Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowWhen Louis XIV expanded his father's old hunting pavilion he created one of the greatest achievements in French 17th century art -- a massive, opulent compound that became the seat of high society and French government. In the modern day, the Palace of Versailles remains an enormously popular tourist attraction and, according to some, a hotspot for for paranormal activity, including ghosts and time travel.
Tonight's classic episode takes us to France. To France at the height of frenchness. You know what I mean, we're talking Big Loui's.
Time totally also the home of some of my favorite bands in the history of music, bands like Air Phoenix and Daft Punk. Can you imagine growing up in a place surrounded by the Palace of Versailles. I think it would cause you to make some pretty interesting and fancy music.
Yeah, and neat lots of cake, right hmm yum. So we're this place has a lot of history and a lot of injustice that occurred around it, and you know, let's say, pretty directly by the people who hung out in it. So there's really no reason to think that there aren't ghosts hanging around here somewhere. And that's what this episode is about.
And with that, we've got I've got to give a shout out to a phrase I learned because of a Palace of Versailles story. Adieu from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
My name is Noam.
They call me Ben. We are joined with our super producer Paul Decant. You are you? Thanks for tuning in? Should I say bonjour? This is stuff they don't want you to know. We get so many suggestions via email, via tweets, via strangers talking to us in the streets. And this episode is based on a very old suggestion that came in two thousand and ten.
Maybe way back in twenty ten. The good old days. Things were so simple then.
Right, little did we know what twenty eighteen would bring. And it's appropriate that we're looking into the past and into the future and remarking on the passage of history because today's episode concerns one of the most important historical locations in France. Today. We are asking why people believe the Palace of Versailles is haunted.
And if you don't know what the Palace of Versailles is, it is the or. It was the seat of royal power in France for many, many years. But it didn't just start off that way.
No, No, it started off actually in a very difficult way. In fifteen seventy five, there was a fellow named Albert de Gandhi Geo and d I, who was a member of the Court of Henry the Second. He purchased this signori, or the lordship over this village called Versailles, sorry, purchased, Yeah, he just bought it. He bought the town.
He got the sign insoid that's Italian.
That's fine, it doesn't matter. Okay, it's early, all right, Actually it's eleven.
It's kind of early for us. We're night out. That's true yet, and you are correct. He did have an Italian background, which at that time came with some stereotypes.
Yes, it did, that's right. Yeah. The French looked down on the Italians as being sort of shifty, uh, not layabouts, but more manipulative, kind of Machiavelian creepers.
I guess right, Yes, schemers. That was the stereotype they were lavering under. But de Gandhi had done quite well and was well regarded in the court. He also clearly had some juice, He had some scratch, he had some some cash, so he yes, he purchased the lordship over this town, about fifteen miles southwest ish of Paris. The population was in a very bad way, or in a tail spin. They have been damaged by one hundred years wars and the plagues and all in all, this series of tragedies for the village of Versailles means it's a great buy for Albert to Gandhi.
Oh absolutely, sort of like the banks swooping in after the housing collapse or whatever, and like, you know, just buying up underwater properties and stuff, you.
Know, quite similar, very gross.
Yeah, you know, it's a good business move.
Yeah. Yeah.
So you know, kingships change over time, as they do. As the old man dies, somebody new comes in, and it's usually blood related, almost always blood related. So in the early sixteen hundreds, Gandhi invited the new King Louis the thirteenth to Versailles on hunting trips. Because you know, you've got this beautiful area, this land that you've purchased, you invite the king down to do a little hunting.
Hey, you're always in court, why don't come out to my place. We down some peasants wars maybe and we can.
Yeah, I'm thinking fox, that's what I'm picturing, with their pack of hounds chasing down the sly little fox.
Yeah, there's all kinds of wildlife there. It was largely just untouched land.
That's true.
And these are going to be hunting parties. Yeah, this means it's not just these two fellows on horseback with some dogs or with some bows and arrows. They have a bunch of people who are doing the actual work.
Yeah, well they kind of watch. Maybe, I don't know who knows who's to say. Actually, there are probably historians that will say exactly how much Louis the thirteenth got down with the hunting. But either way, he loved doing it.
