Ghosts of History: Versailles

In 1901, two women visiting Versailles lost their way and met a series of strange, anachronistic characters. Looking back on the event, the women became certain they had slipped through time into 1789. Learn more in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Keener, joined by fellow editor Katie Lambert. Hello, Candys,
Hi Katie. It doesn't take much to get Katie and

(00:22):
me talking about Marie Antoinettees and I was so excited
when we got an email from Matt and Middletown, Maryland,
who wrote, Hey, Candice and Jane pre Katie. I'm a
huge fan of the podcast, and I certainly love a juicy,
eerie mystery. One of my favorite podcasts in particular was

(00:42):
the podcast you did a couple of months ago on
the Pie Piper of Hamlin. I was wondering if I
could possibly get another dose of that same kind of
crazy mystery with any stories of historical ghosts or Poulter geists.
In particular, I've heard an extremely juicy book about two
women that visited the gardens of her sigh and experienced
some extremely eerie ghost encounters. What is the history of

(01:04):
the situation and could you possibly divulge into any other
fascinating ghost stories of the past. I was really intrigued
by Matt's email because I've never heard of the book.
So I wrote him back and he wrote me back.
We had a lovely little correspondence going and he told
me the title. I looked it up, got it, read it,
and he pointed out that it, to quote him again,

(01:25):
combines two interesting eras with the medium and spirit infatuation
of the late eighteen hundreds in early nineteen hundreds and
the French Revolution. And he's absolutely right. And since Katie
and I started doing this multi part series on historical ghosts,
it was a perfect fit. And before we get too
much into the history of the place, I'd like to

(01:46):
set the scene a little bit. So we're going to
travel back to nineteen o one and two English ladies
are on their way to Versailles, and they're headed to
the Petit Trional, which was Marie Antoinette's private little hamlet.
And as they're walking along, it's deserted. They get lost,
they don't quite know where they are. They see a

(02:08):
plow by the road, and as they keep walking they
start to feel anxious and depressed and everything around them
gets kind of dim and they meet these strangely dressed
men who try to point the point the way to
Petit Trion on and then they meet a very unpleasant
scarred man who frightens them, and a running man who
comes up and tells them where to go, until they

(02:30):
actually get to the Petit Trional and they see a
wedding party and the mood lifts, and they go on
their way, and they in the afternoon by having tea
and going back to their hotel in Paris, and they
don't talk about what happened for a couple of months,
and then it just so happens that one day they're
writing letters and writing their accounts of what happened, just
you know, for their friends back home, and one turns

(02:51):
to the other and says, do you think the Petit
Trianon is haunted? And absolutely is their response, which is
so range because they hadn't shared with each other how
depressed and how heavy their moods had gotten when they
were wandering through the grounds, even though both of them
felt that they were they were being good friends and
good traveling companions and trying to you know, buck up

(03:13):
and go about the tour, but they couldn't explain the
strange feeling. And what's more, when they started sharing their
experiences and recalling the sites that they've seen, they realized
that the other had seen things that the other hadn't,
and the most poignant site that one had missed was
a woman with a sketch pad who was dressed in

(03:36):
a very strange period costume. She had very fluffy hair,
on top of which was perched a hat, and her
face was described as being a little bit older and
supposedly attractive. Like the woman could tell that she was
supposed to find her a pretty woman, but she didn't.
There was something unsettling about her, and later she would

(03:56):
conclude that that was actually her Antoinette. So let's go
a little bit into the history of Trianon. Yes, like
Katie mentioned this most Marie Antoinette's pleasure house. It was
a gift from her husband, Louis sixt the three story
building that was originally erected by Louis fifteen for his mistress,
Madame Pompadour. But Marie Antoinette grew very fatigued of life

(04:19):
at court when she was on the throne alongside her husband,
and so too uh give her an escape from the
rigors of court, he offered her petit trying on, and
later she decided to embellish the house with a little
hamlet like Katie and in two very rustic countryside town
with pretend farmhouses and pretend farm equipment. It was all

(04:43):
very much a product of her imagination, but it was
incredibly expensive. It cost about two million francs to build.
And supposedly while she was there she had a very well,
this is true, she had a very explosive coterie that
was invited to visit. But supposedly she had a Theirs
with Hans Axel von first And and the Duchess de Polignac.

