This castle is also said to owe its name--“Greif-an-den-Stein”--to the _fact_ that the hill on which it stands was at one time the haunt of a griffin, the marks of the talons of which can still be found in the rocks by those who regard seeing as necessary to believing. But the griffin is not the only tradition of this beautifully situated place, for it has the great distinction of being doubly haunted--by an “old white woman” and by one of the first of the lords of Greifenstein who, early in the eleventh century, “sware a dreadful oath.” The story of the first of these ghosts haunting the castle is told by Planché, who says that it arose owing to the fact that a châtelaine of the place, the Lady Bountiful of the neighbourhood, was given to devoting herself to the cure of the sick, and was so generally successful that the very people whom she had benefited at length suspected her of possessing an unholy supernatural power, and so on her death, having received all the good they could at her hands, the peasants accused her posthumously of witchcraft, and declared that her ghost haunted the place of demoniacally inspired benefactions! The second ghost story about this castle on the edge of the Wiener Wald is a long one, but deserves remembering for its romantic elements, and may best be given here in the words of Planché: “As early as the eleventh century the lords of Greifenstein were famed and feared throughout Germany. One of the first knights who bore that name, lost his lady soon after she had presented him with a daughter, who received the name of Etelina. The dying mother painfully aware how little attention would be paid to the education of a female by a rude and reckless father, half knight, half freebooter, however fond he might be of his child, had recommended her infant, with her last breath, to the care of a kind and pious monk, the chaplain of the castle; and under his affectionate guidance, the pretty playful girl gradually ripened into the beautiful and accomplished woman. Sir Reinhard of Greifenstein, though stern, turbulent, and unlettered himself, was, nevertheless, sensible to the charms and intelligence of his daughter; and often as he parted her fair hair and kissed her ivory forehead, before he mounted the steed or entered the bark, that waited to bear him to the hunt or the battle, a feeling of which he was both proud and ashamed would moisten his eye and subdue a voice naturally harsh and grating, into a tone almost of tenderness. On his return, weary and sullen, from a fruitless chase or a baffled enterprise, the song of Etelina could banish the frown from his brow, when even the wine-cup had been thrust untasted away, and the favourite hound beaten for a mistimed gambol. So fair a flower, even in the solitary castle of Greifenstein, was not likely to bloom unknown or unsought. The fame of Etelina’s beauty spread throughout the land. Many a noble knight shouted her name as his bright sword flashed from the scabbard,