An email from a WEIRDO ...

I want to explain (and apologise for) the break in posting.

Over the Christmas holidays, I received an interesting email from one of my old tutors, now a big name in behavioural economics. For reasons that will appear from the email itself, I was keen to publish it. The negotiations for that took a bit of time (hence the delay in posting), but the author has now very kindly agreed to my request, after I made certain changes to preserve his anonymity. 

I am not entirely sure what to make of it all, but I don’t want to influence you in advance of reading it and so, without further comment, here is the email.

Dear [FoA],

Happy Christmas! I hope the legal world is allowing you a little break. There are various downsides to academia, but we do at least get the odd holiday here and there. I say “holiday”, but of course I mean “chance to catch up on grant applications” …

Anyway, I have been meaning to let you know what happened with the project that you helped me with last year. You were insistent that you didn’t want anything in return, but I hope that telling you the whole story will be good consideration (I think that’s the right legal term?) for your efforts.

You will recall that my area of research is exploring the differences between WEIRD and non-WEIRD people, “WEIRD”, in this context, meaning people from “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic” countries. Not only is this a fascinating subject but it also tends to get a bit of coverage in the press, which helps with funding.

I don’t know if I ever told you the full details of the project I asked you about? It was my brainchild and I was really quite pleased with it.

The basic idea was this. We would take a number of countries, some WEIRD and some non-WEIRD, and two groups of volunteers from each country. (I say “volunteers” – it’s inevitably undergraduates.) Each group would be given two tasks. First, we would take a small blood sample. (I am now a qualified phlebotomist – who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?) Second, we ask them to sign a statement which – thanks to you! – we could assure them had absolutely no legal effect. Upon signing the statement, they would receive €1,000 or the equivalent in local currency.

The idea was that the money would make a real difference to the day to day life of a student, not just to be “play money”. I am becoming increasingly irritated by people asking undergraduates to play games for a couple of dollars and claiming to have found out anything interesting from such low stakes: my view is that the stakes have to be real and important in order to gain any kind of valuable insight into the subjects. Anyway, that’s a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine.

Back to the project. The clever bit was this. For the placebo/control group, the statement that they had to sign was “I hereby promise to pray for the good health of the next baby that I see”. Not legally binding, as we assured them, so they didn’t have to do it, and even if they did, it was open to them to interpret it however they wanted.

For the other group, however, the statement was “I hereby sell my soul to the Devil”. A bit different in vibes, granted, but also of no legal effect whatsoever – and worth €1,000 if you signed up. We also planned to surround the signing ceremony, if I can put it that way, with a fair bit of theatrics. The blood sample was completely pointless for the placebo group, but for the Doomed group (as we inevitably ended up calling them internally) we used the blood as the ink for them to sign the statement. It really was their own blood too: we did it properly so that we could honestly tell them that it was their blood, with labels and seals and so on so that they could verify it all. And there were going to be various other bits of atmosphere to it: for example, while the ‘control’ group just signed in broad daylight at a normal table, we would make the Doomed sign in the middle of the night, in a dark room where the door opened using an automatic mechanism, and we would wear these costume robes obscuring our faces as we handed over the piece of paper, with dry ice swirling around us. That sort of thing.

You can see the idea: we were going to investigate the difference between WEIRD and non-WEIRD students in how likely they were to sign up to the Devil clause. We’d get a fair bit of good publicity out of it, plus I had a deadline of the end of the year for my next book, You are a WEIRDO!, and this was sure to generate a chapter or two.

(The “O” in “WEIRDO” is my own addition and stands for “orientated”, i.e. “having a sexual orientation”, something that only WEIRD people have. But, strictly entre nous, I only added the “O” for the acronym and to sell the book – it does not add any explanatory power.)

As you can imagine, the organisational challenge was immense. We needed to get significant funding lined up, a team of collaborators from around the world on board, agreement on proper protocols and so on. I will admit that I became a bit irritated by it all: partly by the fact that my brainchild was going to result in a paper published with about a billion names on it, but also just the amount of time it took to set up. In the end, it was what we academics technically refer to as “only sort of” ready by the summer.

