31 Aug,2025 By Fake Travel News
The adventures of Cass Mitchell continue as she visits Czech Republic…hundreds of years in the past!
When the Journal of Medieval Medical Mysteries offered to sponsor my photography trip to Czech Republic to document plague memorials throughout the country, I thought the worst thing that could happen would be getting caught in a thunderstorm without an umbrella. Turns out, getting struck by lightning while touching a 17th-century plague monument in Olomouc was just the beginning of what would become the most medically impossible, historically implausible, and utterly life-changing adventure of my travel blogging career.
But let me back up.
I’m Cass Mitchell, travel blogger and owner of the website CassOnTheMove.com. After my recent Norwegian statue incident (which I’m still not legally allowed to discuss as anything other than “speculative fiction”), I’d been laying low with more conventional travel writing. Food tours in Portugal, wine tasting in Tuscany, the usual stuff that doesn’t involve ancient curses or government cover-ups. When Dr. Helena Moravcová from the Journal of Medieval Medical Mysteries reached out about photographing Czech plague memorials for their upcoming historical issue, it seemed perfectly safe. Document some monuments, take pretty pictures, maybe learn about medieval medicine. What could go wrong?
“We’re particularly interested in the Olomouc memorial,” Dr. Moravcová explained during our video call. “It’s one of the most elaborate plague monuments in Central Europe, erected after the devastating outbreak of 1679. Your eye for finding the unusual stories behind tourist attractions makes you perfect for this assignment.”
Flattery aside, the pay was excellent, and Theo (my incredibly cute and witty son…single mom shout-out!) was spending spring break with my parents in San Diego, giving me a perfect window for solo travel. I packed my usual gear: camera equipment, travel documents, emergency medical kit (including my trusty z-pack of antibiotics—a lesson learned from a bout of food poisoning in Bangkok), and a book of Czech poetry I’d picked up at a used bookstore to help me understand the local culture.
My first week in the Czech Republic was blissfully uneventful. When in Rome you eat pasta; when in the Czech Republic you apparently soak in beer. Locals swear it’s therapeutic—“good for the skin,” or so I was told—but I suspect it’s just another excuse to stay the world’s happiest drunks. Either way, I got the photo evidence of myself fermenting in what amounted to an entire brewery’s worth of pilsner.
The monuments were beautiful, melancholy, and refreshingly unlikely to transport me through time or space. Then I arrived in Olomouc.
“It’s magnificent,” I told my taxi driver in broken Czech as we pulled up to the column.
“Ano, ale pozor na bouřky,” he replied, pointing at the darkening sky. “Yes, but watch for storms.”
The weather forecast had mentioned possible thunderstorms, but I’d experienced enough travel delays to know you work with the conditions you have. As afternoon clouds gathered, I positioned myself for the perfect shot—close enough to capture the intricate carvings while maintaining the perspective that would showcase the column’s impressive height.
The memorial depicts dozens of saints, angels, and religious figures, all carved with extraordinary detail. At its base, plaques commemorate the plague victims and celebrate the survivors. I was photographing a particularly moving inscription about “children taken too soon” when I felt the first drops of rain.
“Perfect dramatic lighting,” I muttered, adjusting my camera settings as the storm intensified.
That’s when I made the fateful decision to touch the memorial.
I was trying to steady myself for a difficult angle shot, reaching out to brace against the monument’s base, when lightning illuminated the entire square. The electrical charge hit the thirty-five-meter column and traveled down through centuries of stone, through the bronze plaques, and directly into my outstretched hand.
The world exploded in white light.
When my vision cleared, everything had changed.
The modern square was gone. Medieval wooden buildings surrounded me, their windows glowing with candlelight. The smell hit me first—unwashed bodies, animal waste, smoke, and underneath it all, the sweet-sick smell of death. People in rough woolen clothing hurried past, many covering their faces with cloth. Some bore the telltale swellings of plague victims—dark buboes on their necks and under their arms.
“Pomozte mi! Help me!” A woman’s voice called out in what sounded like archaic Czech.
I turned to see a middle-aged woman in a tattered dress running toward me, tears streaming down her face. She grabbed my arm and pulled me toward a small wooden house, speaking rapidly in a dialect I couldn’t understand. But her desperation was universal.
