Madrid's most famous ghost was born on 31 May 1990: that night more than two hundred people walked into the Palacio de Linares, shut for almost a century, carrying tape recorders, hunting for the voice of a little girl. Before that date, the girl does not exist on paper. No papal dispensation, no baptism record, no grave.
That was the first thing we found while researching Those Who Never Left: Paseo del Prado by Night, our night-time mystery running from Cibeles down to Atocha. It ended up as the thesis of the whole game: on this axis, every "presence" has a birth date and a named witness, and the witness is nearly always someone who worked nights. Every one of them except one.
This is the making-of: what we found, what we refused to claim, and how you play it. No puzzle solutions, no ending.
Nine reports between Cibeles and Atocha
The premise came straight out of the research: in all of these stories, the person who sees something is a night worker. Palace caretakers, museum guards, hospital porters. So the player isn't a tourist with a torch. You are the new night watchman of the Paseo del Prado, and you have inherited your predecessors' logbook with nine reports of "presences" written in it. Your first shift is to check them one by one.
The route in numbers:
- 9 stops, from Plaza de Cibeles to Plaza del Emperador Carlos V.
- About 100 minutes and a little over two kilometres, all of it downhill.
- Played at night, between 21:00 and 24:00, entirely from the street. You never go inside a building: the game is built for the hours when everything is closed and the facades are lit.
- Free, in Spanish and English, on your phone, at your own pace.
Every checkpoint closes with a lead into the next one, so the order isn't negotiable — it's what holds the story up. Swap the first stop with the last and the whole thing collapses.
Every ghost on the Paseo del Prado has a birth date
This table is basically the skeleton of the script. On the left, the legend as it's told. In the middle, what the sources actually say. On the right, the detail that changed how we wrote the game: the exact moment that ghost starts to exist.
| Legend | What the record says | The ghost's birth date |
|---|---|---|
| Raimundita, the girl walled up in the Palacio de Linares | José de Murga and Raimunda Osorio moved in here in 1884. She died in 1901, he died five months later, in 1902. There is no dispensation, no birth record, no grave, and no family paper that mentions a daughter | 31 May 1990: the night of the tape recorders. That same year Torcuato Luca de Tena published an article in ABC pulling the story apart |
| The ghost that walks the galleries of the Museo del Prado | In 1808 the French cavalry used the building as a barracks and melted the lead from its roof and gutters down into ammunition | 1988: a Superlópez comic drawn by Jan, with an El Greco nobleman stepping out of his own painting |
| The lift that starts on its own at the Reina Sofía | In early 1992 the Hepta group, led by the priest José María Pilón, spent several nights in the building; one of the lifts started moving with the power cut off and locked | Early 1992, with the museum half open |
| "Ataúlfo", the presence in the old Hospital General | The building was Madrid's Hospital General for almost two centuries and closed in 1965. In 1980, when the works began, human bones came up in quantity. In 1997 a security guard filed a complaint with official bodies about what was happening on her shifts | A ouija board and some bored night guards: the board spelled out "Ata" and one of them finished the joke — "Ata... Ataúlfo" |
| The doctor who never left his museum | Pedro González de Velasco died on 21 October 1882 and his embalmed body stayed inside his own museum until 1943. In 1965 he was moved to the San Isidro cemetery, into the same niche as his wife and his daughter | None. This one isn't a legend. It's a case file |
Eight of the nine reports in the logbook are people telling stories at night: a tape, a ouija board, a comic, a bunch of flowers. The ninth is something else.
The only one who never left had official permission
Pedro González de Velasco was a surgeon, a professor of operative surgery and a doctor at the Clínico de San Carlos — that is, at the Atocha hospital complex the player walks past two stops earlier. That is where he learned to open bodies and to preserve them. Then he built himself a house-museum at Alfonso XII, 68, which today is the Museo Nacional de Antropología.
The story starts with his daughter. Concha died on 12 May 1864, aged fifteen. Velasco embalmed her with his own hands and buried her. Eleven years later, in 1875, with the museum newly built by Francisco de Cubas and just inaugurated by Alfonso XII, he obtained permission to exhume her and brought her into his house. Those who saw her said she was in a glass case, in a wedding dress. The carriage rides around the Retiro with the girl sitting beside him are pure legend: nobody saw it, everybody repeats it. His widow, Engracia, returned Concha to the cemetery in 1886 and sold the building and the collections to the State a year later.
And then there is the man himself. Velasco left instructions to be embalmed and kept inside the museum, and there he stayed for sixty-one years: one more item in his own collection, until 1943.
That's what makes the game work, and it's all we're going to say: the legend that opens the route at Cibeles — a dead person who stays in the house because they can't leave — turns out to be true. It just happened to somebody else, further downhill, and it wasn't a ghost. How that lands at the ninth stop, we're leaving where it is.