There are a number of obviously WEIRD countries and a number of obviously non-WEIRD ones, but one reason that the study got so big was because we wanted to get data on a number of the in-between cases. South Africa, for example, took a lot of setting-up but I thought the data would be interesting. Another example is the further reaches of ex-communist Eastern Europe, which I decided to take for myself.

The main reason for this was a pet theory I have about how WEIRDOism has Atlantic characteristics and/or is more common in countries with access to an ocean. Another reason was that the weather in that part of the world looked pretty good, certainly compared to the summer we had in England this year. And there was also a third, rather more sentimental reason.

You’ve probably noticed that I have an unusual surname. It’s an anglicised version of nnnnnnnnn, which is apparently an aristocratic name, although my own background is as humble as they come. My grandmother – my father’s mother, that is – was widowed during the War (although only because my grandfather had an accident – he didn’t die in combat). After the War she somehow managed to get to Greece and then to the UK with her young son, my father. My father grew up only speaking English, my grandmother died long before I was born and there’s now no family connections or family memory of the area, but I had a mild interest in seeing it anyway.

So off I went, as soon as university term ended here. As I mentioned, the project was only “sort of” ready. All the delays meant that, although the funding was approved, the money had not actually arrived by the time I set off to the first test site. This wasn’t a real problem – I was simply going to use the advance for You are a WEIRDO! in the first instance and get paid back when the money came through – but it indicates the pressure I was under at the time.

The university we partnered with is in what is now nnnnnnnnn and is called the nnnnnnnnn Superior Normal Polytechnical University of Theoretical Applied and Political Sciences. It’s in that corner of the country that was at various points a backwater of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then contested during the first half of the twentieth century, then under Communist rule and is now fully open to the West. It’s a rather lovely spot at the moment, and as yet undiscovered by tourists.

My local contact was a junior lecturer called Dr Eva nnnnnnnnn, who was handling the on-site arrangements. We exchanged a few WhatsApp messages beforehand and she agreed to meet me at the airport and drive me to the university.

I arrived at the local airport dishevelled and bleary-eyed after a cheap flight from Stansted and some awful airline coffee. But I have to admit that I perked up quite a lot when I saw Eva in the flesh. She was gorgeous. She was younger than I was expecting – 30 at most, I would guess – with sleek black hair cut in a smart bob. And she had these absolutely enormous limpid grey eyes. [FoA comment: I am going to cut out a lot of my correspondent’s description of Eva, which I think is unnecessary for what follows. Suffice it to say that he observed her closely from various angles over the course of the day and concluded that she was very attractive: his description used the words “lithe” and “lissom”, which I think gives you the flavour of it.]

The drive from the airport to the university took a couple of hours, and very pleasant hours they were too. I am – genuinely! – a bit of a big deal in academic circles and I admit that I stooped to a bit of name-dropping in the hope of impressing Eva. At one point, I mentioned that Malcolm Gladwell runs things past me when he writes his books and I suggested that I introduce her to him next time she was in New York. I also deployed my top Jonathan Haidt anecdote and I even told her that completely unrepeatable story about Daniel Kahneman that I told you last time we met – it's always a bit risky to talk to women about nnnnnnnnn but on this occasion it came off. I should say also that it wasn’t just me showing off: she talked a lot about herself and her background, and just about funny things we saw along the way. We laughed real belly laughs, and I felt that we genuinely connected. It was an amazing and wholly unexpected pleasure for me to meet someone who was working in my field, so intelligent, vivacious and, frankly, good-looking, and for us just to ‘click’ immediately.

We were driving through what seemed to be a pine forest in the middle of nowhere when she pulled off the road and stopped the car in a gravelly carpark.

“There is a carpark by the university,” she said, “but I think it is much nicer to arrive from this one, on foot, by this path.”

The weather was swelteringly hot and, not just hot but also muggy, with that humid fullness in the air that means that there is going to be a thunderstorm, so I was not keen on a long walk carrying my bag (although of course I indicated to Eva that I was the kind of manly man who enjoys nothing more than hiking through forests).

