Tradition: Czech Mythology
Alternative Names: The Dumpling Farmer’s Wife
Category: Ghost
The Myth
The Dumpling Farmer was a miserly woman from Wischowitz who cared little for the hunger of those who worked for her. She was so stingy with food that her shepherd boy once nailed a noodle from the midday meal to the stable door and wrote beneath it: “Noodle, swear, have you ever seen lard?” The joke mocked the woman’s refusal to provide her servants with proper food.
The farmer’s wife also committed a religious transgression by churning butter on Saturday nights, which were considered especially sacred. After her death, her spirit refused to rest. As her body was carried to the cemetery, she watched her own burial from an attic window. Her ghost then haunted the house for a long time, counting eggs during the night, crawling among the sleeping hens in the chicken coop, and milking the cows. Her restless activities disturbed both the livestock and the people who lived there.
Eventually, a priest cursed the spirit and banished her to Hötschenberg Mountain in Tyrol, where she was condemned to push clouds across the sky. Some people believed that the Wild Hunt had carried her away instead. Whatever her fate, her ghost was still said to wander distant places. Once, a feather merchant from the Osserland travelling through a haunted gorge in Tyrol encountered a figure as gray and thin as a spiderweb. The ghost brushed past him, repeatedly sighing that she was merely the Dumpling Farmer’s Wife from Wischowitz, still burdened by her restless existence after death.
Sources
“Die Knödelbäurin.” In Hans Watzlik, Böhmerwald-Sagen. Budweis: Böhmerwalder Dorfbücher, 1921, Heft 5. Reproduced by SAGEN.at. https://www.sagen.at/texte/sagen/tschechien/watzlik/knoedelbaeurin.html