Blind Spot: Swift's Lost Silver Mine and Dorr's River of Gold

In our last installment, Joseph Mulhatton: Liar Laureate of the World, I took listeners deep into the history of fake news by exploring the life and work of the most prolific newspaper hoaxer who ever lived. The subject of that episode was first introduced to me while listening to the hugely entertaining and informative podcast Astonishing Legends, as hosts Forrest Burgess and Scott Philbrook brought up Mulhatton as a possible explanation for the newspaper article that sparked the legend of Kinkaid’s Cave in the Grand Canyon. This story in the Arizona Gazette in 1909 indicated that a massive cavern had been found in the Grand Canyon that contained not only treasures but also relics and mummified remains that indicated it had once been the home of an Egyptian civilization, thus providing evidence of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. The guys at Astonishing Legends rightly pointed to a quite convincing theory by Don Lago, published by the Grand Canyon Historical Society, that this was a Mulhatton hoax. And indeed, listeners should find many aspects of the Kinkaid’s Cave tale familiar, as Mulhatton several times published hoaxes about caverns with underground rivers and great riches, including proof of pre-Columbian, specifically Egyptian, contact. Philbrook and Burgess of Astonishing Legends also cautioned, however, that there is no proof of Mulhatton having perpetrated this story as a hoax, and it should be kept in mind that there is a long history, both before and after Mulhatton’s time, of stories about caves containing riches untold, legends that spread far and wide and persist even today, despite the fact that they may be nothing more than fables and tall tales. One only has to look at two such American legends to see this folkloric tradition: Swift’s Lost Silver Mine and Dorr’s River of Gold. 

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The first of these tales finds us back in Mulhattan’s stomping grounds, Kentucky, but in the late 18th century. A pioneer by the name of Dooley Townsend is out one day setting traps by the Red River when a band of lost and starving men come upon him, desperate for sustenance and direction. Townsend helps them, but one man among them, an old blind man, is far too gone and dies with Townsend at his bedside, bequeathing to the Good Samaritan his only possession of value, a journal. And the story this journal tells will establish a legend that will drive many to adventure and ruin.

Swift bequeathing his journal, via rootsweb.ancestry.com

According to the journal, the old man was one John Swift, formerly a seagoing man and ship captain who may have commanded any sort of vessel, from merchantman to pirate ship, as far as the record tells. Having retired from that life to become a merchant in North Carolina and Virginia, he happened to take under his wing a young man named Munday who had lived most of his life among Native American tribes. Out of gratitude, Munday promised to lead Swift to a secret cave in Kentucky where native peoples were known to mine silver. So off they went, in the early 1760s, to find the mine, forging through the untamed wilderness that was Kentucky long before Daniel Boone was ever reported to have done so and never encountering a single Native American, as it appears, at least according to some historians, that no tribes then lived in the region, instead using the land only to hunt and meet in open warfare.

Eventually, Munday found the old mine, which was essentially a cave in the face of a cliff, and Swift’s journal gave very precise descriptions of landmarks leading to the mine, ostensibly as a record so that Swift could find it again. He found the mine plentiful indeed, reporting that he easily found ore and was even able to smelt it in a nearby stone furnace. Therefore, he and Munday returned to the mine several times throughout the 1760s, until once they stayed too long, despite Munday’s warnings, and were beset by Native American warriors, barely escaping with their lives. After that close call, they did not return for several years, and when they did, they came prepared to haul back as much silver as possible. On their way back, each member of their party rode his horse with a large, heavy sack of silver, such that the horses could not carry any more weight, but a snake bit Munday’s horse, killing it. When Munday suggested that others go on foot as well so that he could place his sack on a horse and not have to leave it behind, an argument ensued. During the quarrel, Munday threatened to betray the group to area natives, and Swift murdered him. 

Swift and Munday searching for the mine, via rootsweb.ancestry.com

Some versions of his story have Swift going back to England after this, where he was imprisoned on some crime. Others have him returning to North Carolina, where his spending of silver coins he had minted himself got him tried for counterfeiting, charges that were supposedly dismissed when the coins were found to be pure silver. Regardless of where he was in the interim, one detail is agreed upon; not suddenly but inexorably, Swift went blind, and thereafter, all of his future expeditions relied on his recollections, comparing his descriptions to the observations of his travelling companions. Thus his last expedition, when Townsend discovered him lost in the wilderness and starving. After Dooley Townsend received the journal, it was thereafter lost, perhaps taken from his belongings upon his death by an unscrupulous lawyer. Word of its existence first appears in the historical record in 1788, and ever since, it has become a mythical artifact, its narrative and maps passing from treasure hunter to treasure hunter, and somewhere along the way becoming duplicated and bastardized by forgers and compilers claiming to reproduce it from memory, such that there appear to have been multiple competing versions in circulation, all claiming authenticity even though some bear the clear marks of paraphrasing and even bald-faced quotation!

While some argue over the particulars of what has been recorded from these different documents, others dispute the entire story outright. Believers point to Kentucky place names and oral history as proof that Swift and his mine existed, while the more scholarly pore over old documents in search of his name and cite a 1788 treasury warrant by Kentucky historian and mapmaker John Filson as evidence for the story’s veracity, as the warrant identifies 1,000 acres that were supposed to contain Swift’s mine. For proof that Swift’s silver coins did and do exist, numismatists, or coin collectors, will point to the Sprinkle Dollar, a silver coin of unknown origin supposed to have turned up in circulation in 1830s West Virginia.  

A map supposedly based on details from Swift's journal, via TreasureNet

On the other hand, skeptics pick apart all documentary evidence by pointing out inconsistencies and look to geological evidence that Kentucky sandstone has never produced more than trace amounts of silver, and nothing like the great veins and nuggets reported in the Swift tales. Some say that Swift concocted the tale as a cover for counterfeiting activity and piracy, kind of like money laundering in that he had to offer some explanation for ill-gotten coinage, but other disbelievers take it further and allege that Swift himself never existed. One theory points to the many Masonic symbols in the surviving accounts of the Swift journal to suggest it was written as an allegory, symbolically representing Masonic ideas of the search for enlightenment and tying into tales of Solomon’s mines. These theories tend to point at none other than the historian John Filson, he who first put down a reference to the mine for history and posterity, as the perpetrator of this literary hoax. 

Whether the story of Swift’s Lost Silver Mine was a hoax or a literary concoction or a genuine lost treasure, it has certainly driven many a seeker of wealth and adventure to devote their lives and fortunes to searching for it. And even today, well into the 21st century, treasure hunters expend great effort and capital in searching for the lost mine.

Portrait of Earl Dorr, via The Mojave Project

Such is also the case with another legend that sounds even more like a Mulhatton tall tale, featuring as it does a vast subterranean river, although this one appeared decades after the Liar Laureate’s alleged passing. In 1934, a prospector named Earl P. Dorr swore an affidavit regarding the discovery of a cavern and underground river beneath Kokoweef Mountain in the Joshua Tree region of the Mojave Desert. His story unfolded as follows: Three Native American brothers, the Peyserts, had been hired to work on his father’s ranch in the 1890s. During the first few years of the 20th century, the brothers went in search of the motherlode that tribal legend told was secreted beneath Kokoweef, and find it they did. After discovering the entrance to a vast cavern system and exploring its labrynthine passages, they came upon a chamber where an underground river lapped against virgin black sands sparkling with placer gold. The Peyserts took what they could, but before they left, the waters rose as in a sudden tidal influx and drowned one of them. Out of superstition, they never returned to the cavern that had claimed their brother’s life, but they did tell Earl Dorr of the cavern and the river of gold, and Dorr’s affidavit claimed he had gone on to find it, but after the cavern’s entrance was seen by two other prospectors, he blasted it to keep them from taking the gold for themselves, and after that he was unsuccessful at finding another entrance.

The Peyserts making their discovery, in The Desert Magazine, via The Mojave Project

Disbelievers in Dorr’s story call him a teller of tales, suggesting that he may have explored an actual, verified cave beneath Kokoweef, called Crystal Cavern, but that his tales of finding treasure there were fabrications. As proof they point to the fact that he actually swore out multiple affidavits, and that the details between them create discrepancies. Moreover, it appears that many particulars of his story, including the Native American brothers’ discovery of the cave, the description of the underground river and black sands laden with gold, and the tidal waters claiming one brother’s life, were likely plagiarized from a collection of mythical yarns about lost mines and buried treasure written by one John Mitchell and published a year before the swearing out of his affidavits under the title Lost Mines of the Great Southwest. Nevertheless, these revelations have not deterred believers, and the legend has persisted. In the early 90’s, the story of Earl Dorr’s River of Gold was even featured on the classic show Unsolved Mysteries. In the segment, which can be seen on Amazon Video on episode 4 of season 6, Robert Stack tells the story of one Wally Spencer, who claimed to have found Dorr’s river and believed the government was conspiring against him, bugging his house to find the river’s location and take the water rights for themselves. Even today there exists a mining operation at Kokoweef Mountain that has sworn to its shareholders for years that they were very near striking the mountain’s legendary mother lode.