Fortunately, the walk was a short one. And she was right – arriving that way was a superb experience.

It was just a few steps along a gravel path, around a corner and a little uphill, and suddenly the forest opened out and this huge castle presented itself to us.

“The University!” Eva announced. “It used to be a castle belonging to a noble family but the Communists nationalised it and made it into the University.”

It was a very European-castle-y castle, if I can put it that way, with turrets, protruding windows, a large clock over the entrance and an impressive gatehouse. It was strikingly reminiscent of the castle in a picture that my parents hung in their dining room when I was a boy. It was at the edge of a rocky escarpment, with a river below and a thick pine forest behind it on the other side. All in all, the whole thing was a very dramatic – almost fairytale – scene.

We stood and admired the view for a moment. I made some noises about how wonderful it must be to work there and so on, but Eva gave a droll smile and said, “wait until you see inside.”

As we got closer, it became apparent that large sections of the castle were modern restorations. The clock above the entrance, for example, which was noisily chiming a quarter hour as we walked through the gatehouse (“right on time!”, Eva said), was a rather garish modern addition. The windows mostly had a uPVC look to them.

I’m sure that the front door would once have been a big wooden affair with serious metal bolts, but it was now a kind of automatic glass thing that didn’t quite close properly, with a reception desk behind it, manned by a bored receptionist who made me sign in and gave me a visitor’s pass on a tattered lanyard.

Beyond the reception Eva took me through a kind of atrium, with Ikea-type furniture, a coffee machine and some chatting students, and then beyond that we walked past various classrooms that looked as if they had not been updated since the communist era.

After a brief tour, showing me the main lecture theatre, a cabinet of sporting trophies and so on, Eva explained that she had some things to do. including making arrangements for the project, so she would leave me to have dinner in the university canteen for the moment.

The canteen was like every modern university canteen everywhere: trays, cheap tables, fluorescent lighting and so on. I fell in with some postgraduates who invited me to share their table. 

Our conversation was rather desultory and stilted to begin with. But then I said something like “so this castle looks as if it has an interesting history” and that, so to speak, opened the conversational floodgates.

The man I was sitting opposite – Alex, he said his name was – replied first. “Do you not know? This is the actual Castle of Baron Nicolas! From the story!”

I think he was expecting rather more of a reaction that he got: I just shrugged and said, “Go on…”. There was a general hubbub around the table and a few of them suggested that I was pulling Alex’s leg, but I eventually managed to persuade them that the story of the Castle of Baron Nicolas is not well known in England.

“Then,” Alex said, with satisfaction, “We will have to tell it to you.”

Someone at the end of the table was sent to fetch a carafe of wine and glasses were poured for everyone. I gave up on the peppery stew that I had been trying to eat and we settled in to hear the tale.

“A long time ago, this castle belonged to Baron … I think you would say his name is John. Now Baron John was a bad man, but he was just normally bad for a baron. He liked hunting and wenching and receiving rents, but he was not the worst baron in the land. The worst baron was his – I will say ‘acquaintance’ rather than ‘friend’. His acquaintance, Baron Nicolas.

“Baron Nicolas was not merely the worst baron in the land – he was the worst man ever to live. He did not respect the laws of God and he did not respect the laws of man. If he wanted something – food, property, woman or even animal – then he took it by force. All the peasants – all the priests – all the women – all the weak and powerless in the land were afraid of him and his greedy, violent knights.

“But Baron John was also powerful. He also had knights. And so he was only slightly afraid of Baron Nicolas.

“Baron Nicolas loved nothing – his heart was not built for love. But if there was something that came close to a love of his, it was the desire for gambling. And he would often gamble with Baron John.

“One evening, Baron Nicolas and his knights were here, in this very castle, to feast and then to gamble with Baron John and his knights.

