the Interior Ministry in the Stalinist era. And the trip to the little isolated hut where, each winter, the hillside village’s dead were traditionally stored until the ground thawed sufficiently to bury them in spring. No amount of snowball-hurling could make me forget that I was using a bell which tolled death for shelter. This may have saved me from snow down the back, but surely not the wrath of the dead, I thought to myself as I took my refuge.

So, a weekend of me scaring myself with signs and symbols from Gothic horror books all round. But it seems that I survived to tell the tale. And next time I venture out to a chata it will hopefully be summer, and I may try and focus more on the flora and fauna around me, and the relaxational properties of a weekend in the country.