Earl Dorr at his River of Gold, from The Desert Magazine, via The Mojave Project

These stories of lost treasure made their way not only into history books in some cases, but perhaps more profoundly, they established themselves in popular belief and have obsessed treasure hunters and adventurers for decades and even centuries. When stories such as these, the veracity of which are vehemently debated, can become the sole focus and pursuit of people’s lives, then the relatively common and more often than not harmless condition of historical blindness becomes injurious and takes on a more fearsome aspect. Whether hoaxes like Mulhatton’s or earnest reports of riches real or imagined, these blind spots in history have lured many seekers to ruin.

Joseph Mulhatton: The Liar Laureate of the World

Since just before last year’s vitriolic presidential election, a new phrase has entered the American political lexicon. It has become a rhetorical strategy all its own, almost like a brand new logical fallacy in that it does not hold up as an argument under any kind of scrutiny. It is a complete rejection of a source implying it holds no truth or any worth, but this dismissal is not based on research, fact or logic but rather only on the basis that one dislikes what the source has to say and therefore contemptuously applies to it a nonsensical label meant to completely undermine its authority. This label? “Fake news.”

The idea of false or misleading information propagated through journalism is not new. Listeners of course may recall our episodes on the Reichstag Fire and the propaganda surrounding it, which made its way into history books for a long time. Indeed, even the phrase “fake news” isn’t new. A quick look at the Google Books Ngram Viewer shows that it had been used infrequently in the 19th century and then, during the 20th century with its rampant government sponsored, wartime propaganda campaigns, it can be seen to spike in contemporary literature. Of course, one can also see that the phrase’s prominence in social and political discourse today dwarfs its use in the past. And of course, there is a reason for this, an inciting incident, so to speak.

As the 2016 presidential campaigns heated up, sensational and outrageous news stories started to show up in social media feeds, spread by users themselves who found that these stories reinforced their suspicions about or prejudices against a candidate. The problem was that these supposed news stories were actually hoaxes perpetrated by degenerate trolls and opportunists seeking to garner advertising clicks through viral distribution of their fraudulent articles. After the election, the suggestion that these pervasive hoaxes may have helped to sway the electorate caused social media giant Facebook to take measures against this so-called “fake news,” thus bringing the term into common modern parlance and cementing its place in the zeitgeist. Then a funny thing happened. The new president of the United States, who had himself indulged in some of the conspiracy-mongering common of these hoaxes, began to misuse the term “fake news,” and its accepted meaning began to evolve. No longer did the term refer only to recognized hoaxes, false stories propagated anonymously and pretending to come from respectable news outlets by hiding behind slightly altered domain names. Now it was an epithet, a new political barb to sling at any legitimate news outlet that may be publishing unfavorable news or following an editorial direction that proves inconvenient for one’s agenda.

With the idea of fake news drifting so far from its intended definition, it becomes important to put things in perspective, and the examination of history is uniquely useful for doing just that. Therefore, let us go back to the 19th century and the beginning of fake news in the form of newspaper hoaxes in order to better understand what fake news really is. And in looking into this topic, there is no better figure to examine than Joseph Mulhatton*, the Liar Laureate of the World.

The history of newspaper hoaxes provides a nearly perfect analogy for the actual fake news of today. These false stories were often printed despite their dubious nature in order to increase newspaper sales, just like the fake news economy that culminated in 2016 was driven by revenue, although sometimes these hoaxes were mistakenly printed because they fooled editors or were purposely run as satire, making them comparable to articles in the Onion, which are sometimes misunderstood to be hoaxes rather than jokes. The big difference here is that these articles did not appear in publications devoted solely to satirical writing, nor in disreputable publications masquerading as real newspapers, but rather in otherwise trustworthy news outlets. New York’s The Sun, while more willing to print unsophisticated content as a penny paper, nevertheless prided itself on being politically independent and certainly wasn’t in the business of printing boldface lies until, two years after its 1833 launch, it became complicit in a hoax that claimed an astronomer had discovered life on the moon. Not only were various forms of animal life detailed, but a civilization of winged humanoids as well. There are a variety of reasons why the editor of The Sun may have perpetrated the ingenious and complicated hoax. Perhaps it was to increase circulation, which certainly seems to have been accomplished. Perhaps it was meant as a trap for the more respected papers, tempting them to reprint a falsehood that could thereafter be revealed to discredit them, although none took the bait. Or perhaps it was a satire all along, poking fun at the implausible ideas of certain fringe astronomers, but it had quickly gotten out of editorial control. Regardless, this affair certainly serves as the first major example of a newspaper hoax, and it may have exerted some influence on the subject of our story in the form of inspiration.

A French print by the Thierry bothers showing the appearance of the landscape and inhabitants of the Moon, via The Houston Chronicle

And inspiration for newspaper hoaxes was by no means wanting. In 1844, with his wife ill and creditors hounding his trail, Edgar Allan Poe came to the offices of The Sun in New York with a fanciful story in hand, perhaps encouraged by their embroilment in the Moon Hoax not a decade earlier, and sure enough, the newspaper published his story. Thus the Great Balloon Hoax was born, detailing the astounding transatlantic journey of ballooner Monck Mason in just 75 hours. And during the life of our central character, young Joseph Mulhatton, who was born sometime in the late 1840s or early 1850s, another famous newspaper hoax appeared that may have encouraged him in his lies. In 1874 the New-York Herald, which ironically had been the staunchest and most vocal critic of The Sun regarding the Moon Hoax, printed a story about animals escaping the Central Park Zoo and running amok throughout the city. The article caused a general panic among readers, and despite the fact that at the end of the story it admitted to being a fabrication, the Herald was roundly denounced for its deception of the public. 

At this juncture let us focus on the subject of this study, who by the time of the Central Park Zoo Escape Hoax was already well on the path to establishing himself as an accomplished hoaxer. Even in his youth, the impulse to spin tales appears to have been strong in him. Depending on one’s opinion of religion, one may speculate that his tendency to spread false narratives was either developed out of rebellion against his father or was a predisposition inherited from him, for his father was a Presbyterian minister. Regardless, before he had even reached his majority, he had a major hoax under his belt, for it seems he spread the rumor of a series of stagecoach robberies outside of Pittsburgh, where he was attending high school at the time. The newspaper journalists of the area became convinced that an outlaw gang was at work, and in order to scoop an exclusive, they took to riding in buckboard wagons all around the area, hoping to be held up themselves. Eventually, after hours and hours of uneventful wandering, they concluded that the story had been a prank.

Out of high school, Mulhatton went to work for a Pittsburgh hardware company and began to travel as their salesman, or drummer. His travels took him far and wide, and before long he had taken up with a Louisville, Kentucky, hardware company as their drummer, which sent him even farther abroad, to the American South and the Southwest. He was quite successful in his salesmanship on account of being a fast-talker and quick-witted and largely because of his genial nature and the fine figure he cut, a well-dressed young man with well-groomed dark hair and beard and sharp blue eyes. And it was perhaps this respectable demeanor that helped him to dupe and corrupt so many newspaper editors, for along his extensive travels, as a hobby or perhaps a compulsion, he took to writing and publishing brief fictions in area newspapers. This was the era when Joe Mulhatton developed his reputation as the Modern Munchausen, the Monarch of Mendacity, and the Liar Laureate of the World. 

A portrait of Joseph Mulhatton, via the Museum of Hoaxes

His hoaxes began with some similar themes: in 1875, he wrote that the bodies of Presidents Washington and Lincoln were to be exhumed and displayed at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition as a way to raise funds for finishing the Washington Monument, much to the outrage of some. Then a couple years later, in 1877, he presented a story about Washington’s body being disinterred due to some necessary repairs being made at Mount Vernon, at which time it was discovered that the corpse had petrified and resembled a statue. Additionally, in Texas, another story supposed to have been penned by Mulhatton related the discovery of two petrified bodies, those of a cowboy and an Indian, frozen forever in mortal combat. This fantastical discovery is even said to have drawn the interest of that great showman of oddities, P. T. Barnum. 

During his early years in Kentucky, he revisited the theme of his first hoax and in 1878 wrote again about outlaws in a series of letters to papers. Under the pseudonym “Orange Blossom,” he cast himself as a drummer local to the town of Big Clifty who had confronted some highway robbers on a bridge and cast them over into the water. Thereafter, in “Orange Blossom’s” letters, he referred to himself as the “Hero of Big Clifty” and detailed how he was lionized and celebrated throughout the region as the guest of honor at picnics and barbecues. Some years later, in 1883, this story seems to have gotten Mulhatton into quite a spot, as reports surfaced of his being kidnapped by bloodthirsty criminals who wanted to know if he was this “Orange Blossom” hero who claimed to best outlaws and intended to murder him for the fame it would bring. According to the tale as printed in newspapers, Mulhatton was being marched to a skiff on a river when, using knowledge of knots and escape artistry he had apparently learned while travelling with some famous showmen, he surreptitiously freed himself of the ropes tying his hands but did not let on that he was no longer bound. On the skiff, then, he made his move. He shouted, and when the outlaws sprang to their feet, he rocked the boat violently to send them falling overboard. They thrashed in the water, grasping at the sides of the boat, but Mulhatton took up an oar and methodically bludgeoned each of them, leaving a trail of blood in the river two miles long. A gripping yarn, certainly, but considering Mulhatton’s proclivity to spread tall tales, this too likely never happened.