“A reckless mood took the Barons that evening. The stakes grew higher and higher. A great pile was made of what was to be won. First, gold and silver coins, of course, but then all the wondrous goods that these rich and evil men had amassed. Weapons of numerous kinds: swords, knives, cruel scimitars and keen-bladed pikes, even pistols and muskets inlaid with jewels. But other treasures besides. Fine Hungarian wines and aromatic Levantine oils. There were thick furs from Muscovy and carved ivories from Barbary; crystal from Bohemia and silks from Cathay; Baltic amber and Venetian glassware. There were beautiful carpets from Persia, a circlet studded with emeralds from the Serendip and even a ruby the size of a baby’s fist, said to have been a gift from the Great Sultan at Constantinople himself.

“And yet they gambled on.

“At last, Baron Nicolas said, ‘And now, my dear Baron, you have exhausted all your treasures and it is time for you to gamble with your greatest treasure of all – this castle! You must make a pledge of it, and add that pledge to the great pile that lies yonder, afore the hearth’. And Baron John laughed and said, ‘Why then, my dear Baron, you too much sign a pledge for your castle, and for all your lands’. And Baron Nicolas laughed even louder and he agreed heartily. And they wrote their pledges and added the parchments to the great pile of treasures.

“Then Baron Nicolas suggested that the whole affair be settled by the turn of one card: each man would cut the deck, and the higher card would win everything – the entire mountain of worldly goods.

“Now, you have to understand that Baron Nicolas and Baron John did not trust one another. They and their knights were sitting around the table with eagle eyes. There was no possibility of any cheating. Perhaps no man in that room was perfectly fair or perfectly honest, but the deck of cards was as true and fair as any deck ever was.

“Baron John laughed once more and accepted the challenge. He was no coward.

“Then Baron John seized the pack with his right hand and, all the while staring deeply into the eyes of Baron Nicolas, he cut the pack – to reveal the Ace of Spades! The treasures were surely to be his.

“But Baron Nicolas looked unruffled. He stood up, across the table from Baron John, but before he took the pack, he cast his eyes downwards and started to speak.

“These barons – these knights – spoke many languages, because in this part of the world it is necessary to speak many tongues. And the Barons were also educated men: they could translate from Hebrew to Greek as easily as you or I can translate between French and German.”

(I looked rather sheepish at this point. This whole conversation had been conducted in fluent English, which might have been Alex’s third or fourth language, although it is the only language I speak. Apologies – I digress.)

“But the language that Baron Nicolas spoke was no language they knew. It was a hard, coarse, sibilant language. It was not a language spoken by any man – indeed, it is a language that should never be spoken by any man.

“It was the language of Hell.

“As Baron Nicolas continued speaking, the smoke from the fire in the great hall became thick, black and sulphurous. Baron John and all the knights realised what Baron Nicolas was doing: he was conversing with the Devil himself.

“At length, Baron Nicolas looked up and into the eyes of Baron John. Baron John swore until his dying day that at that moment Baron Nicolas’ irises had disappeared: there was nothing but a bottomless black hole in each of his wicked eyes. 

“Baron Nicolas then turned over the top card on the deck. It was the Ace of Black Hearts – the highest card that there is, higher than any other Ace, but it is the one card that is never – never! – placed in a pack. For it is the Devil’s card.

“Baron Nicolas had won!

“There was tumult and uproar. Baron John knew better than to stay and challenge the very Devil. He gathered his knights to leave. But before he left, he issued a prophecy.

“‘Baron Nicolas,’ he said, in a voice that was not his usual voice. ‘You have traded your immortal life to win this Castle. But I say to you that, should you – or any of your sons – enjoy the hospitality of this Castle at midnight then the Devil will claim your soul before dawn.’

“And with that, he left, poor and broken – but alive.

“His prophecy, however, lingered in the air behind him, and it came true before the night was out.

“The clock chimed midnight and Baron Nicolas and his knights were silent for a moment. But then Baron Nicolas laughed a bold laugh and ordered the carousing to begin in earnest. His knights opened a cask of fine Rhenish wine and they drank and sang, merrily enough, it appeared, although there was an undertone of menace to their wassails. Then, for no real reason, there was a spilt tankard, then a jostling, then a scuffle, then a fight and then swords were drawn. Finally a musket was fired and, when the smoke cleared, it was seen that Baron Nicolas was dead. His soul was forfeit to the Devil, and the Devil had claimed his prize before morning.”

