The legend of the House of the Seven Chimneys has a 26-year hole in it. We found it on the second afternoon of research, with half the game already written, and very nearly papered over it. In the end we did the opposite: we made it the central clue.
This is the first post in a series about what goes on behind our games. We're starting with one of our Madrid mysteries, El Fantasma de la Casa de las Siete Chimeneas (Spanish only for now), and with the part that never fits in a tour: what's legend, what's documented, what we made up on purpose and what we left out. No puzzle solutions and no ending.
The legend, as Madrid tells it
The canonical version goes like this. In the reign of Philip II, Elena, daughter of one of the king's huntsmen, marries a captain named Zapata. The king, they say, is in love with her, but a huntsman's daughter is no possible wife for a Habsburg. So she is married off, given a house with seven chimneys on what was then the northern edge of the city, and the husband is sent to war.
Zapata dies in battle. Shortly after, the servants find Elena dead in her bed, with knife wounds. Before anyone arrives, the body vanishes. Her father is found hanged from a beam. Nobody opens a case.
Then the sightings begin: a woman in white walking the roof between the chimneys, a torch in one hand, the other pointing towards the Alcázar, where the king lives. Some versions say the figure on the roof isn't Elena at all, but the illegitimate daughter she had with Philip II.
Three centuries later, in the late 1800s, the Banco de Castilla buys the building and, during the works, labourers find a woman's skeleton in the cellar with coins from the time of Philip II. That's where nearly every urban-legends walk in Madrid stops, because the story comes out neat.
We didn't stop there. Just as well.
The 26-year hole in the Seven Chimneys legend
Almost every version puts Elena's death around 1583. And almost every version says Zapata died at the Battle of Saint-Quentin.
Saint-Quentin was fought on 10 August 1557. Twenty-six years earlier.
So, by the legend's own logic, the widow spent a quarter of a century shut inside a house that didn't yet exist (the building licence dates from 1574). Some sources patch it by having Zapata die "in Flanders", and the Flanders wars do fit the 1570s and 1580s. Spanish Wikipedia gives 1569 as the wedding year, which makes a death at Saint-Quentin even more impossible. Every narrator does their own mending.
The easy option was to keep Flanders and say nothing. Nobody would have noticed. But a mystery game works the opposite way to a brochure: what makes it good is the player finding cracks. And this crack is real; we didn't put it there.
So at the second checkpoint, in front of the Church of San José, the game hands you the contradiction as it is: Saint-Quentin, 1557; Elena, 1583; the dates don't add up; someone is lying. From there the question is no longer "what happened to Elena" but "who needed the story told this way". The rest of the route pulls on that thread. We won't tell you where it leads.
What the building's records say (and what they don't)
This is where the research got interesting, because the house does have a documented history, and it's stranger than the legend.
| Date | Documented fact | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1574 | Pedro de Ledesma applies for a licence to build to a design by Antonio Sillero | Madrid City Council (Monumenta) |
| 1583 | The house is sold to Baltasar Cattaneo, a Genoese merchant | Madrid City Council (Monumenta) |
| 17th century | Residence of the English ambassador Sir Richard Fanshawe | Wikipedia (EN) |
| 23 March 1766 | The Esquilache riot storms and loots the house; a servant is stabbed to death | Wikipedia (ES) |
| 1881 | Conversion into the Banco de Castilla's headquarters; a woman's skeleton with coins is found | Rutas con Historia |
| 1948 / 1995 | Historic-Artistic Monument / Bien de Interés Cultural | Rutas con Historia |
| 1958-1964 | Restoration by Fernando Chueca Goitia and J. A. Domínguez Salazar | Madrid City Council (Monumenta) |
| 1960 | A second skeleton appears, male, walled up | Rutas con Historia |
| 1980s | Banco Urquijo, then the Ministry of Culture | Rutas con Historia |
Two things caught our eye.
First: the year the legend gives for Elena's death, 1583, is exactly the year the house changes hands. Ledesma sells it to a Genoese banker. We don't know whether whoever fixed the legend's date knew that or whether it's coincidence, but it's the kind of coincidence a mystery shouldn't waste. It's in the game, unstressed.
Second: there's more than one Ledesma. The city's file says Pedro de Ledesma, secretary of the Council of the Indies; Spanish Wikipedia says Juan de Ledesma, secretary to Antonio Pérez, the man who fled the kingdom after the Escobedo murder of 1578. A narrative bombshell we couldn't confirm with a second source. It's not in the game.
The second skeleton, the one the legend forgets
Almost nobody talks about this, and it's the most unsettling part.
The 19th-century woman's skeleton fits the legend so well that nearly every version uses it as proof and closes the file. But during the 1960 works, in the middle of the Chueca Goitia restoration, a second body turned up, this time a man's, walled in, and it remains unidentified. The explanation going around is that it could be the servant the 1766 rioters killed when they stormed Esquilache's residence. Plausible. Nobody has proved it.
Here we took a design decision that explains how we think about games: the second skeleton is not on the route. We tried it and it broke the story. A 90-minute mystery can carry one crime, one culprit and a web of power around them. Two bodies two centuries apart turn the plot into a list of events. We did the same with the hanged father: out. He added deaths, not clues.
What we did do was leave the door ajar. When you reach the house, the game tells you "something" was found under the floor. Now you know more was found than it says.
