Spooky! Spooky! Spooky! Who’s afraid of ghosts?
As Halloween is approaching we could not help to share some of our anecdotes as well…

If scary stories give you the good chill, keep scrolling and find out some of the creepiest stories from Palermo!

The Sorcerer Prince

Once upon a time in 1885, the head of an aristocratic family in Palermo, Prince Luigi Alliata di Pietratagliata, commissioned the building of a magnificent villa in via Serradifalco.

The villa was a gem: its neogotic style and its park were an example of the glory and the splendor of those years and for long time the villa was a place of joy and parties, hosting the members of the most influential and noble families in town.

One day in 1921, Prince Luigi died and the villa went to his son Raniero.
The new Prince was… well… peculiar.
He had a huge interest for butterflies, which he studied and catalogued with passion and whose collections are now famous.

But he had other passions.

One of them was gambling and he was an avid card player. One day, after a terrible loss at the card table, he decided to lock himself in his beautiful villa, away from the crowd. There, together with few selected people, he cultivated another passion: esoteric practices.

Every night he hold a seance, calling and searching for spirits from the other side. Some say that one night the Prince himself has been possessed and while a huge smell of sulfur was filling the room, he started talking with a deep voice announcing that he was “The king of the worlds“. As a terrible figure started taking horrible form, all the guests ran away terrified and from that night on, nobody visited the villa anymore.

No one knows what happened to Prince Raniero after those terrible events, but many say that for a long time you could see him at his window every morning, holding a skull and a pendulum, cursing the world outside.

Although he thought he was immortal, Prince Raniero left this world in 1979, after been secluded for half a century.  As he was leaving no heirs nor testament, the villa went to his closest family members who decided to sell the property which has been, since then, left to rot for a long time.

Some say that the building is still haunted and that full of all the spirits the Prince summoned over the years. Maybe, among them, there is the ghost of the Prince himself, still cursing the world he decided to lock outside.


N.B. After years of decay, the villa has been recently bought by an anonymous buyer who is now recovering the property.