by Dr. Harry Neilson
From several of Europe's over two hundred thousand castles have come reports of
paranormal activity. It is in Castello Ruffo in Scilla, Italy where the author had the
following experience.
In junior year of college after studying archaeology in Rome, I took a semester off
to backpack through southern Italy. I liked to travel alone and spend the nights in cheap
hotels. I could go for days at a time speaking to almost no one. If I tired of solitude and
wanted to hang out with other people, a night or two in the communal lodging of a youth
hostel would suffice.
En route to Sicily, the small town of Scilla (pronounced in Italian, in southern Calabria seemed an attractive stopover. It boasted a station on the main train
line and a youth hostel in an ancient castle. Scilla is named for a prominent, flat-topped,
rocky headland that juts into the Tyrrhenian sea. Dominating this precipitous stump of
sandstone as though carved out of the living rock stands Castello Ruffo, a grim
stronghold that has been guarding the Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily since
the mid-seventh century BCE. Now a small museum, the youth hostel was located in
the seaward-facing, rampart wing of the castle complex.
The Rock of Scilla upon which Castello Ruffo stands is as imposing in physical
appearance as it is steeped in mythology and folklore. Even today it poses a significant
navigational hazard and is marked by a lighthouse. In antiquity, Phoenician, Etruscan,
and Greek seafarers represented the rock as a frightful sea monster with the torso of a
woman, tail of a sea serpent, and the bodies of six ravenous dogs protruding from her
midsection. In Greek mythology, Skylla and her counterpart, the whirlpool Charybdis,
prey upon mariners attempting to pass through the narrow Strait of Messina. Skylla is
the more infamous of the two monsters. Odysseus, Jason, and Aeneas are each
warned to give Skylla wide berth, and she frequently appears in art and literature as a
guardian of the underworld and a symbol of death.
As I stepped down from the train in Scilla late Saturday afternoon March 17,
1984, I couldn't miss Castello Ruffo looming ominously over the town.
After checking into the hostel, the manager showed me to the male dormitory. There were only a few
other guests, plenty of space for everyone. The only objects in the cavernous, barrel-