In addition to preserved corpses and murderous outlaws, Mulhatton also appeared to be fascinated with the massive Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and a number of articles about the discovery of gargantuan caves that rivaled that great cave in size, containing underground rivers and astonishing artifacts, have been attributed to him. He wrote of a cave in Pike County, Kentucky, containing virgin gold, with an underground river rippling over a bed of diamonds and the skeletons of cave-dwellers laid to rest in stone sarcophagi. So convincing was this article that it precipitated a rush for purchasing land in the area, and again P.T. Barnum is said to have shown up, looking to procure the remains of one of these cavemen. Then again, in 1878, Mulhatton wrote of the discovery of another massive cave, this one lacking the gold and jewels, but no less rich in artifacts and mummies, this time described as presenting “every appearance of the Egyptian mummies,” and therefore implying some kind of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. Here again, a magnificent underground river was reported to flow—three of them, in fact—making it possible to admit a vessel, and according to the story, a local businessman had even begun to make plans to offer underground steamboat rides. In 1880, in Wyoming, he spun the tale of another grand cavern, this one housing a strange tribe of white natives with Egyptian-like customs who were kept from leaving their subterranean home by the local Sioux tribesmen on account of some superstitions that they came from beyond the vale. A reporter from Omaha was so intrigued by this story that he went to investigate and found himself taken prisoner by those selfsame Sioux, who during his week-long captivity soundly disabused him of the notion that the story was true. And again, in late 1881, a report appeared of a Leitchfield, Kentucky farmer who was accustomed to storing his milk and butter in some small caves nearby his farmstead. Finding them too small, he essayed to enlarge them through demolition only to uncover a far larger cavern beneath. This one too contained a grand underground river, teeming in this account with eyeless fish, and again, there were mummies of an Egyptian sort, but this time Mulhatton took it further, claiming that the farmer discovered an entire pyramid in the cave, an exact replica of the Great Pyramid at Giza, and inside, altars and decorations adorned with Masonic symbols. A final series of lies about caves purported that the famous Mammoth cave had been sold to the English, a report that greatly upset many but was promptly followed by the comforting update that the transaction had been cancelled upon the realization that the cavern would be very difficult to ship overseas.

A clipping from the Chatham Record, January 12, 1882

But preserved corpses and caverns were not the only recurring elements in newspaper hoaxes attributed to Joseph Mulhatton. Several of Mulhatton’s stories revolved around the unlikely and, frankly, unethical, use of animals for commercial ends.  In 1876, he placed ads in Kentucky presenting himself as the agent of a major furrier in New York who was seeking cats because of the sudden and unusual demand for their fur. On the promise of fetching top dollar, a great many area farmers choked the streets of Leitchfield on the appointed day, their wagons laden with boxes full of stray cats. Upon learning it was a hoax, Mulhatton’s fuming dupes released their cats, causing such a nuisance that the township was forced to implement a “shotgun quarantine,” a euphemism for open season on shooting cats. In a sort of reprisal, someone who knew which hardware firm Mulhatton worked for sent them a crate, that, when opened, spilled terrified felines out to fill the business with hissing and mewling. In another hoax, he claimed that a cotton planter had trained geese to weed his fields, each wearing a gourd full of water around its neck so that they could keep hydrated. And then, yet again, he claimed that a Flagstaff shepherd by the name of Green had trained kangaroos to tend his flock, an arrangement that had worked out so well, owing to the animal’s agility, that he had arranged for a great many more kangaroos to be sent to him for training as herders. This, of course, stirred the ire of cowboys and shepherds alike, for how dare he give their jobs to some hop-along Aussie beasts! 

Nor was this the sole controversy he caused over the use of animals as labor. In 1887, he wrote about a farmer who had imported South American monkeys to work in his hemp and cotton fields. Here Mulhatton seems to have been poking the hornets’ nest, going into detail about how compliant the monkeys were and contrasting that tractability with the hot-headed field laborers who had rioted over this usurpation of their livelihood. Of course, no such riots had ever transpired because there were no such monkey field hands, but this did not stop the story from travelling far and wide, until newspapers in England were lamenting America’s bizarre labor problems, suggesting that this did not bode well for the working classes.

And finally, another favorite motif in Mulhatton’s hoaxes was that of the meteorological or astronomical. He had an especial fondness for frightening newspaper readers with accounts of the impact of meteorites, or as they were sometimes then called, aerolites. In 1883, outside of William’s Ranch in Texas, a meteorite descended like a ball of fire and struck with the force of an earthquake, shattering every window in town, according to Mulhatton’s piece. It killed many head of cattle, destroyed the home of a Mexican herdsman and his family and buried the occupants themselves! Afterward, still steaming, one could ascertain its great size, for even though mostly buried in the earth, it still towered 70 feet above the surface and covered about an acre of land. In fact, so convincing was this account that many came to look for the meteor, even scientists from far away. According to Mulhatton, many of these seekers became lost in the brush and had to live off the land, while others, not finding the meteor and not wanting to return without a report of it, simply bought parcels of land and remained for the rest of their days, but one can take this further tale of Mulhatton’s for what it’s worth. And indeed, even if one were unaware of Mulhatton’s history of hoaxes, it would be impossible to credit the fact that he claimed to have witnessed another meteorite strike near the Ripsey mines in Arizona, in 1896, for unless the meteorites were attracted magnetically to him, the odds alone challenge the credibility. This time, he described nearby houses shaking like leaves, with cupboards jarred and the dishes within upset. Even larger than his previous meteorite, this one was supposed to have been 2 acres across, striking the ground with a sound like a cannon volley. Instead of cattle, it was sheep that this time suffered the brunt of the impact, but again, Mulhatton described the sufferings of a Mexican herder and his family whose dwelling was in the path of the meteor. One might safely, I’d say, attribute some racial bigotry to the man for the way he repeatedly hurled fictional meteors at Mexican families. 

A clipping of the Turner County Herald, August 20, 1896.

Perhaps the most incredible story involving Mulhatton actually turns out to be true. In 1884, he was nominated for President by his fellow travelling salesmen at a drummers’ convention in Louisville, Kentucky. He would be put forward as the candidate of the Business Men’s Reform Party, and the whole thing was considered something of a joke by all… all, that is, except Mulhatton, who insisted that with his army of travelling salesmen stumping for him, even if he couldn’t win the office, he’d be able to take a state or two and thereby force his way into politics. An interesting prospect, to be sure, the Liar Laureate goes to Washington, but it never really panned out and he went on with his itinerant lifestyle, sowing falsehoods everywhere he went.

During his travels, he wrote so many interesting hoaxes it’s impossible to parse them all, even if you could find each one of them, as there are many he is suspected of having written that may have been penned by other hoaxsters. Among those that are definitely attributed to him, he started a series of sensations similar to his cave stories about Native American mounds that held treasures and relics, one even containing the original tablets inscribed with the ten commandments! Elsewhere he claimed that an astronomer named Klein had discovered the Star of Bethlehem, and for further astronomical stories, he invented the character of Professor Birdwhistle, to whom he attributed a variety of astounding discoveries, such as a new moon that happened to be invisible, and most astonishingly, the detection of some unusual activity around Mars that revealed not only that Martians existed but also that they flew back and forth interacting with Earth and that they were engaged in some kind of war on their home world to fend off an invasion! 

The list goes on and on. In Iowa, well diggers struck subterranean waters so vast that a new river rivaling the Mississippi had sprung up. In Texas, a girl took a bunch of balloons from a peddler and promptly floated away over the sea, saved only by a sharpshooter who popped one balloon at a time until some rescuers in a boat could bring her in to safety. Elsewhere in Texas, a carriage full of skeletons was found, its occupants apparently having been killed years before by lightning. In the Mojave desert, an intact battleship was discovered, and in Wisconsin,  a lake monster that appeared to be half fish and half snake preyed upon livestock. If you believed his dispatches, he had more luck in discovering unusual natural phenomena than anyone who ever lived, finding a lake that dyed blond the hair of any who bathed in it, and finding not one but two extremely strange species of plant: a cactus with magnetic properties and a carnivorous tree, the arbor diaboll, that that could grasp and strangle even large creatures with its twisting limbs, pulling them in to devour them.