Inside the house, by the light of a single candle, I saw him—a boy of maybe eight years old, burning with fever and covered in the black swellings that gave the plague its name. He was unconscious, his breathing shallow and labored.
The woman—his mother, clearly—knelt beside him and looked up at me with eyes full of hope and desperation. She’d seen me appear in the flash of lightning and was convinced I was some kind of divine intervention.
The boy’s face reminded me instantly of Theo.
Same dark hair, same small nose, same way of curling up when sleeping. Even unconscious and dying of medieval plague, this child looked exactly like my son.
Without thinking, I dug into my backpack for my emergency medical kit. The z-pack of azithromycin I carried everywhere—originally intended for my own protection against traveler’s diarrhea or respiratory infections—might just work against bacterial plague infection. Medieval physicians had no concept of bacteria, no understanding of antibiotics. But I did.
“Prosím,” I said, using one of the few Czech words I knew. “Please.”
I crushed the antibiotic tablets and mixed them with water from my water bottle, praying that six centuries of medical advancement was about to prove itself. The mother watched anxiously as I helped the unconscious boy swallow the mixture.
Then we waited.
Over the next three days, the mother—who I learned was named Božena—cared for me as much as I tried to help her son. My modern clothes and strange possessions clearly marked me as foreign, but she seemed to believe I was some kind of pilgrim or healer sent by God. She brought me thin soup and stale bread, sharing what little food her family had during this time of plague and famine.
The boy—Matěj—slowly began to improve. His fever broke on the second day, and the swellings started to recede. Medieval medicine would have attributed this to divine intervention or the alignment of the stars. I knew it was just antibiotics doing what antibiotics do—killing bacteria that had been murdering people for centuries.
But then I started getting sick.
It began with a headache and fatigue, which I initially blamed on stress and the medieval diet. Then came the fever, the chills, and finally, the unmistakable swelling in my neck that meant I had contracted the very disease I’d just cured.
The irony was not lost on me. I’d traveled back in time, saved a medieval child with modern medicine, and was now going to die of the Black Death anyway.
Božena tried to care for me the same way I’d helped Matěj, but she had no antibiotics, no modern medicine. Just prayers, herbal remedies, and the kind of tender care that had been humanity’s only defense against disease for millennia.
As my condition worsened, I began to accept that this was how my story would end. Not in a hospital in the 21st century, but in a medieval plague house, having saved one child’s life at the cost of my own. There were worse ways to go, I supposed.
On what I was certain would be my last night, thunder began to rumble overhead.
Through the small window, I could see lightning flickering in the distance. The same kind of storm that had brought me here might be my only chance to get home.
“I have to go,” I whispered to Božena, though I knew she couldn’t understand.
Matěj, now fully recovered and sitting up for the first time in days, looked at me with the same intelligent eyes that reminded me so much of Theo. He reached into a small wooden box beside his bed and pulled out a rolled piece of parchment.
It was a poem, written in archaic Czech in a child’s careful handwriting. Though I couldn’t read the words, I could see sketches of an angel surrounded by lightning. When our eyes met one final time, he offered the faintest smile—the first I’d seen since his recovery.
I stumbled out into the storm, guided by whatever supernatural force had brought me here. The plague memorial didn’t exist in this time, but the main square did. As rain soaked through my medieval clothes and lightning illuminated the square, I laid down in the place where the memorial stood in the 21st century and closed my eyes.
“Please,” I whispered to whatever cosmic force controls time travel and lightning strikes. “I need to get back to my son.”
The lightning struck again.
I woke up in Olomouc General Hospital with a very concerned Czech doctor explaining in broken English that I’d been found unconscious in the town square during a lightning storm, claiming to have the plague.
“You keep saying ‘Black Death,'” Dr. Krejčí said, consulting his notes. “Your lab tests are still pending, but…”
“I need to call the World Health Organization,” I interrupted, still convinced I was carrying medieval plague bacteria forward in time.
This led to what was easily the most surreal medical interview of my life. Dr. Sarah Williams from the WHO flew in from Geneva to interview me about my “potential exposure to unknown bacterial agents.” She was professional, skeptical, and clearly convinced I was either lying or suffering from lightning-induced delusions.
“Ms. Mitchell,” she said, consulting her tablet, “you claim to have traveled back in time to the 17th century plague outbreak?”