How we laid out the seven checkpoints
The game is 2.1 km and about 90 minutes between Gran Vía and Plaza de las Salesas, seven stops, all on the street, no entering anywhere. The order isn't the shortest: it's the one that lets the story tell itself.
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Oratory of the Caballero de Gracia. We start here and not at the house, deliberately. Jacobo de Grattis arrived at Philip II's court as secretary to the papal nuncio and died in Madrid in 1619, aged 102. A foreigner who thrived in a dangerous court is the best door into the Madrid of 1583: small, dark, with the city limits two streets away. The case file opens here.
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Church of San José. It stands on the site of the Carmelite convent of San Hermenegildo, founded in 1586 with the approval of Cardinal Gaspar de Quiroga, Archbishop of Toledo and Inquisitor General. Three years after Elena's death. This is where the game plants the date contradiction and introduces Quiroga, the real historical figure holding the plot together. There's a coded message. We're not telling you how it's cracked.
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House of the Seven Chimneys. Plaza del Rey. Count the chimneys. This is the photo checkpoint: the game asks for a picture of the façade and adds something to it. It's the ghost's only appearance in the whole route, and we wanted it on your phone rather than in a paragraph.
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Buenavista Palace. Today the Army General Headquarters. In the 16th century it was an estate that Quiroga himself gave to Philip II. The legend's ghost points at the Alcázar; we have her point here, because this is where the king-cardinal-house connection becomes physical. It's the biggest narrative licence we took, and we're confessing it.
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Plaza de Chueca. Formerly Plaza de San Gregorio, in the Justicia district. The name comes from the Palace of Justice, which has occupied the old Salesas convent since 1870. We liked the irony: the district called Justice is where Elena got none. This checkpoint is about why there isn't a single page on the case.
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Church of San Antón. Built over the Antonine hospital on Calle Hortaleza, one of the city's northern exits. The order was famous for treating "Saint Anthony's fire", and every 17 January the street still fills up for the vueltas de San Antón and the blessing of animals. Here the game asks why the ghost carries a torch. It's our favourite checkpoint and the one we can say least about.
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Church of Santa Bárbara. The Salesas Reales, founded by Barbara of Braganza between 1750 and 1758, with the Supreme Court next door. Ending a case that never saw justice in front of the country's highest court was too good to pass up. The file closes here. Or doesn't.
What we chose not to claim
A mystery game needs a culprit. History doesn't. This is what the game hints at or attributes to "the chronicles" without it being proven:
- That Elena existed. There is no 16th-century document with her name. The legend as told is most likely 19th-century, when the first skeleton appears and Madrid fills up with romantic ghost stories.
- That Philip II was her lover. It's the engine of the legend and of the game. There isn't a single piece of evidence.
- That the coins were "court coins". Sources speak of coins from Philip II's time, some say in a bag. That they only circulated at court is a deduction by the game's narrator, not a fact.
- That the Prince of Wales stayed here in 1623. It's on plenty of websites. We couldn't find it in any official file or in English Wikipedia, which does mention Fanshawe. Out.
- That Juan de Herrera touched the building. Several sources attribute it; the game says "some attribute", which is the honest wording.
What is true, and more surprising than the legend: in 450 years the house has been a palace, an embassy, the target of a riot, a bank twice and a ministry, and two bodies nobody has identified have turned up in its walls.
Frequently asked questions
Can you go inside the House of the Seven Chimneys? No. It houses the Ministry of Culture and has no public visits. You see it from Plaza del Rey, where the game's checkpoint is; the chimneys are easiest to count from the corner with Calle de las Infantas.
Is the Seven Chimneys ghost a real legend or one invented for the game? The legend is real in the sense that Madrid has been telling it for over a century and it features on every mystery walk in the city. What doesn't exist is documentation: no case files, no records, no trace of Elena. The game uses the legend as a starting point and the building's facts as clues.
Can you play it at night? Yes, and it works better. The whole route is outdoors, and the seven chimneys lit up from Plaza del Rey are something else.
Is it a good Halloween plan? It fits the last week of October well. If you want jump scares, MAD HORROR takes over IFEMA from 30 October to 2 November, with paid tickets. If you'd rather have a mystery through real streets, no queues, at your own pace, this is the alternative.
If you want to play it (or keep going with other Madrid mysteries)
People often ask us which part of the game is true. Short answer: the building, the dates, Quiroga, Buenavista, the 1586 convent, the two skeletons and the Saint-Quentin contradiction are real. Elena, the lovesick king and the culprit are legend and game. Knowing that before you play doesn't spoil it; it improves it, because you know which cracks to look for.
If you're left wanting more open cases, there are two from the same family (both in Spanish for now): El Vampiro de Lavapiés, a Madrid of 1884 where neighbours turn up without a drop of blood and a journalist's notebook outlives him, and La Muerte del Conde: Madrid, 1622, the murder of the Count of Villamediana in the middle of Calle Mayor, which is documented down to the last detail and still unsolved. And for Madrid after dark, our blue-hour walk through the Austrias.
And if you play Seven Chimneys and find another crack in the legend we haven't spotted, write to us. The Saint-Quentin one gave us a whole game.
Cover photo: Façade of the House of the Seven Chimneys, by Mentxuwiki (Wikimedia Commons), CC BY-SA 4.0.