Alex was a great storyteller, and I was held captive throughout his story. But it wasn’t just Alex: I’ve written it down as if he did all the talking, but the others around the table had been joining in as he spoke, being knights shouting “hurrah”, or suggesting other treasures for the stakes in the pile before the hearth of the Great Hall, so in fact it had been a wonderfully communal performance. I had been sitting in a modern-ish canteen, picking at a bread roll and drinking rough wine from a plastic tumbler, but in my mind’s eye I had been in the feasting room of knights, watching an evil man traffic with the underworld.

“The prophecy held true,” Alex continued. “Baron Nicolas had had a wife, whom he had long since abandoned, a pretty peasant woman who had caught his eye for a moment, long enough to give him some entertainment – and a son. His widow was a good woman. She lived simply, with her people in the ancestral village, and brought up her son to avoid the evil ways of his father. He vowed never to set foot in the Castle of Baron Nicolas, and he never did.

“But his sons! Ah, that was a different story. Many was not as wise or as lucky as he, and none could escape the prophecy. One grandson, or perhaps he was a great-grandson, was a virtuous and holy man. He said that he would spend the night in the Castle in a vigil of prayer, and that he would be protected by the blessing of his good friend, a priest called Father Simon. But when he came to the threshold of the Castle, he was greeted not by Father Simon, but another priest, a stranger to him, who said that he had been sent by Father Simon because Father Simon was indisposed. The grandson accepted the blessing from this strange ‘priest’ and, well, you can guess the consequence. The ‘priest’ was no priest and after saying some nonsense Latin, he disappeared, never to be seen again – Father Simon had been murdered in his cell that morning. The grandson knew nothing of this at the time and so he entered the Castle with great confidence. But he did not leave it alive. The cause of death was not known, but the hired man who came to recover his body said that the face of his corpse was twisted in an expression of the most awful fear he had ever seen.

“And it was always thus. Another great-great-great-grandson was a wicked man and he said that Satan would be content to wait until his old age before claiming his soul. ‘We’re friends,’ he said. ‘The Devil will not mind me spending a night in the Castle … with a young female friend!’ But the Devil did not wait: before dawn, the woman had run from the Castle screaming. They hanged her, of course, for who believes that the Devil kills young men in the prime of their life? But we all know that she was innocent.”

“You must know about the wolfish beast!” one of the other students said to me. They were all still somewhat amazed that I had heard none of their stories. But I shrugged again and so someone else, a young woman whose name I did not catch, took up the story of the wolfish beast.

“Everyone who grows up here knows the story of the Castle of Baron Nicolas, but even before that, when we are just little children, we are told the story of the wolfish beast.

“There was once a nursemaid,” she continued. “She was courted by a handsome man. His speech was charming and his manners were exquisite. She fell quite in love with him. But he would only meet her alone – he would always make some excuse to avoid meeting her friends or her family.

“He persuaded her to meet him here, at the Castle – which by then had been abandoned completely – to spend the night with him. ‘But I cannot leave my charge – my baby!’ she said. For she was nursemaid to a small boy. ‘Bring him too,’ her lover said. ‘He will sleep soundly with the noise of the forest birds in his ears, while we exchange vows of love in the next chamber.’”

This was clearly a much-loved fairytale. The woman telling the story paused at the phrase “the noise of the forest birds in his ears”, to allow the others to join in with her.

“You will have guessed, I am sure, that the baby boy was a son of the family of Baron Nicolas. Just a sweet and innocent baby – but bound by the curse of his line nonetheless.

“So the nursemaid went to the Castle, bringing the baby with her. The man smiled sweetly at the baby and she thought that he would make a good father. Then she and he embraced, and then she slept.

“But she awoke in the depths of the night – after midnight – and her lover was not at her side. Instead, she saw a wolfish beast sniff the air at the door of her chamber and then walk, noiselessly, towards where the baby lay sleeping a way off.

