Lahneck Castle

While on holiday with her family, the 17-year-old girl mounted the abandoned castle's high tower, when suddenly the wooden stairs collapsed behind her.

Lahneck Castle was built in 1226 by the Archbishop of Mainz Siegfried III of Eppstein to protect his territory at the mouth of the Lahn, where the town of Oberlahnstein and a silver mine had come into the possession of the Archbishopric in 1220.

In the German Mediatisation of 1803, in which the Archbishopric of Mainz lost its secular territories, Lahneck Castle was granted to the Duchy of Nassau.

Imperial Admiral Robert Mischke, later commander of the battlecruiser SMS Von der Tann, purchased the castle in 1907 and it has been owned by his family ever since.

In Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1838 is Letitia Elizabeth Landon's poetical illustration to an engraving of a painting by Samuel Prout entitled The Church of St. John, and the Ruins of Lahneck Castle.

[2] The castle features in chapter 14 of Unless Victory Comes, Gene Garrison's memoir of the United States 3rd Army's crossing of the Rhine on the morning of 25 March 1945.

Lahneck Castle
The castle in 1905, shown looming over the city of Lahnstein