Like every great city of its own, Barcelona also has its own collection of urban legends. Some «classics» like that story about the young ghost that appears doing auto-stop in the road of l’Arrabassada.
In fact this is a legend so widespread in the world that phantom hitchhiker could form a large union to improve their working conditions. But there are also more original ones. One of them affirms that the dance of the sardana was born from the witches who danced in circle in the square of Sant Ramon del Call.
By J.Ribera | Translated by Leo DAVID | Barcelona
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Another historical legend: the Hostal Flor del Lliri, located at number 1 on the same street, in the Gothic quarter. Around 1950 they always had some room for free. Some of the wealthy guests traveling alone disappeared in their room, and reappeared a few days later at the table of other guests in the form of succulent steaks and appetizing stews. The legends are ancient, and even came to say that customers were killed by an ingenious system that folded their beds while they were sleeping. Currently the hostel is closed, but the arch remains. Stand there, imagine and listen, because some people claim to have heard psychophonys.
In the neighboring Terrassa, we have the Thorax Hospital, former hospital for tuberculosis, where the patients commit suicide by throwing themselves into the void from the ninth floor. Apart from the suicides, there are murders by bad nurses determined to lighten their work, fetuses from abortions preserved in jars and satanic orgies, all in a time before the discovery of penicillin and in which most of patients were sentenced to death. The abandoned building is so gloomy that it has been turned into a set for horror movies. They say that the ghosts of old patients are still hanging around, so that even some producers are spared from hiring a special effects technician.
Another inexhaustible source of urban legends is the metro. From the abandoned or never opened stations such as the so-called «Gaudí» where many travelers claim to have seen a person waiting eternally on the platform to the Rocafort where four suicides took place in the space of a month in the 80’s. Now they say that ghostly figures walk during the night on the platforms and the tracks, and that their images have been captured by the surveillance cameras. And also that the technicians of the TMB refuse to work there at night. Another concurrent legend is the subway-surfing, where some young people hooked the last wagon of the convoy with a rope and surfed on the tracks, often with dire consequences. Obviously, their ghosts continue to lament, cursing the moment when they let themselves be influenced by «The Watchers of the Beach» and wandering erratically.
In 43 Calle Francisco Giner, in the Barrio de Gracia was given, in 1935 the first case of poltergeist documented and publicized in Catalonia. Noises, psychophonies, furniture that went alone here and there, amazing sounds, wandering specters. The building is still standing, in the indicated direction.
Finally, we conclude with the case of the gigantic bird that flew over Barcelona in the early 90’s. Dozens of people described it in such a way that there was no other way to conclude that it was a prehistoric animal of the era of the Dinosaurs. A bird of bad omen, in any case.