How we separated the legend from the record
Before a single line of narration gets written, the research goes through a section we call "verification notes", where the conflicts between sources are logged along with how we resolved them. Three rules, and all three cost us good sentences:
1. When two sources disagree on a number, write the hedge, not the number. Mateo Morral's bombing on 31 May 1906, on Calle Mayor, appears in the sources with 24, 25 and 28 dead. The game says "more than twenty dead and around a hundred injured" and moves on. Same with the floor the bomb was thrown from: some sources say the third, others the fourth, so the text says "an upper floor of number 88".
2. A conflict between sources never becomes a plot twist. This is the strongest temptation there is: when two versions contradict each other, the narrator wants to say "someone is lying". Sometimes that's legitimate — we did it in our game about the ghost of the House of the Seven Chimneys — but only when the contradiction sits inside the legend. If the contradiction is between our sources, that's our problem, not the case's.
3. What gets told but not documented is labelled as such. Agustín Luengo, the giant from Extremadura who stood two metres thirty-five and also ended up in Velasco's museum, is said to have been paid by the doctor during his lifetime for his own corpse. The game says "they say". The historian who argued in 2009 that something in the Linares legend was true is in the text precisely so it's clear that nothing here is closed.
Our internal audit, done by someone who didn't write the game, also caught a serious error we'd inherited from the earlier research: the number of artworks evacuated from the Prado during the Civil War was out by a factor of ten. The published version says what the sources say: close to two thousand works, 361 of them the Prado's own, left by lorry for Valencia. We'd rather have the small, checkable figure.
Why this game only works after dark
This isn't atmosphere. Half a dozen checkpoints are built on things you either can't see in daylight or that mean nothing in daylight:
- In the Plaza de Murillo, the game asks you to count the streetlamps you can see inside the Real Jardín Botánico. The answer is none, and that eight-hectare patch of blackness in the middle of the city only exists after sunset.
- The Cuesta de Moyano was born dark by regulation: thirty wooden stalls of fifteen square metres each, with a municipal rule from 1925 banning lighting and heating. Water and electricity didn't arrive until 1986. Sixty years without a single bulb. At night, with the wooden shutters down, they look exactly like what they were.
- The glass lift towers on the side of the Reina Sofía are the best night-time detail on the route, and one of those lifts is the subject of the 1992 report.
- The facades of Linares, the Banco de España, San Jerónimo el Real and Atocha are lit and the buildings are shut. Which is precisely the state the witnesses in all these stories saw them in.
The route also passes the underground memorial to the victims of 11 March 2004, on the Atocha square. That's where the logbook goes quiet: no report, no puzzle, and there never will be one. The game only says that if you go down, go down in silence.
How to play it without getting lost or cold
- Start between 21:00 and 22:00. The game is calibrated for that window: a hundred minutes from nine o'clock has you finishing around eleven, with everything still lit.
- Metro Banco de España to start, Atocha to finish. The first stop is on Plaza de Cibeles and the last is at Alfonso XII, 68, two minutes from the station. No walking back to the start.
- It's all downhill, a little over two kilometres across nine stops. Comfortable shoes anyway: that's nearly two hours on your feet, on pavement.
- Charged phone. There's GPS, audio and two photo captures along the way. Go out with battery, and go in pairs if you can: several stops work far better argued out loud.
- Nothing to enter, nothing to book. Everything is visible from the street. There's one moment at Atocha where the game tells you to come back tomorrow. Take it or leave it.
- If you're stretching the night out, this axis connects well with the old centre. That's what the Habsburg quarter is for — the opposite of this walk: stone, small squares and alleys instead of museums and a boulevard.
Frequently asked questions
Is it scary? It isn't a jump-scare game. It's a game about checking things at night, which is a different thing and, depending on who you ask, worse. The unsettling part here isn't the apparitions. It's the paperwork.
Can I play it in daylight? You can, but you lose. Three or four checkpoints depend on it being dark — the blackness of the Botanical Garden, the shutters on Moyano, lit facades on closed buildings — and there's one question whose answer is only correct after sunset.
Is it suitable for children? It talks about corpses, embalming and a fifteen-year-old girl who died in 1864. No blood and no images, but with names and dates attached. From about twelve or thirteen, with an adult.
Do I need to go inside the Prado or the Reina Sofía? No. At that hour they're closed, and that's the whole point of the game.
If you want to take the shift
People ask us a lot how much of our games is true. In this one, the answer is almost all of it: the dates, the names, the night of 31 May 1990, the 1992 lift, the 1997 complaint, Velasco's sixty-one years inside his own museum. What isn't true is flagged inside the text itself, which is where it belongs.
Those Who Never Left: Paseo del Prado by Night is free, runs about a hundred minutes and is played entirely from the street, in English or Spanish.
If you play it and spot a fact we got wrong, write to us. The audit on this game found four, and the game got better with all four.
Cover photo: Palacio de Linares at night, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.