Und wandern sollst du ruhelos ... (1915)

A wealthy count who is an avid antiques collector acquires an antique casket. What he does not know is that the artifact bears a terrible, centuries-old curse. Ever since buying it, he has been constantly haunted by a ghostly apparition in the form of a medieval knight’s wife. One day, the count visits a friend at his castle. When a fire breaks out there, the count uncovers the secret of his cursed casket. He finds an ancient document entitled “The Castle Court Jester’s Records” and reads it. It tells how the curse came about: Once, a brave knight lived in a castle with his young and beautiful wife. As a proper knight, he naturally had to keep setting out into the wide world to undertake new adventures and battles, and so he was often away from home. But as his lovely wife began to grow bored on her own, she got foolish ideas and took up with a handsome young squire. When the knight was home again, he went to the altar with the woman he believed to be a virgin and gave her that very jewelry casket as a morning gift, filled with the family’s holy relics. But the knight’s wife had long been planning to have her frequently absent husband killed. She took the relics out of the casket and put a little bottle of poison in their place. She gave the casket to her lover so that he could now get rid of his rival. The castle’s court jester learned of the dishonorable and faithless woman’s wicked plan and shared what he knew with the knight and lord of the castle, who was seized with sheer horror. When everything came to light, the squire threw himself into the depths, and the knight’s wife took her own poison to escape her husband’s revenge. The relics she had removed remained missing. Standing over her corpse, however, the knight uttered a terrible curse: “And you shall wander restlessly until the relics are returned.” The count with his collecting obsession is very lucky in his misfortune: before long, he comes across a similar casket that really does contain the relics. He places them back in the original casket and is thereby freed from the curse.