“I know how it sounds,” I replied. “But I have proof.”
I reached for the book of Czech poetry I’d bought before my trip, the one that had somehow survived my journey through time. As I was waiting for the WHO doctor to arrive, I had been perusing it out of boredom and came across something that made my blood freeze. I now presented this to Dr. Williams as evidence.
There, printed in modern Czech with an English translation, was a poem titled “Anděl z blesku” (“Angel from Lightning”). The author was listed as Pavel Novák, with a note that the poem had been “passed down through his family for generations, originally composed by his ancestor Matěj Novák during the plague outbreak of 1679.”
The poem described a mysterious woman who appeared during a lightning storm, healed a dying child with magic, and then disappeared back into the storm. Per the book, the poem echoed through the 1968 Prague Spring protests, symbolizing hope and crucial support from abroad.
Dr. Williams read the poem, examined the book’s publication date, and checked the ISBN number on her phone.
“This is… unusual,” she admitted. “But it doesn’t prove anything except that you’re remarkably well-prepared for an elaborate hoax.”
“Check the family records,” I suggested. “Look up the Novák family in Olomouc. See if there’s any mention of a Matěj who survived the 1679 plague.”
Three days later, Dr. Williams returned with a very different expression.
“We found the records,” she said quietly. “Church documentation from 1679 describes the miraculous recovery of Matěj Novák, son of Božena, from the plague. The parish priest wrote that the boy’s recovery was ‘inexplicable by earthly medicine’ and attributed it to ‘divine intervention following the appearance of a foreign woman during a great storm.'”
We stared at each other across the hospital bed.
“The bacterial infection you’re carrying,” she continued, “appears to be a strain of Yersinia pestis that predates any known antibiotic resistance. Our lab analysis suggests it’s centuries older than any plague bacteria we’ve previously encountered.”
“So you believe me?”
“I believe you’ve encountered something that challenges our understanding of both medicine and physics,” Dr. Williams said carefully. “Whether that’s time travel, parallel dimensions, or something else, I honestly don’t know.”
After two weeks of treatment with antibiotics and extensive decontamination protocols, I was finally cleared to leave the hospital. The Czech government, in coordination with the WHO, has classified my medical records, though they’ve given me permission to write about my experience as long as I include appropriate disclaimers about the speculative nature of time travel. I also got a great pic of me recovering from the plague, hopefully the only time I will have to say that!
I returned to Olomouc one more time before flying home. The plague memorial stood exactly as it had before—weathered, ancient, and now carrying a very personal significance. I reached for it, then pulled back. It’s better not to tempt fate, just in case time travel isn’t a once-per-monument kind of deal.
At a local bookstore, I found three more collections of Pavel Novák’s poetry. The shopkeeper, an elderly man with kind eyes, noticed my interest.
“Novák je místní hrdina,” he said in Czech, then switched to English. “Novák is local hero. His family, they preserve old stories. Stories of hope.”
As I flew home to San Diego, I thought about Matěj—now just a name in historical records, but once a real boy who reminded me of my own son. I’d changed history in the smallest possible way, saving one child’s life in an era when children died by the thousands. But that one small change had rippled forward through centuries, creating poetry that inspired protesters, preserving stories of hope in dark times.
When I finally hugged Theo at the airport, I held him a little tighter than usual.
“How was your trip, Mom?” he asked as we drove home. “Did you find any good stories?”
“The best kind,” I replied. “The kind that remind you why we fight so hard to stay alive.”
The official medical explanation for my experience remains “lightning-induced hallucination combined with exposure to unknown bacterial agents.” The Czech tourism board has quietly added new safety protocols around the Olomouc plague memorial, including lightning rods and weather monitoring equipment.
But every time I read Pavel Novák’s poetry, I remember a little boy named Matěj who looked just like my son, and a mother named Božena who shared her last piece of bread with a stranger who fell from lightning.
Sometimes the most important journeys aren’t the ones we plan.
The non-fake disclaimer: Fake Travel News is a satire travel blog. We create exaggerated travel stories for entertainment, though we believe the very real magic of travel can sometimes feel stranger than fiction. For actual information about the Olomouc Holy Trinity Column and Czech plague memorials, visit the official Czech Tourism website. The WHO advises that time travel is not currently considered a risk factor for contracting the plague.