“She jumped up, with no heed for her own safety and concerned only for the child. She ran, her bare feet slapping the flagstones, slip-slap! slip-slap!, shouting at the wolfish beast and crying for the baby. But she was too late: as she turned the corner, she saw the beast with the baby, a bloodied mess, in its awful jaws. And she saw from the expression on the beast’s face that the beast was her lover.”

She paused for a moment. “It is perhaps odd that that story is always told to children. But perhaps it is told only to girls.” She turned to the other students at the table: “Do boys hear it too?” And then there was a general conversation about sexist tropes in folktales.

The story of the Castle of Baron Nicolas seemed to be at an end and the general conversation was devolving into little groups discussing their own favourite childhood stories or the sociology of fairytales. But just then a quiet young man spoke up from my right.

“Have you heard about the last time that the curse struck?” he asked, diffidently.

There was a general bemusement and Alex asked him to carry on.

“It was during the War. There was a group of partisans fighting in the forest –”

I interrupted, a little hazy on my history of the area. “Partisans? So which side were they on?”

Alex shut me down coldly. “What does it matter?” he replied. “They were honourable men and patriots, fighting for their country. They did not know then what we know now.”

That left me none the wiser, but I thought it best not to ask any more.

“Continue,” Alex said, gesturing to the shy young man, who carried on as directed.

“It was getting late and they needed somewhere to spend the night, away from the Enemy,” he continued. “They came across this Castle, by now in ruins, and decided to camp out in it. Their leader was a young officer. He said that he would take the first watch of the night. He climbed to top of the North Turret –” the man gestured vaguely above his head “– and watched the horizon for any signs of aircraft or troop movements. All was quiet except that, not long after midnight, his comrades heard a crack: a rotten wooden beam or joist in the turret had finally given way under his weight, and the young officer fell instantly to his death. It was only then that one of the men remembered that their officer was of the family of Baron Nicolas, and they realised the identity of the ruined castle in which they had set up camp. But the Devil … he does not forget.”

He paused.

“That’s the story I heard, anyway,” he finished limply. “My grandmother said that she heard it in a refugee camp on the southern border.”

“Good story,” Alex said, encouragingly, and then the conversation moved on.

As I left the canteen, Eva was waiting for me.

“I have been so rude!” she said with a laugh. “I have left you with your luggage all this time. Come and see what I have been working on - and where you will be staying tonight.”

Eva had not been rude at all: I only had a rucksack – I travel light – so this was not something that I was at all worried about. (Also, I had €50,000 in cash for the payments to the volunteers, for my project, so I was in no hurry to put my bag down.) But I was more than happy to rejoin her.

As we walked around, Eva gave me a little tour of the remainder of the ground floor of the castle building. By this time, the university building was starting to empty out. We passed a library where I saw quite a few students with laptops and headphones, settling down for an evening’s study, but the coffee shop in the atrium had shut down, professors and lecturers seemed to be locking up seminar rooms and lecture theatres, and there was a general end-of-the-day air about the place. Eva explained that the students tended to live in some communist-era accommodation blocks that had been built not far away, where the old stables had been, in a position designed not to spoil the views of the Castle, while staff normally lived in the villages in the valley below, but she added there were a few rooms in the Castle itself reserved for visiting academics and other honoured guests, and I was to have one of these.

She took me up several flights of stairs and around various corners, explaining that the card on my lanyard would open the necessary doors, but I was soon completely lost. At last, she opened an unremarkable door to a large, wood-panelled room with huge windows along one side.

“What a great room!” I exclaimed, surprised at the sight: the rest of the Castle had been uniformly utilitarian in design.

“This is the only room that has been preserved much as it was before the Castle was abandoned and before the Communists rebuilt it,” Eva explained. She pointed to some tables. “I have started setting up for the experiment. I thought that this would be a good room to use for the volunteers tomorrow.”

“Absolutely!” I agreed. I was very excited to have a characterful room for the tests: that put us already half-way there in creating the right kind of ominous effects.