Yeah. He loved the place so much that in sixteen twenty three he had a hunting lodge built nearby. And for him, this was a modest, a modest structure.
Yeah. I was built out of bricks and you know, would stuff that the common man would use. But that's all they needed. They just needed a place to take shelter so they could stay the night there or whatever and they'd go hunting the next day.
So then eight years later Louis obtained the Signiory of Versailles from the Gandhi family and began to make enlargements to this hunting chateau. He continued to expand the structure until his death in sixteen forty three, at which time the real big player in this story comes along. His son, Louis the fourteenth, aka the Sun King, came along and he was a huge fan of the location as well.
Yes, the Sun King, the one that your history books rightly associate with the practice called absolute monarchy.
Yes, he loved centralized government. He was all about it, and he thought the king is the center. Everything else moves out from there.
Right, hence the Sun King right, as Noel has pointed out, And it's true, he expanded Versailles at a massive rate, and this is where it moved from a pretentious royal chateau to a palace, in fact, by some measures, the largest palace in the world. And there's a side note here that I want to put in just for all of you listening who have an interest in the bizarre nature of royal day to day life. While we were researching this episode, I found something that has nothing to do with whether or not Versaia is haunted. It is the ceremony that the king had his rising and sleeping ceremony. Yes, it is bizarre and so over the top.
Yeah, if you want to go down a rabbit hole, look up Marie Antoinette the waking ceremony. It is one of the strangest things.
People would pay to talk to these folks as they were waking up, to like put their clothes on for them to address them, and then they were paid to do the same thing as they were going to sleep. And the one thing, at least in Louie's case, that keeps popping up is the fact that they're the actual place where they slept amid these ostentatious, opulent chambers. The actual place was separated from the rest of the room by this tiny decorative balustrade. And they kept using the phrase decorative balustrade. Yeah, I looked it up. It's just cartoonish.
What is a balustrade.
It's it looks like a banister, That's what I.
Was kind of picture.
Yeah, it's a it's just a gilded Bannis fancy banister. It's a fancy that's what they should call it.
Uh.
I think we should write to the editors and ask them to change that.
I agree to a fancy ben yes.
So, speaking of fancy, though, Louis was himself quite fancy right, he was responsible for a lot of the trends in clothing and coiffery. It kind of permeated out of France and into the rest of Europe. Right, Yeah, Yeah, he was a trendssetter who was also he was also easily angered, and angering him was bad. But without going too far into Louis, we can say that his call it his ego, call it his philosophy of what a government should be symbolically, whatever the motivation, it resulted in this gigantic, monstrous compound.
And this place is huge. We have stats about the palace itself. It has seven hundred rooms that are spread over more than seven hundred thousand square feet.
Yeah, it's stinking giant. And that's just the palace itself. If you look at the surrounding area of the palace that is considered Versailles still or the Palace of Versais grounds, you're covering over two thousand acres and that's about eighty seven almost eighty eight million square feet good golly.
Yeah.
And this also includes two hundred and thirty acres of gardens, again massive, and inside these gardens you'll find two hundred and ten thousand flowers and two hundred thousand trees that are annually planted there. Those numbers are astounding.
And they're very into fountains. It must have been a different time, you know, the era of construction, because gardens must have been i'm going to say more popular overall than they are today.
You know.
Also, the fountains themselves are a work of art. This makes the Palace of Versailles officially the world's largest royal domain in terms of sheer area, and it also has a lot of notable features.
Yeah, I think we're all big fans of the Hall of me which has seventeen giant mirrored arches opposite seventeen windows. Each one of the arches contains twenty one mirrors, which makes a massive three hundred and fifty seven total as the hall is two hundred thirty nine point five feet long, thirty four point four feet wide, and forty point four feet high.
Yes, a cavern, Yeah, it's a cavern that you walk down that has a light coming in on this on to your right. Let's say you're walking this way to your right, and then on the left you got the mirrors reflecting the light and these chandeliers, these opulent, insane chandeliers, and above the chandeliers are these paintings on the ceiling. It's just I mean it's incredible, but it's also one of those things like how much money.
Can we spend? And then you know why, sure, weren't weren't peasants starving in the streets?