1887 image depicting another carnivorous plant from a similar hoax, via Wikimedia Commons

Later in life, in the last years of the 19th century, he settled in Arizona, buying and selling mining claims, and doubtless his tricky nature came to bear in this enterprise as well. In fact, there are reports of Mulhatton showing rocks with veins of gold ore in them as proof of a claim’s worth, when actually it seemed he had simply hammered brass nails into the stone to give it the appearance of containing gold. Then at the turn of the century, he was committed to an asylum for a time as insane, thinking he had killed a man and others were after him for revenge, and after that, rumors abounded that he had gone out west and died. Indeed, the fact that no one heard from him for some years seemed to indicate that he did pass into history, but eventually he turned up in Texas, exploding the rumors of his demise and putting all the newspaper on guard.

After that he seemed to disappear again, until eventually he turned up in California. In October of 1904, the San Francisco Call reported that Mulhatton sat in a jail cell in that city awaiting trial for stealing someone’s coat. In recent years, since his bout of insanity—which he attributed to being kicked in the head by a horse rather than to any alcoholic degeneracy—he had drifted westward, following circuses and relying on the charity of the Salvation Army. He presented himself as a phrenologist, one who can tell the content of a person’s character and even predict his or her behavior by feeling the lumps of the person’s head. Mulhatton appears to have been engaged in some similar bamboozling at the tavern where he was arrested, as he was said to have taken off his own coat to hold forth about a “mystic chart” and then put someone else’s coat on, which garment contained a bank roll in its pocket. Mulhatton is described as being wholly ignorant of the fact he committed a crime, but then he seems not to have been as sharp as he used to be, his wits likely dulled by whiskey as instead of the fast-talking genius he had become an incoherent mess. And no longer cutting the attractive figure he had previously been known for, he had gained weight and grown a red, bulbous nose. Such was his marked descent that the Call article went so far as to illustrate his decline with a drawing depicting his former self next to the sad, filthy version of himself that sat in the San Francisco jail. 

Illustration of Mulhatton both after his downfall and in his prime, from the San Francisco Call

This story went far and wide, and later that month, an expanded version of it in the Chicago Tribune included further statements from the interview with Mulhatton in which he admitted that whiskey was the culprit responsible for his downfall. Therefore, it seems not only the loss of his job as a hardware drummer and his apparent financial straits could be blamed on his slowly worsening alcoholism, but also his erratic behavior and apparent bouts of insanity, a fact that had been suspected ever since his asylum commitment. And apparently he hadn’t even liked the stuff at first, but felt he had been forced to imbibe whiskey because he was so well known and so well liked that he was expected to liven up every party. In a sense, then, it was his stories that were his ruin, for it was his entertaining yarns that thrust him into fame and high society, where the life of the party never finds the bottom of his glass.

After his arrest in San Francisco, he disappeared again, and again there were rumors that he had died, which were again debunked in 1908 when he showed back up in Arizona, claiming to have discovered a copper mine. Then in 1913, another report of his death emerged. While out about his mining operations, he reportedly attempted to cross the Gila River, which was swollen at the time, and lost his footing, whereupon he was swept away. Several witnesses claimed to have seen the drowning, recovered his body and buried him, but the world and all posterity learned of it through, of course, a newspaper report, so it may be understandable if some believe this to be one final hoax that Mulhatton may have played on the public before fading into obscurity. And the fact that our knowledge of the past relies in large part on such publications so frequently misled and riddled with hoaxes causes one to begin to doubt much of received history. When parts of what we know about the past may actually be nothing more than concoctions penned by a hoaxer, then certainly we suffer from historical blindness.

* A variation in the spelling of his name as Mulhattan is common, but I have chosen to spell it as Mulhatton because that is how his name appears in the majority of the contemporary newspaper sources I found. 

Blind Spot: Tutelary Spirits

In our previous installment, we explored the weird and convoluted legend of the White Lady, a ghost that appears as a warning or fell omen that a prince of the Hohenzollern dynasty will soon perish. In researching this pale harbinger, I came to understand how tied up it was in ancient mythology as well as more recent history, and indeed, this phantom of Germany was not alone the sole example of its kind. It appears that the idea of a guardian spirit that is tied to an individual or a family can be found in the ancient traditions of Greeks, Romans and Celts. These entities were called daemons in Ancient Greece, and it was argued that they were part and parcel with human existence, tied in some mysterious way with our bodies or our souls. Socrates spoke of this daemon as though it were some divine force guiding his actions, but since then, many thinkers have suggested that he actually referred to something more rational and down to earth. Hegel believed that Socrates referred to his will, and Jung believed that what Socrates mistook for a spiritual guide was actually the unconscious. But these are modern rationalizations, and one can find notions of a guardian spirit, a phantom presence that protects and warns, throughout history, from the Roman Genius, which was a guardian spirit or family spirit, to the spirit guides of Native Americans. It is this tradition of actual spectral entities, many of which are described as bound not only to an individual but to a certain family, that the White Lady of the Hohenzollerns seems to fit into. They are often said to appear before some calamity or tragedy, as a silent forewarning, and there seem to be many of them in Germany and beyond. These guardians have another name; they are called tutelary spirits.

The Hohenzollern harbinger appears to be only one among a great many White Ladies in popular lore everywhere. In the United Kingdom alone, many come to mind. The White Ladies of the castle of Skipsea in Yorkshire, of Samlesbury hall in Lancashire, of Blenkinsopp castle in Northumberland, of Bolling Hall near Bradford, and those of Woodhouselee and Avenel all have their legends, in which women of various stations in life suffered various abuses and lunacies and perished by neglect or violence. The difference, however, is that these don’t appear to be tutelary spirits, their appearances not necessarily presumed to foreshadow anything in particular. In Ireland, however, there is legend of an undoubtedly tutelary spirit called a “White Lady of Sorrow” who is known to warn certain families of an imminent death among their ranks. This, of course, is the legend of the Banshee. It is supposed that a Banshee might be the spirit of any person who had in life encountered the family and loved them or had good reason to harbor animosity toward them. Thus the Banshee, who portends a family member’s impending death with its song, may sing a comforting air or shriek with hellish glee at its enemies’ forthcoming suffering.

A friendly banshee depicted floating above ramparts.

Nor is the Banshee the only singer among tutelary spirits. Scottish lore suggests that the chiefs of ancient houses had their own guardian spirits, Bodachs, who warned of a coming death, and one, the Bodach-an-Dun, or ghost of the hill, protector of the Shaw clan, is said to have sung in lamentation when the family lost its ancestral land. 

Sometimes these tutelary spirits, while still women like the Hohenzollern harbinger and the Banshee, differ noticeably in appearance, or more specifically in the color of their garments. Back in Germany, we find a legend out of Darmstadt of a Red Lady who appeared shortly before the unhappy death of Princess Alice, daughter of Queen Victoria. And in Bavaria, another is connected with the House of Wittelsbach, a family that has been haunted not only by spirits but by the specter of madness as well, with more than 20 members having gone insane within a hundred years. The spirit that haunts the Wittelsbachs in their ancestral castles at Fürstenried and Nymphenburg is also an ethereal woman, but rather than appearing as a young and fetching woman in white, she appears as an aging and haggard woman in a long black robe, with hair as white as a sheet. This Black Lady appeared prior to the death of King Maximilian II in 1864. According to the story, Maximilian’s wife, Marie of Prussia, beheld this fearful apparition standing behind her husband’s chair and looking at her with sorrow in her eyes before vanishing. Greatly frightened, she told the king what she had seen, and Maximilian, aware of the legend of the Black Lady, demanded of his guards what woman clothed in black they had allowed to enter the room, but of course his guards claimed not to have admitted anyone. Three days later, the king died suddenly, supposedly of a catastrophic attack of gastritis.