She had done a lot of preparatory work, but there was still plenty to do and of course she needed me for the heavy lifting. So we got on with moving furniture, experimenting with lighting and dry ice, rigging up the self-opening door mechanism and so on. Eva had provided a huge stack of candles and we spent some time setting them up in atmospheric arrangements. Then I got out the costume robes that I had brought with me, and we dressed up and played around in them, joking and laughing. When she put her robes on, I said that she looked like the woman in the Scottish Widows adverts, but that took some explaining since the Scottish Widow woman is a feature of British culture quite as unknown to them as Baron Nicolas is to us. Eva had brought a bottle of rather nice Hungarian wine and a couple of glasses with her, so the whole evening was rather hilarious and fun.

After a while – I lost track of time – we were finally happy with the set-up of the room. By now it was dark, and the thunderstorm that had been threatened earlier on was raging with full force outside the windows, blowing the tall pines of the forest this way and that. We stood quietly, in our silly robes, with the only light coming from the candles and the moon. It was, I have to say, rather romantic.

“That’s quite a storm,” I observed, for want of anything better to say.

“We are a passionate people,” Eva said. teasingly. “Even our weather is passionate. Not like you English, I think.”

She walked to a window and flung it open. Then she turned dramatically back to face me, her robes billowing behind here. “Come here,” she said, and she beckoned me with her finger. “Feel the wind and rain on your face. It is good to feel alive.”

This was a little awkward for me, as you can imagine, but I walked to the window and again she was right: it was amazing to stand there and experience the storm. There was torrential rain, just inches from our face; there was a heady smell of pines, which grew close to the Castle at this point; and then, just as I opened my mouth to say something trite, there was a flash of silver lightning like a sudden crack in the porcelain of the sky, followed by the most enormous roll of thunder that I have ever heard, so I closed my mouth and said nothing.

Eva held my hand, and that felt right and natural in that moment.

“Come,” she said, “Your room is through here” and she led me through a door concealed in the corner of the large, wood-panelled room to another room, a small, modern room with a bed and a little en suite bathroom.

My bedroom had none of the glamour of the room we had come from, but it was charming in its own way. It had windows on two sides and curved walls – and I realised that we must be in one of the turrets of the Castle. I went to a window and opened it, just as Eva had done in the room before.

“You will stay here, in the North Turret. I think you will like it,” she said. With that, she sat on the bed and took off her robes. Then she kicked off her shoes in that irresistible way that women do sometimes. “I think we will both like it,” she added.

I’d been thinking of trying it on with Eva – shooting my shot, as my undergraduates say – from, ooh, about 30 seconds after meeting her, and I needed no more encouragement than that. I dropped my rucksack to the ground, removed my robes and, staring firmly into her eyes, kicked off my shoes. I started to walk towards her with a huge smile on my face.

There was then a further flash of lightning and roll of thunder. That broke my concentration for a moment. I happened to glance at the little digital clock on the bedside table with its flashing red LEDs. It was 11.59. Nearly midnight.

And then a series of thoughts struck me all at once. No, not thoughts, but realisations. Certainties.

First, I understood why my family had a picture that looked like this Castle in their dining room: it was this Castle. Our family’s Castle. A Castle in which no son of the family should ever stay past midnight.

I also remembered the details of the family story about how my grandfather had died, during the War. It was always said that he had fallen through a floorboard. Exactly how the young partisan officer had died, in this very turret. The man had said that his grandmother heard the story in a refugee camp on the southern border – i.e., on the way to Greece. My grandmother and my infant father must surely have passed through the same camp.

And it dawned on me that a balding, bespectacled, middle-aged academic in a tweed jacket cannot charm a woman of the likes of Eva into bed by one afternoon of name-dropping anecdotes and SCR jokes.

I was suddenly sure – as sure as I had ever been sure of anything in my life – that Eva was an emissary of the Devil and that, if I remained in the Castle when the clock changed to midnight, then my soul would be forfeit and claimed for Hell before dawn.

The fastest decision I ever took was the one I took then. I climbed on the windowsill and jumped – jumped in my socks, through the thunderstorm – my arms outstretched to the nearest tall pine, praying desperately, wordlessly. Praying not that I would land safely, but rather that I had jumped in time.

