To Be...or Not To Be?...or To Be Something...In Between

Staff Claims Hamlet's Castle Is Haunted

from The Associated Press

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - There is something spooky going on around the Danish castle that inspired William Shakespeare as the setting for his play Hamlet.

Employees insist that the grounds inside the bastion of the 431-year-old Kronborg Castle are haunted.

It all started in June, when a new restaurant, called Kronvaerket, opened at the castle, Jeannett Pedersen, of the restaurant staff, said Wednesday.

"Windows and doors fly open, stacks of paper disappear and reappear elsewhere, and tables set themselves," she said.

Most of the employees have reported strange happenings at the restaurant, such as two seeing inexplicable grey shadows waft by and another claiming to have seen the ghost of an old man in the kitchen, Pedersen said.

Whatever they are, they seemed to be good-natured and don't frighten the guests.

She had no idea why anyone would want to haunt the castle but said they even tried using a spiritualist to clear them out.

Birgitte Graae, the spiritualist, claimed in the local Frederiksborg Amts Avis that she drove off dozens of ghosts from the castle.

Shakespeare never saw the castle in Helsingoer, some 50 kilometres north of Copenhagen, but used it as the setting for Hamlet after it was described to him in detail.