Yes, and on special occasions, while the same peasants were starving, they would light around twenty thousand candle at night to have the same sort of phenomenon occur. It seems like one of those things is difficult to imagine until you actually visit. Yes, it kind of makes me think of that movie The Florida Project. Have you guys seen this yet, only in that it's about.
These very poor areas around Disney World and these really kind of like shoddy hotels where families rent them by the week because otherwise they wouldn't be able to pass a credit check. But they're all like things like the Magical Castle and like Future Land, but they're all just completely kind of poor facsimiles of Disney stuff. And then you know, every night Disney World shoots off this insane, ostentatious firework display and it becomes this thing you're just kind of living in the shadow of, and you sort of like take it for granted, and it's like, well, we're never gonna get to go there, but here it is, and you just sort of almost like forget about it. I don't know, you know what I'm saying, Like, Yeah, people that like, here's this thing that's just we're living in it's shadow, but we're never going to understand that kind of wealth or opulence and it's Is it depressing? Is it a constant reminder? Are you just kind of get used to it and just go on with your life.
I don't know.
Yeah, it's stark inequality and very close association.
Well, and it means that rumor would spread a lot because imagine all those people who live near it that can never go there, and you can only imagine what the royal family does up there in the dark.
Spoiler alert, weird stuff.
Yeah, are they hunting animals or are they hunting men?
The greatest game?
Right?
Right?
Who is that iced tea ice cube?
One of the one of the ice is I think it was tea.
It was tea iced ty And we won't explain that reference. If you don't get it, you're going to have a great time this weekend googling this. Over the years, Versai has also been home to not one, not two, not three, but five chapels, and they have a royal opera house, ye in there. It's just an opera house. It's made out of wood.
I think they actually still host some fully produced opera performances there. And you can obviously buy tickets to tour the Palace of Versailles and the opera houses included as part of that.
And let's return to the history here.
Sure, let's jump forward almost a century to seventeen fifty eight. This is when the next king, Louis the fifteenth, he had another chateau constructed inside the gardens themselves, remember that two hundred and thirty acres. He called it the Petit Trianon, and it kind of mirrored the larger triannon that existed in the palace itself already, and it was just meant to be another royal residence on the grounds. It was supposed to be able to house the king if the king was in town, as well as the king's entourage, so enough rooms to house a small group of people. Then, when this king, Louis the fifteenth, died of the pox in seventeen seventy four, the crown was passed down to yet another Louis, this time the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette.
And did she later enter into possession of this petit triannon.
Yes, it was given to her by the king, and she really took it as her own. She made all kinds of additions and alterations to the surrounding structure and to the petit trianon itself, and she spent a ton of her time there, like inside the.
Petit trannon, balustrades galore, yes, all over the place. And then, of course we must mention that the Palace of Versailles itself had a close brush with death due to the French Revolution. In seventeen eighty nine. The Revolution forced Louis the sixteenth to leave Versailles for Paris.
Do those revolutionaries have no appreciation for fine things? What's wrong with them? Come on?
The French Revolution is this startling chapter in history that I think more people should know more about. One of my favorite parts of it. It's a weird sentence to say one of my favorite parts of the French Revolution, but one of my favorite parts was the effort to remake the calendar, to create a different calendar entirely.
Absolutely, there's so many nuances to the whole thing that you don't get in the broad strokes kind of high school education version of it, all right, or in limits or oblem.
Right right right.
The palace would never again be home to French royalty, and in the nineteenth century eighteen thirty seven specifically, it became the Museum of the History of France. Today, it's one of the most visited sites in the country up there with you know, approximately the other one in the Eiffel Tower right. And in the centuries between its construction and the modern day, it's been host to numerous storied visitors and residents. Some rumor has it never left oo, so is.
It about to get crazy?
Yes? Right after this quick break, here's.
Where it gets crazy. In the past as well as in the modern age, multiple visitors have reported otherworldly or to their mind inexplicable phenomena at the palace. They've alleged, to put a fine point on it, that they've seen ghost.
Yeah, specifically King Louis, the sixteenth, the fourteenth, and the thirteenth. All of these these kings have been seen roaming the halls of the palace itself or in a hunting party.
That never ends, the great hunt. Yes, yes, yes, yeah, And we clearly just established earlier in the show that we think they were recreationally hunting people.
