Sightings of royal ghosts are a worldwide phenomenon. Aztec emperor Moctezuma II’s ghost is said to roam Mexico’s National Palace. At the beautiful Château de Chenonceau in Loire Valley of France, the ghosts of the two women in 16th-century King Henry II’s life, his wife Catherine de’ Medici and mistress Diane de Poitiers, are spotted only when the moon is full, with Catherine combing the hair of her husband’s lover.
In Russia, Peter the Great strides purposefully around the theater of the hermitage in his heavy boots.
But no ghostly sighting of a tragic queen caused more of a public kerfuffle than the strange case of Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain. On August 10, 1901, the two English women, trailblazing academics at St. Hugh’s College at the University of Oxford, were strolling the grounds of Versailles. According to their book An Adventure (which was originally published under pseudonyms), they were searching for Marie Antionette’s fabled Petit Trianon when they entered a “dreamy haziness.”
“Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry,” they write.
They saw two old-fashioned men, one menacing and one elegant. “He was tall, with large dark eyes, and had crisp, curling black hair under the same large sombrero hat. He was handsome, and the effect of the hair was to make him look like an old picture.
His face was glowing red as through great exertion, —as though he had come a long way.”
He spoke frantically to them. “You must not go through that,” he said, “this way...look for the house.”
The women walked over a rustic bridge to a small, idyllic cottage. On the lawn, was a woman sitting on a camp stool sketching. According to An Adventure:
She saw us, and when we passed close by on her left hand, she turned and looked full at us. It was not a young face, and (though rather pretty) it did not attract me. She had on a shady white hat perched on a good deal of fair hair that fluffed round her forehead. Her light summer dress was arranged on her shoulders in handkerchief fashion…I thought she was a tourist, but that her dress was old-fashioned and rather unusual…
Then there was “the little red man of destiny,” a horrifying gnome dressed in scarlet said to make Faustian bargains with the rulers of France. According to Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Palaces by Brad Steiger, the little red man first appeared to Catherine de’ Medici in the 16th century and was seen before the assassination of King Henry IV in 1610, and in the prisons of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette before their executions.
Some monarchs were also said to be haunted by those they had harmed. Legend has it that Wu Zetian, China’s only female Emperor (624–705), was haunted by the spirits of two women she had murdered, Empress Wang and Consort Xiao. They would come back to her in her dreams, bloody and maimed as if fresh from their execution.
I looked straight at her; but some indescribable feeling made me turn away.