The legend of Görlitz Klötzelmönch

The history of the beautiful city of Görlitz, in eastern Germany, on the Polish border, is very interesting and mysterious, with multitude of legends surround its historical streets, squares, and buildings.
One of the most popular is about a gruesome murder in the medieval town, and something similar could actually have happened.

If you cast your eyes to the upper floors of the building at 2 Fleischerstraße, you’ll discover a small, stone sculpture of a woman’s head, fearfully gazing up the street towards the Dreifaltigkeitskirche (Holy Trinity Church), now part of the former Franciscan monastery church.
Behind it the legend of the Ratcheting Monk or the Klötzelmönch, the Black Monk.
As story goes, a weary traveler fell asleep from exhaustion in the back benches of the church, was locked in, and, in the middle of the night, was awakened by a clattering sound.
He saw a hunchbacked, gruesome monk with wooden clogs dragging a dead girl’s body by the hair, who then buried beneath a stone slab at the altar.
Then he pushed the slab back into its place and disappeared silently as he had come, through the door to the monastery.
The traveler was scared to death, and the rest of the night seemed endless to him.
He trembled with fear, he still didn’t know whether it had all been just a horrible dream and, when the morning bell rang and the gate was unlocked again, he went away, going unnoticed.
That same morning, in the inn, he heard that people in Görlitz were very worried because a poor widow who lived in Fleischerstraße was desperately searching for her missing daughter.
The beatiful girl had gone to mass in the monastery church as usual, but had not come home the day before.
The traveler had terrible premonitions, and so he ran to the town hall to report everything he had seen during the night.
The witness led the mayor to the gravestone in question, while the town servants lifting the heavy stone to actually find the girl they were looking for underneath.
Moreover, the guy immediately recognized the suspect by his ugly face among the monks who had been hastily called together, and the culprit confessed to the exact course of the crime: he had lured the unsuspecting girl into his cell, where she had to do his bidding.
The monks were not allowed to live with women, but the violent offender lacked the strength to keep his monastic vows, and the fear that his crime might be discovered made him a murderer, as he killed the girl and brought her corpse to the church at midnight.
As punishment, the monk was buried alive within the walls of the church, and he’s said to still haunt the church’s holy grounds.
As soon as someone heard a mysterious noise somewhere in the monastery or church, they immediately said it was the monk.
Even in the last century, a barber’s boy is said to have died of fright because he got lost in the cloister corridors and encountered the ghostly monk there.

In any case, this story was probably only passed down through the centuries because the people of Görlitz wanted to use it to vent their anger at the monks’ dissatisfaction with the dissolute life of the monks.
At the former Löwen pharmacy, which burned down at the end of the war in 1945, two stone heads were attached to Fleischerstraße.
The woman’s head represents the worried mother anxiously searching for her daughter, who did not return home from mass.
Opposite this woman was a bearded, ugly man’s head, which was believed to be the wicked monk itself. It was also said that a compassionate citizen had these stone images installed after the unfortunate mother died of grief over the early death of her beloved daughter.

Images from web – Google Research