The Haunted
Château de Combourg

by John Cullen

There was something very familiar about the engraving when I first saw it. The towers were so well pronounced and the trees seemed like something out of a Dracula story. I had to read the French text that accompanied this strange little engraving, for I knew something of interest was bound to be there.

The castle was first built for the Archbishop Guinguené in 1025 but he left it with his illegitimate brother Riwallon. Then, in the 1700’s it was the home of a slave-trader whose son was François-René Chateaubriand (1768-1848).

He slept in one of the Towers, listening to the ghost with a wooden leg trudge along the stairways with his cat. Their sounds and the melancholy of the place he was raised in drove him out into the nearby forest.

Considered to be France’s first Romantic writer, Chateaubriand had many copy his style. He travelled to North America for a few years, was a politician and statesman in France and loved the wilds of the bush. His best work was Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe “Memories Of The Death”.

His story is an eventful one, and his burial even more interesting.

His grave, at his request, is situated on a small island off the coast of France at Milo, where he was born. The grave, with a remarkable site, is only accessible at low tide. The Lake Tranquil, beside Combourg and the village, became his hideaway from the heavy shadows of the Château.

I have found beauty and power and longevity in this Château. It will always invite me to its secrets and I long for a visit there someday. It is still owned and maintained by relatives of Chateaubriand, open for visitors nearly every day!

What mysterious tales of the wooden-legged man and his cat lay there to be discovered, and to possibly find my strange connection to this wondrous edifice in Brittany in all its restored beauty.

The Great Hall seems so familiar to me.
Was I one of its occupants at some time in the past?