Ács: Zombie Goose Shenanigans (Small Town Legends A to Z)

This year my A to Z theme is Small Town Legends. I am exploring folklore from villages and small towns in and around Hungary, bringing you the most entertaining bits. You can plan your next visit around them!

Let's kick this series off with a fun one!

This story was collected from Ács, which is a town of about 7,000 people in Komárom-Esztergom county, northwestern Hungary, by the River Danube. In the olden days water mills lined the river.

The story goes that one day the millers in Lovad (a field by the river) caught a goose on the Danube and decided to cook it. They cut it up and put it in a pot to make some nice savory gulyás (take note, gulyás is originally a soup, not stew). However, the more they cooked it, the tougher the meat got. After waiting several hours for the meal, one of the millers checked the pot again - and was shocked to discover it had pieces of a fur coat in it instead of meat.

Frustrated by the whole thing, the millers dumped the soup from the pot into the Danube. But as soon as they did, the meat turned back into a goose, and it swam cheerfully down the waves of the river. The millers did not try to capture it again. They merely waved and yelled:

"Go on, damn you! Trick the millers in Aranyos down the river too!"

(Collected from Péntek József, a miller from Ács, in the 1920s. Source here)

"Aranyos" in this story refers to Csallóközaranyos (Zlatná na Ostrove) on the Slovakian side of the river.

Image from here