(05:05):
And on October five nine, Marie Antoinette was at the
Petitrion on when a messenger came to tell her that
a mob from Paris was on its way to Versailles,
a violent mob from Paris with the idea of either
capturing or killing her and Louis the sixteens, And that's
why that date figured so strongly in her mind. On

(05:25):
August tent in, which is oddly the date in nineteen
o one that the two ladies had gone to Versailles,
and they believed that they had time slipped into one
of Marie Antoinette's memories, and August ten was a significant
date because that's when she and Louis were on trial
and the Hall of the Assembly, and they had seen

(05:47):
their Swiss guards massacred in the Tweeler. Right, So is
this this time slip or time travel. It's just it's
very strange for me to out my head around, especially
as far as ghost stories go. Be has When I
think of a ghost story, and when I heard about
this one from Matt, I guess I imagined that the
women would be on the grounds of your Side and

(06:08):
they would run into Marie Antoinette, and it would be, oh,
a gros Lan encounter. But it goes a step further
than that. It's almost like a being John Malkovich moment
where they're in her mind and things are sort of
foggy and less bright and less clear. They're living through
her experiences, but they're seeing her years ago. So it

(06:31):
would have been Marie Antoinette remembering Marie Antoinette in nine
Yer or layers in an Onion and an Ogre. So
just to get with the story, these two women, they
decide to write down their accounts separately, without one informing
the other, so that they can be as accurate as possible,

(06:53):
and they appeal to the society for psychical research to
investigate tren On on the grounds that there may be
posts Sarah, but their claim is denied. So they decided
to investigate the matter for themselves, and being two academics,
they did quite a bit of research everywhere from the
Conservatory of Music in Paris to the National Archives. And

(07:14):
that's another reason that they use pseudonyms to write the book.
They didn't want their names to be damaged in academic circles,
so not until their death didn't come out that they
were two women of good intellectual means. They published an
Adventure in nineteen eleven under the names of Miss Morrison
and Miss Lamant, and the book was pretty sensational and

(07:34):
much talked about, but also widely criticized until again after
their deaths, it came out that these were two very
well respected women. They were the principal and vice principle
of St. Hugh's College in Oxford, and in their account
they claimed they had twenty points of coincidence which couldn't
be coincidental. Uh No, pun intended all of these items

(07:57):
and scenes and people that they had seen smacked of
seventeen eighty nine, but they were seeing them in nineteen
o one. And there were subsequent visits that they also
took to train on um. After the first visit on
August tenth, nineteen o one, Miss Lamont went on her
own January second, nineteen o two, and on that date

(08:18):
she also times slipped, becoming lost in very dense woods
and feeling enclosed by a huge crowd of people with
rustling silk skirts, but with no one around. Then they
went back for the third time, and then the fourth
time on July seven, nineteen o four. In July nine,
and they were with a companion on one of those days,

(08:38):
and there were many many tourists there on another day,
and they found that the grounds were, as they said,
entirely changed. They were smaller, more compact, cleaner. Before there
had been the sort of romantic tangle of grasses and
weeds and flowers and rocks and streams and little buildings,
and none of that was there anymore. So totally different landscape.