Maximilian’s son, then, is also said to have had his demise foretold by an appearance of this Black Lady. Ludwig is sometimes called the “Mad King,” because he was deposed when a psychiatrist declared him mad and therefore unfit to rule. In recent years, this evaluation has been brought into question, with some suggesting that Ludwig’s deposing had more to do with his debts and rumors of his homosexuality rather than any genuine insanity. Regardless, one night, a guard claimed to have seen the Black Lady floating at the opposite end of the King’s corridor. Chasing the spirit down to the courtyard, the guard demanded that she identify herself, but the figure made no reply, moving on through the moonlight. Nearing the chapel, the spirit turned to regard him. The guard then produced a firearm and discharged it, but it backfired, injuring him mortally. He had only time enough to tell the tale of his encounter to another alarmed sentry before dying. And true to the legend of the Black Lady’s appearance, the very next day, a great tragedy befell “Mad” King Ludwig while out walking the shore of Lake Starnberg. He had insisted on walking alone with the physician who had declared him unfit to rule. When they didn’t return, a search ensued, and they were both found dead in the lake, with the physician showing signs of having suffered some violence. It was thought that the Mad King had killed the doctor who’d betrayed him and then drowned himself, but no water was found in the King’s lungs, leaving the nature of Ludwig II’s death a mystery. But that tale may be better served if we save it for the topic of another episode…

Lake Starnberg, with portrait of "Mad" King Ludwig inset, via Zeno.org

As for these legends of tutelary spirits, it seems they do not always appear as spectral women. In France there persisted a tradition of a Little Red Man who showed himself at the Tuileries Palace just prior to some great calamity that would affect the ruling family of the land. At his first appearance, Marie Antoinette herself saw him in early August 1793; she and her attendants were lounging when they noticed him, a tiny man, clad in scarlet, with such an inhuman gaze that he seemed a goblin. Horrified, she and the others fled from the imp and told her mother what they’d seen. Within a few days, the bloody French Revolution had begun. This Little Red Man appeared again in 1814 to Napoleon’s son before Napoleon’s abdication and exile, but thereafter, many thought him a hoax because of one debunked sighting in 1815.  The Little Red Man appeared to some ladies and a chevalier while they sat dining. Coming out of the fireplace, he took a leg of mutton from the table and disappeared back up the chimney. This report certainly upset the royal family, who feared it portended some tragedy, and the King sent two chimney sweeps up the chimney to search out the scarlet imp, but neither of them returned! Only when he sent professional firefighter up the chimney was it discovered that some youths on another floor had cut a hole into the chimney in order to play the prank and had let the two chimney sweeps in on the joke. However, the legend of the Little Red Man did not die, for the creature was seen again in 1824 before Louis XVIII’s passing and again in 1871 before the fires of the Paris Commune. 

Indeed, it appears that legends of tutelary spirits associated with royal families do not always even take the form of a person. Legend has it that, before the transpiring of terrible events that touched the lives of those in the Habsburg dynasty of Austria, preternaturally large white birds were seen flying in the daylight. These unearthly creatures, called the Turnfalken, were said to fly by night, hidden in darkness, and only made daytime flights to forebode some ill omen for the Habsburgs with their strange and shrill cries. As with others of these tutelary spirits, the Turnfalken were seen in flight before numerous Habsburg deaths, some of them quite unexpected, such as that of Duchess Sophie Charlotte, who died in a fire at a Paris bazaar. One of the most notable Habsburg deaths presaged by the flight of the Turnfalken was the mysterious death of crown prince Rudolph in what is known as the Mayerling Tragedy. This incident, in which the crown prince and his mistress were found dead in the imperial hunting lodge, has remained a mystery, as none can be certain whether their deaths resulted from murder, suicide, or some combination thereof. But that, again, may be a story to explore in a future episode, so let us not dwell long on it, for the Turnfalken flew on through the years. Before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for example, there are reports that a flock of Turnfalken were seen wheeling around the skies above Vienna, shrieking. And before the death of Emperor Franz Joseph I two years later, it is said the Turnfalken circled the city in such great numbers that they sparked a general panic among the populace.

A depiction of the scene at the Mayerling Tragedy

To the enlightened modern mind, these legends of tutelary spirits not only smack of superstition but also may seem backward in their outmoded notions of the superiority of nobility and royalty, that for some reason families of a certain breeding were special and warranted the protection of spiritual guardians. All too often, though, we look at the past through the lens of the present, judging our forebears according to our own worldview instead of meeting them on their own terms. If we fail to understand that the people of the past lived in a world of spirits and magic, then we are blinded to the true nature of their existence and perhaps to an entire facet of the human experience. Consider the words of Sir Walter Scott: “Unaided by revelation, it cannot be hoped that mere earthly reason should be able to form any rational or precise conjecture concerning the destination of the soul when parted from the body; but the conviction that such an indestructible essence exists…must infer the existence of many millions of spirits who have not been annihilated, though they have become invisible to mortals who still see, hear, and perceive, only by means of the imperfect organs of humanity.” 

The White Ladies of German Lore

In this installment, we’ll take a look at a story that, while certainly mysterious and certainly historical, leans somewhat more toward legend and the supernatural. As such, the sources I’ve had to rely upon have been spare and rather less credible than I would like, but such is the nature of stories like these, and indeed, like the old classic show Unsolved Mysteries and like much of the more popular programming on the History Channel, I may occasionally dip my toes into the murky waters of the paranormal, just as I may sometimes enter the realm of true crime and politics. Be assured, however, that my central theme of scrutinizing the blind spots in our past shall remain intact.

The subject of this episode actually came up in my series on Kaspar Hauser, Foundling of Nuremberg, Wild Boy of Bavaria, and Child of Europe. In the second part of that series, I explored the theory that Hauser had been a crown prince of the Grand Duchy of Baden, stolen from his nursery and swapped out with a sickly babe by an evil second wife of his great grandfather. This woman, Countess Hochberg, according to the legend as told in multiple sources, dressed in white in order to impersonate a famous ghost whose appearance was known for presaging the death of princes. Thus she is said to have frightened away any who might have questioned her presence in the nursery and witnessed Hauser’s abduction and replacement with a changeling. I reported, based on the sources associated with Hauser’s story in which I had found the detail, that this spirit was called the White Lady of Baden, and to be certain, I was intrigued by this story. However, as I looked further into the story and began to entertain the idea of focusing an entire installment of Historical Blindness on this legend and its origins, I realized that my sources were in error, at least in a way. For every source I have been able to find on the White Lady records her appearances in the Old Schloss, the city palace in Berlin, which is indeed far from Baden. However, as I investigated the tales behind the story of the Weisse Frau, the White Lady of the Old Schloss, I found that this apparition was identified not only with the Berlin Palace but also, through her supposed origins, with other White Lady legends, apparitions that were supposed to have resided in various other locations throughout Germany. Therefore, as a retraction and mea culpa of sorts, I am happy to present The White Ladies of German Lore.

*

The Berlin Stadtschloss, or City Palace, began as a fortification on the Spree River built by Frederich II, Hohenzollern Elector of Brandenburg, in the mid-fifteenth century, with part of a city wall integrated on its eastern side. The palace served as the winter home of the Hohenzollern family for three centuries thereafter, and became the hub of government and society. Successive monarchs renovated and expanded the palace, adding new wings until it became something of a hodge-podge old pile, but nevertheless, it remained a symbol of government and power well into the 20th century. Listeners may recall that the Old Palace was one of the landmarks that Marinus van der Lubbe had tried to set on fire before succeeding in burning the Reichstag. It was something of a hulking and rambling monstrosity, especially in its heyday, with 600 lushly furnished rooms, grand gala suites and banquet chambers, all connected by great pillared halls lined with frescoes and sculptures—to say nothing of the sumptuous royal apartments and throne room! And then there is the dark tower, with its onion cupola plated in copper that after tarnishing earned it the name “The Green Hat,” where Frederich II, nicknamed the “Irontooth,” is said to have gravely conducted traitors to the Iron Maiden, silencing their screams when he shut them up inside. 

The Berlin Schloss with Green Hat visible, via antique-prints.de

Such a palace, as it slipped slowly into disuse and decrepitude, can be imagined as the very model of a haunted castle, and indeed, a specter was seen there quite frequently. One of the earliest records of people claiming to have seen the spirit comes from just before the turn of the 17th century, in 1598, when another Hohenzollern Elector of Brandenburg, Johann Georg, lay dying, and thus the legend that this apparition foretold the imminent doom of Hohenzollern princes was established. Such was the pervasion of this legend that before Elector Johann Sigismund’s death some 20 years later, he asked the chaplain of his court more than once if the spirit had been seen. We know from the chaplain’s own writings that the existence of the spirit was not a matter of debate, as it had been seen so many times “by individuals of all ages and conditions.” Rather, the real questions were of the disposition and intentions of the spirit. The chaplain believed the apparition, which appeared as an ethereal woman in a white dress, to be benevolent, as its presence provided a warning to princes of their looming demise.

And indeed, the White Lady had been spotted by a page in the days before Johann Sigismund’s death, in a corridor near the tower of the Green Hat, where it is traditionally held that the spirit resides in some hidden room. This page, it is said, upon catching sight of the spectral woman, tried to make a pass at her, attempting to snake an arm around her waist while saying, “Lovely mask, where goest?” His arm passed through her as through a fog, and the spirit, raised one of the keys she was said to carry, which keys some suggested she used to enter any room in the palace, and tapped him on the forehead with it. The page shared his story with whoever would listen, and as the legend goes, he grew pale and slender and more feminine with age, he who had once been a masculine and ruddy sort of fellow. It was reported that, as this went on, his steps began to make less and less noise, until the transformation seemed complete and he flowed about like a very ghost, frightening women who mistook him for the White Lady. Upon his death, the legend says that only a sack of bleached bones were found in his bed.

