20 
LAND & WATER 
June 8, 191J 
The Hohenzollern Ghost 
By Francis Gribble 
THEY speAk of the ghost as The White Lady. 
Her local habitation is a certain tower of a 
certain old Schloss— old, for BerUn, that is to 
say — on the banks of the Spree, built by the first 
King of Prussia, who was envious of the glories of Ver- 
sailles ; but 1 had never heard of her until she cropped up 
in the course of a conversation during my involuntary 
sojourn in the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg in wartime. 
It was on the day on which my host gave a party in 
honour of a huge salmon trout which he had caught that 
morning in the Our. No friends of Prussia were present, 
and speech was consecjuently free. We discussed the 
fish, and then we discus.sed the war. Some one pro- 
duced an almanack containing the predictions of Madame 
de Thebes — a prophetess whose reputation, I fancy, no 
longer stands exactly where it did ; and then, superstition 
having been approached, someone else said : 
I hear, too, that the White Lady has been seen. It's 
a good sign. Something is going to happen — something 
that they won't like. Wait and see." 
We waited and we saw. What happened was the Battle 
of the Marne. The Germans have never yet formally 
admitted that they did not like the Battle of the Marne ; 
but tliey have not challenged our credulity of boasting 
of it as an agreeable experience, so that we are entitled to 
our own estimate of their feehngs. 
Luxemburg, it may be, took an exaggerated view of 
their disappointment ; for Luxemburg claimed to have 
heard from a charwoman, who claimed to have access to 
the waste paper basket of the General Staff, that Germany 
had lost no fewer than 160,000 prisoners in that action ; 
but that is a side issue. The main point is that the 
mention of the White Lady and her warning aroused my 
cariosity, and started me on pliant asmological research. 
" Who was she ? " I asked ; and it appeared that 
no one knew for certain. 
" What does she do ? " I asked ; and there again I 
came up against conHicting'versions of the Hohenzollern 
ghost story. 
According to some, the White Lady wandered nightly 
through the passages of the Palace, and only entered the 
royal apartments on the eve of the death of a member of 
the royal family. According to others, the spot which 
she ordinarily haunted had never been discovered, and no 
one ever saw her except a prince who was about to die. 
According to all, however, her apparition was a presage 
of misfortune. 
It was agreed, too, that she was the mistress of one 
of the Electors or Margraves of Brandenburg ; but 
different authorities gave different Electors and Margraves 
the credit. There was no evidence which could fairly 
be called evidence ; but the most convincing story — 
artistically convincing, I mean, of course — identifies her 
^vith a certain Agnes von Orlamundc of whom a certain 
Margrave Albert the Handsome was enamoured. 
" Willingly would I marry this beautiful widow," said 
Albert the Handsome, " if it were not for four eyes which 
watch and worry me. ' 
The beautiful widow thought that he referred to the 
four eyes of her two children, and she killed those children 
by piercing their eyes with a golden pin. But the Mar- 
grave really referred to the eyes of his father and mother, 
who objected to the marriage ; and when Agnes dis- 
covered her error, her remorse drove her mad, and she is 
still condemned to haunt the earth. 
Perhaps that story is true — it has a truer ring, at all 
events, than any of the others ; and, in any case, Berlin's 
belief in the White Lady is firm, and as well founded as 
any such belief can ever be. She not only may be seen, — 
she actually has been seen, not once but often in the course 
of the tragic Hohenzollern annals. And the apparition 
has always been followed by disaster. She was seen on 
tbe eve of Valmy, and again on the eve of Jena ; and even 
Princes for whom she has remained invisible have lived 
in dread of the visioui If Frederick the Great was pro- 
tected from the terror by his scepticism, William I was 
not. Attended by a trembhng aide-de-camp, he once 
spent the whole of a long and anxious night searching for 
the White Lady in every one of the six hundred apart- 
ments of the Palace ; but his hour was not yet, and there- 
fore she did not appear. 
There have been sceptics, as there are everywhere — 
sceptics who have vowed that, if ever they met the White 
Lady, they would speak to her aud solve the mystery ; 
but the only sceptic who ever tried that experiment paid 
for his rashness with his life. 
It hapf>ened in the reign of Elector Sigismund — he 
whoso daughter married the illustrious Gustavus Adoiphus. 
The sceptic was one of the Elector's pages ; and it 
happened that, one night, he saw the White Lady coming 
towards him in a dim corridor. He made a bold gesture 
of gallantry, taking her by the waist and asking : 
" Well, Madam, where are you going ? " 
There was no word of anger or of answer. The White 
Lady had a key in her hand — the key, doubtless, which 
was to have admitted her to the royal apartment for which 
she was bound ; and she rapped the page on the head 
with it. He lived long »!nough to tell the story, but no 
longer ; and Elector John Sigismund himself died in the 
course of the following day. 
And then there is the story of the White Lady's appear- 
ance to Fredenck I., the first of the Kings ol Prussia. 
This Frederick, like so many of the Hohenzollerns, was 
a bad husband. His first wife, Leinbitz's friend, Sophie- 
Charlotte of Hanover, kept sedulously out of his way ; 
but his second wife was of the House of Mecklenburg, 
whose members are not distinguished by meekness or any 
tendency towards self-effacement. She put up with a 
good deal ; but when the King, envious as has already 
been said, of the splendours of Versailles, came to the 
conclusion that a Montespan or a Pompadour was essential 
to his dignity, if not to his comfort, and established the 
Grafin von Wurtemberg, the wile of his Prime Minister, 
as his maitresse en litre, the point of her endurance was 
passed, and she resolved to act. 
" Throw that woman out," she said one day to her 
lackeys ; and the lackeys threw her out — nght out into 
the street. 
One can imagine the scandal and the royal wrath. All 
Berlin talked about it, and neither King nor Queen 
forgave the other. Melancholy, indeed, preyed upon the 
Queen's mind, and unhinged it ; and the rest of the narra- 
tive may be given in the words of one of the most recent 
historians of the Hohenzollern House. 
" The King," we read, " had fallen ill, almost at the 
same time as his wife, and had not been informed of the 
Queen's condition. She, one day when she was more 
excited than usual, escaped from the room in which she 
was kept under observation, passed along a gallery, 
and entered her husband's apartments through a glass 
door which she smashed with blows of her fist. The King 
was asleep. Hearing the noise, he awoke with a start ; 
but he had neither the time nor the strength 'to rise from 
his bed. The Queen had thrown herself upon him, cursing 
him as she did so. Terror overcame him when he saw her 
half-clothed, attired in white, her hands and arms splashed 
with blood. Some officers who were on duty in an adjoin- 
ing room heard his cries and ran in and rescued him ; 
but Frederick was so affected by the experience that he 
fell into a fever. He moaned, as he got into bed : 
" I have seen the White Lady. It is all over with me. " 
The next day, he died. 
Of all the many stories told of the apparation of the 
White Lady, that assuredly is the most dramatic, unless 
we give the palm to the story that it was for sudden fear 
of her that Frederick William turned tail from the 
French at Verdun, in 1792. The truth contained in them 
cannot, of course, be exactly measured ; but one can, at 
any rate, affirm with confidence that they are believed. 
The Hohenzollerns believe in the White Lady, and so 
do their Prussian subjects. Whenever there is reason to 
apprehend disaster, either to the realm or to the rulers 
there are always those who look up to the Palace window, 
by night, fearful lest they should see a white form gliding 
past them in the darkness. We may be quite sure that 
there are many watchers for the White Lady now ; and 
we may be not less sure that presently we shall hear that 
the White Lady has once more been seen. 