(09:01):
And that was the cool thing for me about the
book was the level of detail, because they do go
being academics, point by point with footnotes and appendices and
illustrations to show exactly what they were seeing, and then
a rebuttal to any possible questions exactly, and one of
their bottles that they said, and I'm actually going to
acquite the whole thing. They asserted, both of us have

(09:24):
inherited a horror of all forms of occultism. We lose
no opportunity of preaching against them as unwholesome and misleading
because they mostly deal with conditions of physical excitement. And
they go on to add to that. But the point
being they're saying, we are basing this entirely on facts.
So let's go over some of those facts. And the

(09:45):
one I'd like to begin with is the specter of
Marie Antoinette that they supposedly saw. And the woman who
described her as aforementioned said, she was supposedly an attractive woman,
very fluffy hair. And later on she saw a very
famous portrait of Marie Antoinette, which had long been hailed
as the queen's most accurate likeness. And here's the eerie part.

(10:06):
The queen was wearing the exact same outfit and the
portrait as the ghost was and the grounds of bataeron on,
and it was the Vertmoller portrait, which is supposed to
be one of the most identical likenesses to Marie Antoinette,
the one that actually looks like her, and like many
portraits of the period, exactly and beginning with their their steps,

(10:28):
tracing their steps throughout the grounds where they get lost.
And again they tell in the book that they come
to Versailles with no preconceived notions of what they're going
to see. They're not entirely familiar with the history of
the palace, and they wanted to conduct their travels in
France and a chronological order of some sort. I'm not
quite sure what they meant by that, presumably with the

(10:51):
events seating out to the revolution. But they went to
Versailles a couple of days early, and they were using
a certain map and lost their way, and one of
the first strange items that appeared to them was this plow.
And the plow was definitely not contemporary to nineteen o
one for one reason, there was no need for a

(11:12):
plow on the grounds. They were handled in an entirely
different maintenance sort of way. And it was one from
the pre Luis sixteenth era that had been relegated to
use as a prop at tree and on. It was
later sold off after the couple was deposed. So why
would it have been there, and a lot of the
details about the people they ran into, such as the costuming,

(11:33):
they later found out were related to events at the period,
Like they'd seen these men in green coats and had
assumed at the time that they were gardeners. But the
more research they did, they realized that Marie antoinette Swiss
guards were green, and that modern gardeners actually were black
and most seasons, and white in the summer. And the
very unpleasant man that they saw with the scarred face

(11:56):
looked very much like the Comte de Vaudroy. I'm sorry
if I'm not saying that correct, who was scarred by
smallpox and was an enemy of Marie Antoinette's, in fact
betrayed her. And that's the point of contention that I
found between the book itself and some other research that
I did. I read that at one time he was
a member of this core degree that was welcome at

(12:18):
train On, but he wanted Marie to ask Louise permission
to play a part in the marriage of Figura, which was,
as the woman said, a politically dangerous play. So they
would have been friends, but then that friendship would have
gone sour, which might explain why he was giving off
such a strange air of evil when the woman saw

(12:39):
him exactly. Louis had said that if they put on
that play that it was, it was likely that the
bus steal would be stormed. And after the starming of
the bast steel, not too long after came the mob
of Parisian women that marched to Versailles to take Marie
and Louis. So the dangerous art point taken. They also
found at chiosk Uh. They continually called it a kiosk

(13:03):
I'm not sure if that's the most appropriate name for
the structure, but it was composed of seven ionic columns
and a domed roof, and they litter found evidence of
this and plans that had been sketched for trying on,
but it certainly was not present in nineteen o one.
Also that running man that they saw they believed to
have been the page who ran to tell Marie Antoinette

(13:25):
that the mob was on its way, and at the
time it said that she suggested just going back through
the forest to get back to petit trying on and
and to leave the grounds, but he said no, and
that he would run and get a coach to come
and get her. Instead, and they said that both times
they saw this running man, he was breathless but seemed
to come out of nowhere and then disappeared again. And

(13:48):
he correct me from ron Katie. It was also the
one who offered them directions on which way to go
to find the house. Is that right, I believe. But
the strange thing is they were told that after seventeen nine,
when the grounds were open to the prying eyes of
the public, it was government owned land at that point
and the only directive given to tourists was just be

