Rataskaevu 16 — The Devil's Wedding House
A late-Gothic merchant house in Tallinn's Old Town whose top-floor window is bricked up with curtains painted on the glass — because, says the city's most famous ghost story, the Devil held his wedding in the room behind it, and the town walled it shut; the tale is told by the tourist office, filmed by Ghost Hunters International, and the restaurant downstairs is fully booked.
Case File No. 284
FILE 01 The Legend
The house at Rataskaevu 16 is a medieval diele-dornse merchant's dwelling, later merged with the neighbouring gatehouse; its courtyard wings run back to the city wall. The legend, told as Tallinn's most famous ghost story — the tourist office ranks it first among the Old Town's haunted houses — runs: once, long ago, the owner fell on hard times and stood at the edge of suicide, when a stranger knocked and asked to rent the upper room until dawn for a party, paying royally on one condition — complete privacy. Coaches came, more guests than the room should hold, music, dancing, the house shaking. The owner broke his promise and looked through the keyhole: a wedding in full swing, every guest on hooves, horns on their heads, and the groom was the Devil. The party fled at cockcrow; the bag of gold left for the rent turned to dung. Versions disagree on what followed — the servant died that day having confessed to a priest what he had seen; hoof- and claw-prints covered the floor — but agree on the ending: the room was walled up and the window bricked, false curtains painted on the inside. The facade still shows it. The story's print life is tourism-era — the city's ghost-tour guides and the official Visit Tallinn ghost-story pages carry it, and no earlier chronicle version is on record — but the bricked window is real, and the room behind it still exists behind a wall of the apartment next door.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
The house keeps producing testimony. Restaurant staff downstairs describe sounds of clinking plates and laughter from the empty upper floors — the party the room still holds, as it were; neighbours report footsteps and knocking; an apartment on an upper floor was long rented with the sealed room inside it, and residents told of singing at night. In 2006, during historian Mart Laar's summer ghost tour outside the house, a white-sheeted figure leapt from a first-floor window with a roar — a young man embellishing the tale, after which Laar delivered the expert verdict: wrong window; he should have appeared from the room next door. Ghost Hunters International filmed the house for SyFy in 2010 as The Devil's Wedding: teams investigated Apartment 6, heard footsteps, checked the Soviet-pilot story in another room, and concluded most claims had normal explanations — neighbours rapping on walls, pliant stairs — while declining to explain all of them.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The canonical narrative is a travelling tale — the devil's wedding appears in Baltic German and Nordic tradition, and folklorists file the walled-up room with foundation-sacrifice legends told across Europe. No chronicle, court record or property document mentions the wedding, the stranger or the dung of gold; the story's dated life begins with ghost tourism. The bricked window has never been opened and dated; painted curtains are a known trick of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century facades where light and symmetry were wanted without a habitable room behind. The GHI investigation itself — the only systematic one — attributed the knocks, steps and clinks to adjacent apartments and old staircases, and the tourist office tells the story as a story, at a house whose present business is one of Tallinn's best-loved restaurants.
BEYOND THE CASE FILE / PLAN A VISIT