Stein Castle

It is said that an underground passage leads from the castle ruin of Stein to the ruin in Bad Berneck. According to legend, eerie things happen there at night. One day, a poor fiddler, who earned his money by delighting people with his music, came to Stein. He was very interested in the castle ruin there, so before he checked into his lodging, he went there and had a castle guide show him around. After they had thoroughly examined the old masonry, they came to the cellar vaults, and when the fiddler stopped in front of a huge gate, behind which a ghostly dark chasm stretched, he shuddered. When the castle guide saw the young man's anxious face, he said in a grave voice: "Whoever passes through this gate will experience the most terrifying things. Things even worse than anything he has ever experienced before. Apparitions of the dead and ghosts haunt this place at night, and no one who has ever crossed this door has returned! However, whoever survives the horrors in this passage will be richly rewarded."

Torn between fear and the prospect of a decent reward, the fiddler stood before the gate. Finally, however, the desire for prosperity won, and so he opened the huge door and entered the passage. When the castle guide had closed the gate behind the fiddler, he was immediately enveloped in an eerie blackness. Suddenly, he saw a movement in the darkness of the passage just a few steps in front of him! Terrified to death, the man stopped and realized that the horrifying figures were corpses approaching him with stiff movements! Further back, he recognized a funeral procession with an ancient coffin. The fiddler recoiled, hoping that a redeeming faint would overcome him, but he remained steadfast! Finally, the funeral procession stopped in front of him, the coffin was opened, and he was commanded to get in! But although he could no longer think clearly from fear, he resisted the offer, and when the terrifying figures realized that the young man remained steadfast, a pale figure approached him, clad only in a shroud, and said without moving its lips: "Before you can ever return to the world of the living, you must solve one more task!" He handed the man a bag of gold coins and asked him to divide them into two exactly equal parts. Although the fiddler immediately set to work, he could not solve the task at first, because there was an odd number of coins. He finally took a sharp object from his jacket and scratched one coin so that it could be broken into two parts. When the dead man saw how the man had solved the task, he handed him the bag and released him into freedom, where he was joyfully received by the castle guide. Thus, the man never had to live in poverty again and led a happy life until his death.

As early as 1377, a castle chapel erected by Hans I von Sparneck was consecrated in the name of St. Michael. It was located in the area of the Zwinger immediately before the access to the core castle. The ruin of this early chapel can still be seen today on the northeastern edge of the castle complex.

After the population of Upper Franconia was forcibly reformed during the Thirty Years' War, they belonged to the Protestant confession. Almost 40 years later, in 1686, the Protestant church bought the castle ruin of Stein from the Catholic Archdiocese of Bamberg. The upper floors of the completely preserved multi-story building of the castle's palas, the so-called Ritterhaus (Knight's House), were converted by the then bailiff Johann Jakob Baßler von Basel into the St. Michael's Chapel, as it is still preserved today. Since then, only the chapel has been structurally maintained, while the rest of Burg Stein has been left to decay.

The altar of the castle chapel comes from Goldkronach. The organ formerly belonged to a Protestant girls' grammar school in Taufkirchen.

Burg Stein today belongs to the church property of the Deanery of Bad Berneck, and the castle chapel is administered by the Evangelical-Lutheran parish of Bad Berneck. Services and other events take place on special occasions.