Dragsholm Slot

"August, are you twelve yet?"

"Yes. No. No, not till July."

"Okay, so, one adult, one child, um... Some time over Spring Break." I typed in our information and selected March 2-3 from the electronic calendar. We were on a Danish website, trying to figure out how much it would cost to get a hostel. But not just any Danish hostel. Oh no no. The haunted Danish hostel.

The kids go through cycles on how they like to spend their recess. How much it costs to stay the night in a foreign country is a new one. For several weeks they crowded into the loft in the school library and sang a Vespers service together: the setting from 2007 by Will Chiles. They sang as much as they could remember, and hauled up copies of THE LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER Book 7 for "the readings." There have also been recesses spent up at the dining hall playing ping pong and foos-ball (I have never known how to spell that). And read-aloud is another popular activity: I've read them poetry, ghost stories, two-minute mysteries, Roald Dahl's "Boy: Tales of Childhood," and every story book I could find that was illustrated by Edward Gorey or Maurice Sendak.

This morning they took up their research projects: with topics ranging from Castles to Giraffes to Michelangelo to Fairies. (I got in trouble straight away for saying, "Well fairies don't exist, really." I can't believe I've sunk so far.) Castles was the topic that extended into recess. August and I spent class time seeing what books we could order from the region's Public Library (they'll send it to Holden by post, how cool is that?) and had moved on to see if we couldn't find any useful internet sources.

It's GOOGLE'S fault for lighting on a webpage with the name "Haunted Castles."

"Let's see what that's about," we said, almost at once.

The first story we read together was from Dragsholm Slot, a castle in Denmark (Slot = Danish for "castle"). It has three ghosts, apparently, one of them "The White Lady," a young girl bricked into a castle wall by her furious father, which seemed ridiculous and bad until they tried to install modern toilets in 1939 and ripped out a wall and found a skeleton in a white dress.

Loads of stories like this. Come recess, we split an orange and some Goldfish crackers and petitioned for our class field trip to be in Denmark. And as soon as we could we were back in the computer room.

Dragsholm Slot is now a privately owned hotel, and for me to stay there a night would cost about 1600 Danish Kronen (275 USD). Add August, and --

"Two kids."

"Three."

The rest of the elementary school was drifting in behind us, and suddenly we were trying to find out how much it would cost to put five children and myself up in this hotel. I grudgingly added another adult.

Then we went back to reading the ghost stories. Some were gruesome tales of dungeons and spikes and crimes of passion and prisoners gone mad. Then there was the other ghost that haunts Dragsholm Slot, "The Grey Lady," a girl who had been a maid at the castle and still roams the halls, routinely checking if all is in place. Some wanted editing to temper the ghastliness; others to liven things up a bit. But they always know when I'm lying or leaving things out.

"Go back and read it right."

Someone remind me, when I arrive at last in Denmark, searching the churchyards for Kierkegaard's grave, that I promised an eleven-year-old at Holden I would send him a postcard from this haunted castle.