(14:09):
out by dark. So they were told later the women
to be clear that no one would have been giving
them specific directions and that part of the grounds they
would have been free to wander as they like. So
it's very odd that this frantic man would tell them
specifically which way to go. Another strange piece of evidence
is that a footman appeared at the house, the three

(14:31):
storied pe teachering On house, and he came out of
a door and slammed it very hard and noticeably. Yet
that door had been locked for years and years, and
only one man had the key and had never opened
it that day. And when miss Lamont returned by herself
on her own visit, she heard this strange, low pitched,
repetitive music, and so she wrote down what she could remember,

(14:53):
and she brought them to a music expert who listened
to it, did some research, and added them to a
melody from around seventeen eighty And it was a distinctive
melody because there had been, as he said, a mistake
in the notes, and it was very distinctive of a
particular composer. Sacchini, I believe right, so very telling, and

(15:17):
it's it seems like all of these points of coincidence.
As the woman said, whose real names I'm sure they
won't mind if I reveal since they are deceased are
Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor f Jourdan. They said it
couldn't be coincidental. They were dead certain that they had
time traveled back to seventeen eighty nine ers I, and
the fact that they did come from such respectable backgrounds

(15:40):
gave people pause. Moberly's father was the Bishop of Salisbury,
they were both daughters of clergymen, They were both very
well educated, and the idea that they wouldn't be telling
the truth it seemed entirely implausible, and for a while
their academic status added merit to their report. And then

(16:00):
sentiment turned a bit and people started to think that
they were two women who wanted so badly to believe
what they had seen that they did too much research
and convinced themselves of the ghosts of treon On and
one man in particular film fault with them. In nineteen
fifty W. H. Palter investigated the letters they had originally

(16:22):
written to the Society for Psychical Research in one and
he found that they didn't contain nearly as many details
as their nineteen six accounts did, and so he was
one of the primary voices saying, look, they just went
too far with their research. They may have seen something strange,
but they have completely inflated it. It's not true. And

(16:43):
Salter was a fellow of the Royal Society, so his
words did carry wait. And he also made the claim
that perhaps it was just yet another Marie Antoinette fixation,
like that of the medium A. Len Smith, which had
been exposed in the press not too long before that. So,
whether you choose to believe the time slip ghost story

(17:04):
or not, Marie Antoinette is a fascinating figure, and if
you want to pick up the book. It's a very
slim little volume. You could finish it in an afternoon,
and I will warn you that it helps to have
a good working knowledge of French reading comprehension. It's been
quite a while for me, and so I had to
skip over a few passages, and I was remarking to
Katie how disappointed I was, because a lot of their

(17:25):
evidence hinges on these um these French passages, one of
the women would write. But then I learned that colon
long French passage, and I was convinced, and I thought, well,
I wish I could be convinced to I really missed
that one. And just as a little bit of an epilogue,
UM critic Terry Castle writes in the Female Thermometer and
also in the Apparitional Female, I believe um that perhaps

(17:49):
this was a bit of a lesbian folliade, which Folia
does basically um infectious insanity, which is when two people
have the same psychosis. And sheep leaved that Mobile and Jorgia,
who did live together for twenty three years after the incident,
had perhaps repressed homosexual longings, and that they identified with

(18:12):
Marie Antoinette, who also had many homosexual rumors about her
and the Madame Dapolnac and the Princess Lombal, and that
that was why this was something that was so important
to them. Well, that is certainly an interesting reading and
whether or not it colors your interpretation of the ghost story.
I know some people sometimes believe that ghosts try to

(18:32):
communicate more with people who they believe will be sympathetic
to their interests, so that could be a connection. But
in the meantime, if you want to learn more about
Marie Antoinette and Virsai as well as the French Revolution,
we invite you to look at those articles on the
website how stuff works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot

(18:53):
com and be sure to check out the stuff you
missed in History Class blog on the house stuff works
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