Kasteel Waardenburg — Doctor Faust's castle

OVERVIEW

Kasteel Waardenburg, sometimes Weerdenburg, is a medieval castle in Waardenburg in the municipality of West Betuwe, Gelderland. Its founding date is known exactly: on 5 August 1265 Count Otto II of Gelre gave the village of Hiern (Waardenburg's old name) to the knight Rudolf de Cock, with leave to build a house costing no more than 300 Leuven pounds. Its square donjon of 1355 still stands, a storey lower than it was.

HISTORY

Louis of Nassau, brother of William of Orange, destroyed the castle in 1574 when its occupant, Catharina van Gelre, sided with Spain and refused to surrender; it never recovered. The ruin was made habitable again in 1627, restored in 1895, damaged in the Second World War by the bombing of the nearby Bommel bridge, declared uninhabitable in 1957 and then restored on a large scale by A. F. van Goelst Meyer.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The castle is known for the Faust legend. In the Dutch folk tale, Doctor Faust moves into the castle — locally called 'de Stomp' — to make the philosophers' stone, raise dead things and create a homunculus; failing, he calls up the Devil, who serves him for seven years as a secretary named Joost in return for his soul, signed for in blood. After seven years, at midnight, the housekeeper hears an uproar in the great hall; in the morning everything is upside down, blood is spattered on the walls and a tuft of hair hangs at the small barred window. Faust and Joost were never seen again, and the bloodstains would not come off. The story was recorded in the 1960s by Henk Kooijman, for the Meertens Institute, from five men living near Waardenburg; the indelible bloodstain is, the article notes, an international legend motif.

VISITING

The castle stands in Waardenburg, on the Waal near Zaltbommel. Visiting arrangements are not recorded in the sources.