Thereafter, the ghost was seen by another man of the cloth in 1628, when she is reported to have uttered a statement in Latin: “Veni, Judica vivos et mortuos!” which translates to “I have come to judge the living and the dead.” Thereafter, she appeared in the mid- to late-1600s prior to the death of Anna Sophia, Duchess of Brunswick, and before the death of Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, mother of reigning Elector of Brandenburg Friedrich Wilhelm. During the latter of these appearances, it is recorded that she was witnessed by a courtier named Kurt von Burgsdorf who had earlier expressed a general disbelief in the spirit’s existence, suggesting that he would have to lay his own eyes on her to give credence to such tales. One night, after the Elector had retired to bed, Burgsdorf saw the spirit upon the back stairs leading to the garden, and he cursed her, asking if her thirst for the princely blood of Prussia had not already been slaked. In reply, the White Lady is said to have thrown him down the stairs, making such a noise as to wake the Elector from his slumber.

Some years after that, in 1667, another report of the White Lady being seen in the very bedchamber of Electress Louise Henrietta. In this instance, the electress herself saw the apparition sitting in a chair and writing, whereupon the White Lady rose, bowed and disappeared. Then, sure as night follows day, not long after this encounter, Electress Louise Henrietta of Nassau passed away.  And so it went throughout the years. In 1678, Erdmann Philip, Margrave of Brandenburg, found the White Lady sitting in an armchair in his bedchamber, and thereafter he died of injuries sustained on the race course when his horse fell. Then she was seen several times in 1688, the year in which the Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm, died, and was in fact seen the very day of his death by the court chaplain at the exact time of the elector’s passing. And then on to Friedrich Wilhelm’s son, Friedrich I, King in Prussia, who was supposedly woken in the night by the White Lady who parted the hanging fabric over his bed to give him a good look at her and then drifted into the adjoining room to make a great clamor of crashing dishes, like a very poltergeist. Friedrich I is said to have ordered a coffin made the very next day and promptly died that evening. 

The White Lady appearing to Freidrich I, via Wikimedia Commons

However, another version of this story suggests he did not see the White Lady at all. Rather, it is said that his jealous wife, Sophia Louisa of Mecklenburg, believed the king had a beautiful young countess in his bedchamber, and in the middle of having her hair powdered, she flew into a rage and ran down a corridor with a sheet around her, leaping through a glass door to enter the king’s chamber. Upon waking to see this bloody, powdered figure in a bedsheet, he fell in a fit, crying that he had seen the White Lady and was surely lost. Despite being told the truth, he came down with a fever and perished. Therefore, even if this were not a genuine apparition, still a White Lady appeared to him, portending his demise, just as would be the case with this son, Friedrich Wilhelm I, known as the Soldier King, who legend says saw the spirit while drinking a bowl of beer and, coughing, set down the bowl, said merely, “Well, we must be going,” and died of what has been termed “alcoholic degeneracy” that very night. Whether a true ghost or some other figure wearing the guise of the shade as the Countess of Hochberg is supposed to have done when kidnapping Kaspar Hauser, it seems that even just the belief that one had seen the White Lady was enough to send a healthy prince into the grave.

The Soldier King’s son, Frederick the Great, however, was not a believer. Out of bravado or overcompensation, he openly scoffed at the notion that the White Lady was real, even though popular wisdom told him that his forefathers had all seen her. But he may have been far more obsessed with the tale than he let on. Apparently he took the time to paint a picture of the White Lady, which he gave to his sister. And once, with the writer and philosopher Voltaire, with whom the king had formed an affectionate and mutually flattering though short-lived friendship, he went on a midnight hunt for the ghost, holding candles aloft as they traipsed through the Old Schloss’s many darkened rooms. At one point, when Frederick took a corner and lost Voltaire, it’s said that the atheist intellectual and dandy, perhaps jumpy from his legendary overconsumption of coffee, went quite mad with fear, dashing across rooms and upsetting furniture and other things in his terror. Some sources say that Frederick the Great himself never saw the White Lady, despite his preoccupation with her. However, shortly before his death, his Queen and her entire household claimed to have seen the apparition looking out from a turret of the Old Schloss. And other sources contend that, eventually, Frederick the Great saw her after all, though not in Berlin. Rather, he saw her at his summer palace in Potsdam, striding through his library without sparing him a glance. It cannot be said that he feared her, or at least that he couldn’t overcome his fear of her, for he bravely followed her, finding her always across the room and entering the next, far from his reach, although she turned and beckoned to him. He died soon afterward in the same library in which he had seen her, and it is reported that he passed while looking intently at something—or someone—in the corner invisible to all save him.

A depiction of a White Lady apparition, via Wikimedia Commons

It may seem strange that the spirit would appear beyond the walls of the Schloss, but actually sightings of the phantom appear not to have been bound to the Berlin city palace. She is supposed to have appeared to a Hohenzollern count at Hohenzollern Castle in the Swabian Alps during its siege by the Free Cities of Württemberg, pacing the ramparts, wringing her hands and sobbing, heralding the impending loss of the beleaguered stronghold. Here again, a story has the Hohenzollern count’s wife disguising herself as the White Lady in order to leave the castle unmolested during its siege and thereby resupply their stores of ammunition, so perhaps some sightings of the White Lady beyond Berlin were actually of impostors in costume. The tales of the White Lady showing herself beyond Berlin are numerous, however, including appearances in Schalksberg,  Plassenberg and Ansbach, and when we consider the origins of the legend and try to pin down who the White Lady may have been in life, who her “original” was, so to speak, we begin to see that the spirit was rather well-travelled . . . or that in fact there may have been more than one White Lady in Germany.

The most common account holds that the White Lady is the ghost of one Agnes, Countess of Orlamünde, who bore Count Otto of Orlamünde two children before his death in the mid-14th century. Thereafter, Agnes is said to have fallen madly in love with a younger man, Albert “the Handsome” of the Hohenzollerns, Burgrave of Nürnberg. When she confessed her feelings, Albert supposedly told her that he would marry her, but for the fact that there were “four eyes” watching him, standing in the way. According to the story, Albert meant his parents, who disapproved of their marriage, but Agnes believed he meant her two children, and in order to remove this impediment, she murdered them both by driving a golden needle into their brains through their ears. Some versions of this story vary, asserting that her weapon was not a golden needle but rather a silver hairpin or a spinning needle, and some suggest that, after Albert discovered her horrific crime and rejected her, she went mad and killed herself while others follow her journey of redemption to Rome and thereafter to Himmelskron where she supposedly founded a convent and died there as its abbess.

While the story of Agnes of Orlamünde may provide a perfect backstory for the spirit, it is problematic, historically speaking, as it appears Otto of Orlamünde’s wife was named Beatrix, not Agnes. It may be that this figure has been confused with or is a corrupted version of one Kunigunde of the Landgraves of Leuchtenberg, who married a subsequent Otto of Orlamünde, and though she did not found it, she certainly contributed to the convent at Himmelskron in the form of an endowment. History may not have recorded the murder of Kunigunde’s children, but popular legend says she likewise killed her son and daughter with a silver hairpin.

Tombstone of Kunigunde von Orlamünde at Himmelskron, via Wikimedia Commons

In the mid-15th century we find another likely suspect in the form of Perchta (or often, alternately, Bertha) von Rosenberg who was cruelly mistreated by her husband, John von Lichtenstein of Steyermark. After his death, she moved to Neuhaus in Westphalia where she had a castle built for herself. For the rest of her life, she was known to wear only white out of mourning, such that even in her portraits she appears remarkably similar to the White Lady, in a white gown and white veil, carrying roses and a ring of keys, both of which are known to be items the White Lady has been seen to carry. The spirit of Bertha von Rosenberg was first known to haunt her castle at Neuhaus, but she is said to haunt other locales as well, wherever her family had settled or expanded. As the Rosenbergs had married into the Hohenzollerns as well as the royal families of Hesse and Baden, this means she has been seen across many German regions and principalities, from Berlin to Bavaria and elsewhere, which appears to explain the misnomer of the “White Lady of Baden” used by some authors when discussing the story’s intersection with that of Kaspar Hauser. And indeed, it seems some surviving accounts confuse Bertha von Rosenberg with Agnes or Kunigunde of Orlamünde, suggesting that after she was widowed, it was she who killed her children to win the love of Albert the Handsome, and that she afterward threw herself from a window of her castle at Neuhaus.

Further confusing the origins of the White Lady legend and particularly its association with Bertha von Rosenberg is the historical presence of another Bertha, a Hohenzollern who married Rudolph II of Burgundy and was depicted on the throne with a spindle rather than a scepter, and another Bertha commonly called the Goosefoot Queen, who reigned as Queen of the Franks with her husband, Pepin the Short, and who was said to have had a broad and flat foot as a result of her constant pedaling of a spinning wheel. These real Berthas appear to have been identified with a figure from Swabian folklore, Bertha the Spinner, who is said to carry a spindle and stomp her flat foot in anger when displeased. Indeed, the legend of Bertha the Spinner itself may have been the inspiration of the White Lady, as she is said to wear white robes. Moreover, she comes forth at Christmas time to reward or punish children according to their behavior, like Santa Clause, but considering the fact that she wields a spindle when she comes for the children, it is not hard to discern some intersection here with the legends about Agnes or Kunigunde of Orlamünde, for it must be remembered that in some versions of their tale, she killed her children with a spindle. And just to give some idea of how these legends continue to spider-web in every direction, these historical Berthas and this legendary goose-footed spinner, in addition to being comparable to the figure of jolly St. Nickolas, also may have been the origin of Mother Goose.