Hey, hey, we never said that. Yeah, it was just you know, we hinted at it was thrown out ideas here.
Dennis Reynolds would say, it was the implication.
It's correct.
There are other ghosts that are rumored to haunt the grounds Marie Antoinette, of course. And then there are a ghost of visitors such as Benjamin Franklin, whom friends and neighbors you may recall from an earlier episode.
Yeah, he liked to hang around there.
Yes, Benjamin Franklin, probably not a serial killer.
Probably not, but definitely a philandering francophile.
Yes. Indeed, indeed there's no proof of these ghosts, of course, but from a tourism perspective, a good ghost story is great for business, and these are just oddly enough, and the Kings would be very insulted to hear this. They're just the also rans and the stories of hauntings of Versailles. When most people mention ghost or paranormal activity in Versailles, they're thinking of a singular strange afternoon that occurred around one hundred and seventeen years ago. This August. Was it a wrinkle in time, a fold in death. It starts with two teachers who traveled there from England on August tenth, nineteen oh one.
These two academics were Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jordain, and these were the principal and vice principal of Saint Hugh's College in Oxford, and they were in France on vacation and they wanted to go visit Versailles, as you do because most people when you're in there France, go to Versailles if you can. And after touring the palace, they went on search in the nearby gardens of the petit Ryana, remember the one with Marie Antoinette. Well, they noticed that things seemed a bit off somehow. The further that they traveled that they kept going and things are feeling strange.
And again this is a huge area, right They passed a deserted farmhouse, they noticed an old plow lined by the side of the road, and they both claimed they began to feel strange, as if some sort of emotional oppression was occurring. They got a bad vibe.
And this is something we here with ghost encounters or stories of ghosts. Encounters throughout the centuries that there's an overwhelming feeling of dread that occurs before you see or hear anything.
And they started to see other people they saw, according to their reports, they saw two men dressed in long grayish green coats with small, three cornered hats passing by, and they asked the men the way to the Petit Triaden, and they were pointed toward a path that was directly in front of them. They walked on.
They came to a gazebo shaded by trees. The dark mood hung even heavier over them. Here in this shady grove, everything was very, very still, and all of a sudden, a repulsive, foul looking gentleman, his face pitted with small pox, was standing by the gazebo, and he stared direly unpleasantly at the onlookers.
And just then someone came rushing up behind them and warned them that they were going the wrong way. They were told to cross a small bridge, and when they did, they arrived at what they assumed to be the Petit Trianon, where they found a woman sitting on a stool sketching. Yeah.
They said that she wore an old fashioned dress. She was covered with a pale green scarf, and all of a sudden, that gloom came back over them, that intense, sad, disturbing feeling.
Suddenly, a footman came rushing out of a nearby building, slamming the door behind himself. The footman told them that the entrance to the Petit channel was on the other side of the building, and so they walked around the house where they found a wedding party waiting to tour the rooms.
And at that point they're encountering other human beings that they can confirm our human beings, and the dark mood lifts, and nothing else unusual happens to them.
In fact, they didn't talk about it for a long time. Later, so the story goes, they realized that people they'd encountered were dressed in garb from approximately seventeen eighty nine. They also found that some of the buildings they had passed existed in seventeen eighty nine, but not in the present day. Again, that's nineteen oh one, So from what they believed and what later came to be known as the Moberly Jordain incident, they somehow they thought had traveled one hundred and twelve years into the past, or seen things that happened one hundred and twelve years ago, only to be rescued by the tour guide who was leading that wedding party in nineteen oh one.
I want to see a dramatization of this. Yeah, like you know, a reenactment. This is a cool scenario.
Yeah, you know, they were just experiencing the flat circle, you guys. I think that's what happened.
Quite possibly, right, Well, we'll see. Within months of their encounter again August tenth, nineteen oh one, they I published an account of this in a book called An Adventure. It's very important to note they used pseudonyms, they did not use their real names. Their experience became known as the Versailles time slip, which sounds cool, the Ghost of Triannon, or of course, the Moberly Jordainane incident.