I will swear to my dying day that, as I was in the air and before I hit the welcoming embrace of that tree, I heard two sounds. First, the chime of the Castle clock over the entrance, sounding midnight. Second, an unearthly howl from the open window behind me – a howl of frustration, I think, and not such a howl as could issue from a human throat but rather from what I can only think of as the throat of a wolfish beast.

The rest of it can be told quickly. I did manage to grab hold of a prickly pine branch. By a mixture of falling and climbing, I somehow made it safely down to the ground. Battered and bruised, my hands cut to pieces, I scrambled around in the forest until eventually I found the undergraduate accommodation. Still in my socks, bleeding and by now sodden with rain, I hammered at various doors until eventually I found someone who ordered me a taxi. Fortunately, I was still wearing my jacket, so I had my wallet and passport with me. I got to the airport, at vast expense, where I bought some new shoes and a ticket on the first flight back home.

When I got home, I explained to my wife that she had been right all along: the country wasn’t quite as safe as I had assured her it would be. She was pleased to be vindicated.

I also decided that the research project could not go ahead in any form. With some difficulty, I explained to all my international collaborators that the project had had to be cancelled because our ethics approval had been “rescinded by a higher authority”, as I put it.

In the months that followed, I tried to verify the story. I have since discovered that the putative existence of an Ace of Black Hearts – a kind of “trump of all trumps” – is a common trope in folktales from Eastern Europe (and also, curiously, Sicily). The black heart on the card refers, of course, to the black heart of Lucifer. Such tales are usually interpreted simply as warnings against the perils of gambling.

The legend of Baron Nicolas itself is well-attested in a number of variants and there is even a version of it on the university’s website (although not on the English language pages), but of course no one believes it is true. There are a few, contradictory accounts of what the Baron’s family name was, and my surname is plausibly a mangled version of one of them, but that is not evidence that would stand up in a court of law, as I’m sure you would confirm. No other source that I have found records the story of the curse striking during World War II.

I asked my father about the picture of the Castle: he confirmed that it had belonged to his mother, but could say no more about it. He gave it to me and it now hangs in my room in College; I treat it as a reminder not to make a pass at even the prettiest of the students I supervise.

My phone is gone, and so are all my WhatsApp messages with it. Eva has no presence on the university’s website, LinkedIn, or any of the usual academic haunts; and she has no publications on JSTOR. More surprisingly, no-one at the university there can ever remember seeing her. I tracked down Alex just before he finished his PhD (on ethnography, since you ask) and he well remembers our dinner in the canteen but, so far as he recalls, I entered and left the canteen alone. I think he is right about that.

My final line of enquiry was the visitor’s pass and the lanyard I got from reception, which was still around my neck when I jumped. I phoned up one day and got through to the receptionist. She said that I was just one of many people who came in that day and, although she has no particular memory of the occasion, she thinks I came in on my own. She also berated me for not signing out. I insisted that she enter my leaving time in the visitor’s book as 11.59 and asked her to send me a photo to prove that she had done it. I slept a little easier that night, after seeing the photo. For her part, she said that I can keep the visitor’s pass and lanyard: I hang it over the picture of the Castle.

That is as far as I can take it: the trail has now gone cold. All I can tell you is that, at the moment I jumped, I was fully conscious that I was leaving behind me not only my luggage (although that was bad enough, as it included my phone and my laptop), but also €50,000 of my own money. You might choose not to believe it, but I still consider that the best €50,000 I have ever spent. I am entirely sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if I had waited for even a few more seconds, I would be not only the subject of a slightly mysterious news story (“British prof in love nest heart attack” perhaps) but also suffering in fiery torment alongside my ancestors in Hell.

The incident has also changed the focus of my research slightly and now, after a few discussions with my publisher, you can look forward to the publication of Perhaps you are not a WEIRDO, available in all good airport bookshops shortly.

I wish you all the best for 2025. Do pop in next time you are visiting the old college – I’ll wangle a seat at High Table for you, and a drop or two of the finest Hungarian wine.

Best wishes,

nnnnnnnnn