Bertha von Rosenberg, via Wikimedia Commons

A century later, in the mid-1500s, we find another couple of figures commonly identified with the White Lady, both being women who were ill-used by Joachim II, Elector of Brandenburg. Joachim II is known to have greatly expanded the Old Schloss of Berlin during his time, which necessitated that he purchase some of the buildings around it, and one story suggests that he turned a certain old woman out into the street when she refused to sell him her house. This version suggests it is this old woman who has haunted his descendants ever since. The other version of the story suggests that the White Lady is actually one Anna Sydow, the widow of a gun maker who was beautiful enough to draw the Elector’s attentions. According to one source, whether by expanding the palace or by showering his mistress with extravagances, Joachim II went broke and ended up seeking the help of an alchemist called Philoponus Philaretus, who promised to make the Elector 300 million gold coins using only one small grain of thePhilosopher’s Stone. Like many of the sources I’ve been able to find for this episode, most of which vary in their details or contradict one another (and which I have tried dutifully to document in the blog entry), this tale of a mysterious alchemist, which of course intrigued me, could not be substantiated at all. The name appears to correspond with pseudonymous characters Robert Boyle later used in his writings, so it’s possible that they were common names in the lore of alchemy or even commonly used as aliases among confidence men posing as alchemists. The latter appears to agree most with the story, which says that Joachim II died suddenly without seeing the windfall promised to him by the alchemist, who promptly disappeared. Before the Elector died, he made his son promise to take care of his mistress, Anna Sydow, but his son either broke his promise or interpreted his obligation oddly, for he immediately locked her up in a tower at Spandau, where she languished until her death. Thus it is said that Anna Sydow haunts not only Spandau but also every residence of the family of her beloved. The Elector’s son, it should be noted, was none other than Johann Georg, mentioned earlier as one of the first Hohenzollerns to have his death foretold by the White Lady’s appearance. However, some have suggested that Anna Sydow could not have been the White Lady, as she is said to have seen the specter herself, as had her beloved Joachim II, indicating that the spirit existed long before her imprisonment and death.

And indeed the stories of the White Lady may derive from legends and folklore with an even longer history than any I have so far mentioned, stretching back all the way to Norse mythology and the Nibelungen Lay, a pre-Christian epic poem featuring dragons and a mystical treasure, for a very similar apparition robed in white is said to haunt the rocky Swabian hills, carrying roses and tapping her magical keys against rock faces to open hidden doors and give glimpses of the long vanished Nibelungen treasure. And tracing even farther back into the pre-Christian Norse mythology from which the Nibelungen Lay was derived, we find a goddess named variously Freya or Frigga, and significantly enough, in ancient Germanic tradition, called Bertha. The bride of Odin, Bertha is described as white-robed, a bringer of life and death, and called by some the Ancestress, as she is thought to be the forerunner of all Germanic nobility and royalty. To further tie her back to the White Lady legend, this Freya/Bertha goddess was conflated or syncretistically combined with Bertha the Goosefoot and Spinner, in that some parts of Germany celebrate Berchtentag, or Bertha’s Day, by eating the foods considered sacred to the goddess Freya and praising geese and all other white things as sacred.   And there may also be some confusion or conflation of the many Berthas already mentioned with the Teutonic goddess Perchta, goddess of the moon and bringer of winter, who is depicted as a widow bemoaning the loss of her late husband, the Sun. Her children are the flowers in the field and the foliage in the tress, which she slays with another kind of silver needle: an icicle.

Frigga depicted with needle in hand and two infants beside her, via Wikimedia Commons

Whether the White Lady of the Old Schloss of Berlin is in fact a goddess, or whether she is the spirit of a once-living woman—or as has been suggested before, an entire line of women who have been doomed to haunt the Hohenzollerns, or whether she is a simple myth perpetuated by the mistaken, the playful and the dishonest, it is certain that sightings of her continued well into the late modern period, haunting every royal German family throughout every region of Germany. In the late 18th century, she seems to have moved out of her comfort zone, haunting others besides the great families of Germany, as France’s King Louis XVI, while being held for trial during the revolution that overthrew his rule, apparently asked those around him if they had seen the White Lady, explaining that she appeared when princes of his house were about to die. And in 1812, during the French occupation of the palace at Beyreuth, she is said to have thrown over the bed of Napoleon Bonaparte and tried to strangle him. Perhaps the most recent report of the White Lady has her appearing to foretell the death of an Austro-Hungarian of the Habsburg-Lorraines, and in the process ushering in the doom of a generation, as she is rumored to have appeared in 1914 before the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and the commencement of the Great War, a conflict that would result in the abdication of the last Hohenzollern emperor, Wilhelm II.

Granted, ghost stories are not history, but they often have a historical inspiration. When wading through such muddied historical context as this, with persons who may not have existed, and figures who have been confused and combined in memory, who have been mixed up and mythologized, we again see the weakness in our records of history, the blind spots in our recollection of the past. One might even imagine that “The White Lady” of Ferdinand Freiligrath’s poem, she who “attired in white, appears / with mourning and with wailing, with tremors and with tears,” is speaking of our historical blindness when she chastises us, saying, “’You note them not; you blindly face the hosts of Hate and Fate! / Alas! Your eyes will open soon—too soon, yet all too late!’” 

Blind Spot: The Lady of the Haystack

In a little village called Bourton outside Bristol, a beautiful but troubled woman appeared in 1776. By all accounts young, elegant, shapely and graceful, she enchanted those whom she encountered, who worried for her on account of the destitute condition she appeared to be in. Nevertheless, she never complained about her situation or begged for any charity beyond a drink of milk. Indeed, although everyone she encountered entreated her to come indoors and accept shelter in their homes, and especially the village women who warned her how unsafe it was for a woman alone to sleep out of doors, this unusual creature refused all their offers, choosing instead to slumber beneath the makeshift shelter of haystacks in the fields of Bourton, for as she said, “trouble and misery dwelt in houses, and that there was no happiness but in liberty and fresh air.”

Never did she share her true name with the townsfolk, who assumed from her bearing and mien that she was of high birth. In the absence of a name, he was given one: Louisa. Throughout her time in Bourton, many attempts were made to ascertain who Louisa was and whence she came. She spoke English, but with some peculiarities in pronunciation and sentence structure, such that most believed she was foreign born. One gentleman spoke to her in a variety of European tongues, most of which appeared to make her uncomfortable, and when he spoke German, she turned away, overcome with emotion and sobbing.

Walking to and fro, she showed kindness to children and accepted gifts of milk and tea and simple foods but refused the extravagances of fine clothing and jewelry, which she discarded atop bushes as though they were things of little interest or beneath her. Thus she abided in Bourton for four years, making her home among the haystacks the entire time, except for a short stay in St. Peter’s hospital in Bristol, where she was treated for insanity and promptly released. Age, illness and exposure to the elements took a toll on her beauty, but nevertheless she remained an enchanting woman. Fond of her and concerned for her well-being, the people of Bourton placed her under one Mr. Henderson’s care, in his private insane asylum in Gloucestershire. Although she had not wished to go, her health did appear to improve there. Her lucidity, however, appeared to wane, and she descended into some form of cognitive impairment, called in that era not derangement or dementia but rather “idiotism.”

Depiction of a similar scene, via The Natural Navigator

While her wits deteriorated, those who cared for her refused to give up on finding where she had come from and perhaps reuniting her with family. Based on her reaction to spoken German, they believed her to be of German origin. Therefore, as she languished in Henderson’s Gloucesterhire madhouse, her friends composed a narrative relating all they knew about her appearance in England and her behavior there, and this they published in the newspapers of a variety of major German and French cities. To their disappointment, nothing came of the narrative’s publication, at least not at first. Some years later though, as Louisa, the Lady of the Hay-Stack, continued to deteriorate in her room at the madhouse, a fantastic pamphlet purporting to reveal the secret of her origins was published anonymously in France. This mysterious pamphlet was titled The Stranger, a true history, and it began with an introduction of sorts that gave the particulars of Louisa’s previously published narrative before tantalizingly suggesting that this poor Lady of the Hay-Stack might indeed be one and the same as the subject of the narrative it went on to share.