There are alarms going off in my head about this already, just because of the garb what went down at the Palace of Versailles, the smallpox epidemics that were, you know, ravaging France around the time that they allegedly went back to I feel like there are signs pointing to maybe an explanation that would be less otherworldly.
Yeah, so what happened?
Nowadays? There are several popular theories. We'll go ahead and say the first two that everyone thinks of. Did these people travel in time or did they have what would be a retrocognitive experience the opposite of precognition, right, or did they just happen to see a bunch of ghosts? And if so, there's an interesting debate there what would the difference be. What's the difference between them traveling in time and them seeing a bunch of ghosts?
Well, it's certainly hard to explain away given that they had a shared experience, whatever might have happened. So that's you know, that's how I see it.
That's a great point. There were the popular mundane theories as well, right, But the primary thing is, yeah, a shared experience. It wasn't one person saying, who's that dude with a weird hat? What's wrong with that guy's face?
Yeah, because even if they were both like tripping their butts off on some sort of psychedelic they're not gonna see the same thing. They might just you know, have a weird freakout at Versailles, but they're not gonna see the same dude in the green coat and the woman sketching with the you know, the veil or whatever, the green scarf.
Right, Well, but what if they did have some wine and they were walking the grounds and then they came across something that was real that they both saw that maybe they just didn't know what was happening or understand.
Perhaps a historical reenactment of some kind.
Yes, that's what I'm thinking.
That's one of the theories. One is that the teachers accidentally crashed an historical reenactment.
Yes, a woman named Joan Evans, who was Jordaine's literary executor. She wrote in a nineteen seventy six article for Encounter magazine in which she argued that the two women had simply walked unknowingly into this historical reenactment where you know, there are people dressed in seventeen late seventeen hundred's garb and even with perhaps face paint of smallpox, and they're all just you know, going around in the period attire because they're waiting for the performance.
It's like backstage, it's like Disney rules. Man, you never let them see you with your head off, you know, you always you don't unless you're on and like in the game, you don't let people walk up on you just doing your thing.
Well, that's the thing they were. They were just wandering about through the gardens and trying to find the Petit trianon and perhaps all these other people are just getting ready.
And you think maybe they were drunk too.
I don't know. I'm just saying, if you're a little bit tipsy and you see something like that in you're feeling that gloom or whatever it was that they're feeling, perhaps everything became a little more sinister or strange than it truly was.
Well, okay, okay, just saying okay, But here's the thing. Evans is seeking a way to defend this explanation, right without attacking the protagonist or the people who believe this happened. She researched re enactments, but she didn't find any events that would have been happening in nineteen oh one. So if that is the explanation, then it was some sort of underground historical reenactment, which I guess people do. I would love to accidentally walk into one with you guys, but they're not. They're not that common, right.
Yeah, Well, here's my theory. Part of the wedding that was going on was the reenactment. The reenactment and the wedding were tied together, the one that they crashed from earlier, because it was just around the corner to enter the Petita and on. I think it was all part of one just opulent wedding party.
There's another theory. Did you hear this? When this also comes from Evans. She based it on a nineteen sixty five biography of a French artist named Robert de Montescuele. The biography, by an author named Philip Julian, noted that this artist had lived in a house in Versailles and was noted for his performances that were called tableaux vivant, in which a Parisian men performed the roles of both men and women, kind of in Shakespeare's style, and Evans says that maybe Moberly and Jordayne were encountering some performance like this. We should also add, after they were speaking to each other about this incident, they both became convinced that the woman they saw sketching outside of the Petit Trannon was Marian's. Whenette either alive one hundred and twelve years ago or dead and ghost sketching, which is, you know, obviously their version of ghostwriting.
The whip, ghost sketching the horse.
Right, exactly good.
There's a problem, though, there's no evidence indicating this artist would have thrown an event in nineteen oh one, and ever since her article, this theory had been reported and re reported as one of the most likely explanations for the Versailles timesl but again no hard proof.
Yeah, and I wonder it does make sense that an historical reenactment of that sort would be written down somewhere in some record, because there's a budget associated with it, and anytime there's money associated, it probably got written down. Unless it was like a black market recreation, it's like.
A black bag operation y the government of France.
Or maybe it's just in you know, the father of the bride's records somewhere that he paid for it.