The pamphlet began its story in 1768, when one Count Cobenzl, minister plenipotentiary of the Austrian Netherlands under Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa, received a cryptic letter from a woman at Bourdeaux calling herself Mademoiselle La Frülen. In this letter, she said that she had written to him because of how universally respected he was. She was soliciting some undefined aid from him, and she assured him that when he knew who she was, he would likely be glad to have helped her. Cobenzl then received another letter signed by a Count Weissendorf from Prague suggesting that Cobenzl do all he can to help this La Frülen woman, and to advance her money if she desired it, for again, “when you shall know, Sir, who this stranger is, you will be delighted to think you have served her, and grateful to those who have given you an opportunity of doing it.” And then another similar letter from one Count Dietrichstein of Vienna arrived, entreating Cobenzl again to help this stranger with a false name.

Cobenzl replied to La Frülen that he’d be happy to help her but must be told her real name. Their correspondence continued, and as she prevaricated, Cobenzl was visited by a woman from Bourdeaux who knew the mysterious letter writer, speaking very highly of her and sharing with Cobenzl that, due to her mysterious origins and the fact of her remarkable resemblance to the late Holy Roman Emperor Francis I, founder of the Habsburg –Lorraine dynasty, many rumors had arisen about her extraction. Meanwhile, La Frülen assured Cobenzl that she would tell him everything, but for the time being she sent him a portrait of herself, saying that it might give some hint as to what she would tell him. The subject of this portrait appeared to bear a remarkable resemblance to the late emperor, and this judgment was made by none other than the late emperor’s own brother, Prince Charles of Lorraine, whom Count Cobenzl had shown the painting.

Portrait of Count Cobenzl, via Wikimedia Commons

As Cobenzl continued to exchange letters with this stranger, she sent him further portraits, this time of the empress and the late emperor, suggesting Cobenzl compare her portrait only to the latter. The implication was quite clear, and Cobenzl felt he had to tread rather carefully, yet he continued to receive letters from elsewhere commending him for helping this Mademoiselle La Frülen and beseeching him to keep her secret. After about half a year of this, though, in the early months of 1769, he received letters of a different sort. These communications from Vienna indicated that the authorities were in the process of arresting this La Frülen in Bourdeaux and shipping her to Brussels to be questioned by Count Cobenzl himself. For it appeared that the King of Spain had also received a letter about this woman in Bourdeaux, this missive purporting to be from Emperor Joseph II himself claiming the girl as his half-sister and the natural born daughter of the late Francis I, but when the King of Spain contacted His Imperial Majesty about this letter, the Emperor denied writing it, informed his mother, the Empress, that a forger and impostor in Bourdeaux was seeking to pass herself off as a Habsburg-Lorraine and forthwith dispatched legal authorities to apprehend her!

Upon arriving at Brussels and being conducted to Count Cobenzl, the mysterious Mademoiselle La Frülen charmed everyone with her beauty and bearing, and surprised some with her striking resemblance to the late emperor. She appeared to be under the impression that her arrest was due to debts she had incurred in Bourdeaux, which had been her reason for writing to Cobenzl for aid in the first place. The tale this woman shared with Cobenzl and her other interrogators was a sad one indeed. She had no notion of her birthplace, but believed she had been raised in Bohemia, where she remembered a remote country house and two kind women who nurtured her, and a man of the cloth who occasionally visited to say mass and catechize her. The women took it upon themselves to teach her to read and write, but this priest, upon discovering the fact, forbade it.

Thus she persisted, a chaste and pious youth sequestered from all society, until a man she did not know came to visit her wearing a hunting-suit, put her on his knee and remarked upon how grown she was. Lovingly, he encouraged her to behave well and obey her guardians, and he took his leave. He made a great impression on her, and when he returned more than a year later, dressed again as though out on a hunt, she committed his features to memory, such that she could and did describe him in detail to Count Cobenzl and her other interrogators. At the conclusion of the man’s second visit, she wept, and he appeared moved, promising to visit again soon. However, he did not return for two years, explaining then that he had intended to visit sooner but had taken ill. During this third encounter, the youthful Mademoiselle La Frülen expressed her familial love for the man, and he likewise expressed love for her, promising to see to all her needs and provide her an opulent life of wealth. He then gave her three portraits, one she recognized as being of himself, which he admitted, and one of a regal-looking woman. These, she claimed, were the portraits of the late Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa that she had sent to Count Cobenzl. The third portrait depicted a veiled woman, which the man claimed was her mother. Along with the portraits, he gave a gift of money and a promise to soon fulfill all her grandest wishes, but he also made her vow never to marry.

Portrait of Emperor Francis I, via Wikimedia Commons

The implications of the tale were clear. If the man had been the same as the subject of the portrait given to Cobenzl, that made him Emperor Francis, and some other particulars of the tale indicated that she was supposed to have been his daughter. For example, in explaining to her some article of his clothing as an officer’s distinction and then endeavoring to explain what an officer was, he indicated that they were honorable and gallant men whom she should love, being herself the daughter of an officer. And later, when asking her whether she would like to meet the Empress, he said, “You would love her much if you knew her, but that for her peace of mind, you must never do,” implying some secret kept from the Empress. Thus the fact he always visited in hunting clothes, for what better excuse to make a visit to the countryside than a hunt. And La Frülen’s descriptions of his features, and in particular a distinguishing pale mark on one of his temples, seemed to fit the late Emperor Francis exactly. In fact, the detail that he had become ill during a specific period was corroborated by the late Emperor’s brother Charles, who recalled Francis becoming ill after returning from a hunting trip around that time.

Eventually, the priest who taught her catechism informed her that the kind visitor she so loved had passed away and had left instructions that she be taken to a convent. So terrified was she of life in a convent that she fled from her chaperones during the journey, ending up sleeping in a barn. Thereafter, relying on the charity of those she encountered, she was able to find passage to Sweden on a carriage but fell from the conveyance during the journey, suffering a grievous head wound and having to stay with a Dutch family at their inn until her recovery. Thereafter continuing to Stockholm, she encountered the first of a series of charitable noblemen who, on account of her resemblance to the late Emperor and based on cryptic recommendations to offer her aid, took her in, provided her with gifts and loans and generally saw to her every need and comfort. Everywhere she went in those years, from Stockholm to Hamburg to Bourdaeux, she fell in with an aristocratic element, who often received letters from afar entreating them to offer her succor and charity, hinting at the tantalizing secret of her lineage.

Such letters, of course, Count Cobenzl and his fellow interrogators were well familiar with, and they informed Mademoiselle La Frülen that she was not in custody because of the many debts she had accumulated in Bourdeaux but rather for the forging of letters and for fraudulently posing as the daughter of Emperor Francis. In great distress, she admitted to having forged the letter from Emperor Joseph II to the King of Spain as well as some other letters, but she justified this based on the threats she had received from creditors and refused to recant the story of her youth and its implications that she was a natural born daughter of the Emperor. As for many of the other letters, some of which Count Cobenzl himself had received recommending him to offer her aid, she claimed absolute ignorance of them, suggesting that her father must have instructed a great many people to see to her welfare, and that they continued to do so from afar.  Moreover, she indicated that she had no desire to continue seeking charity from others but that she had no choice because of the vow she had made never to marry. Several advantageous proposals had been made to her in Bourdeaux that would have seen her well taken care of, but she had refused them to keep her promise.

Portrait of Empress Maria Theresa, via Wikimedia Commons

Having received the details of this interrogation, the Empress was disposed to treat the prisoner as severely as possible, but before any action was taken against her, Count Cobenzl became very fatally ill. While on his death bed, he received a mysterious letter that he afterward burned. Something in the content of the letter appears to have convinced him to treat Mademoiselle La Frülen far more leniently than the Empress wished, and after Cobenzl’s death, she was conducted to a small town and left there to her fate with a sum of fifty gold coins. 

Thus the pamphlet ended in the year 1769, insinuating that somehow this poor woman, driven quite mad by her circumstances, found her way across the Channel seven years later to England and Bristol, to lead a sad but tranquil life among the haystacks of Bourton. In support of this speculation is the report that, among the several languages other than English spoken to her, Louisa, the Lady of the Haystack, only appeared to respond in any way to French and German. She appears to have been illiterate, never looking in a book even when one was offered to her. Some reported finding a distinct scar on her head that seemed to corroborate the story of her fall from a carriage. As her faculties had drastically diminished, all questioning of her regarding the content of the pamphlet was largely fruitless. She babbled about her mamma coming for her mostly, but once, when it was suggested that they take her to Bohemia, she is said to have replied, “That is papa’s own country.”

After a long illness, she died in Mr. Henderson’s madhouse in December of 1801, by all accounts still a happy and mirthful woman even if she had lost all of her wits. She seems to have reverted to a childlike nature during that final season of her life. And she left behind many questions to which we may never know the answers. Who was she? If she was Mademoiselle La, then was she indeed the daughter of an emperor? Or was she merely a forger and confidence woman? Just as Mademoiselle La Frülen remains a question mark blemishing Continental history, in all likelihood, Louisa, the Lady of the Haystack, will ever remain a blind spot in British history, a mystery in her own time as well as an enigma in posterity.