Really pushing this wedding party. So there's there's another there's another aspect here, and it goes back to a point where we had established earlier. It's that they experienced this together. They had a shared call it a delusion if you will, but they had this shared experience. Where does that lead us. We'll find out after a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
So another potential explanation for this phenomenon is that these teachers shared a delusion, which is kind of the sticking point for me.
If it wasn't.
An incident of drunkenly stumbling into a historical reenactment, there's definitely a shared delusion going on here. If it's not, you know, actually physically seeing ghosts and this is cool. This is something that's called a folly adieu or madness of two. And you've probably heard this term before. I am connected with stories of identical twins who for some reason go insane at the same time, such as Ursula and Sabina Erickson.
I argue that they didn't go mad. I still think they're like secret spies or something.
Well, this is interesting. You often will hear about the madness of two, or it could be a followed dedois about this in terms of twins, one twin goes crazy. There's there are a couple of cases in the United Kingdom that involve this sort of this sort of emotional contagion spreading. And when we hear descriptions of someone saying, oh, we both felt a palpable mood. We have to remember that the majority of our in person communication is nonverbal. So if someone is indicating that they're feeling a mood and you are sympathetic with them, close with them, they're a friend to colleague, a neighbor, a family member, then you will unconsciously pick up on those cues, and if you like them, you will unconsciously start practicing something called mirroring, which is when you subtly mimic the sales folks are doing this to you all the time, before and after you listen to this show, where I'll subtly mimic maybe the placement of your arms or the placement of your legs, or start nodding when they ask a question. This stuff, all, this whole quiverfull of strange nonverbal arrows. They can affect people, whether or not they're twins. And in this case, I would agree that there's some sand to it, although it does sound weird because usually if we think about as shared delusion, we imagine, you know, kids one upping each other, backing each other up when they're telling crazy stories, and they all know on some level it's not true, but they want to participate. So how could two people really believe this? The problem with this theory, which seems really solid in my opinion, is that it comes from kind of a screwed up place. The scuttle button about Mobley and Jordain was that they weren't just two colleagues who taught closely to get and took vacations. According to at least one former student, they were romantically involved and had a long term open relationship where they were known to pursue other teachers and students as well. And this comes from a book in nineteen fifty seven by a former student named Lucille Eyermonger, who wrote a critique of their book An Adventure in her own work called Ghost of Versailles, Miss Moberly and Miss Jordain and their Adventure a Critical Study.
Wow a word for a title there, but it gets across exactly what it is. So Ayremonger delved into the nature of their relationship the two women and basically concluded that their adventure was this folly adieu yep.
And.
They had been so you know. She suggests that they had been so distracted by their relationship and by their time that they were spending together and again, I'm gonna insert maybe some wine there, that they merely misinterpreted ordinary people and objects to be things from that time period seventeen eighty nine, and they became so obsessed with proving their story and kind of retelling their story that it grew and grew over time that they even convinced themselves of the reality of this ghostly encounter.
But do we have any reports of them doing historical reenactments at the Palace of Versailles during this time period.
No?
Yeah, hmmm, that's it. You know, this seems like a little bit odd to have done in the early nineteen hundred.
Well, I don't know. Okay, So let's imagine the Colosseum, the Greek Colosseum. Okay, that entire thing was based or at least it became in the end historical reenactments of war battles things like that. I mean, I think this is a celebrating the past, especially victories or something good or a previous king.
Oh, that's true. I guess I'm just thinking of that as being more of a touristy thing that you would do like at a you know, like stone mountain. Yeah, like you have like you know, civil war reenactments and stuff that seems like a much more of a modern construct.
But no call assumes a good point.
It is a very good point.
I have a life hacked for everyone listening. It is relatively unethical and is not particularly good. Oh, there is no recognized statute on the amount of time that needs to elapse between reenactments. That's true. We all have sort of a rough spider sense about it. You know, if you don't feel like changing your clothes, just tell people the next day that you're doing a reenactment. I think, I think you can get away with it once.
I'm going to use that, but I've got to keep it in my back pocket for when I'm really funky.
It's just between it's just between us super producer Paul, and millions of people. Yeah, so don't tell anyone folks. Everybody use it once, and.
I would say, be be excruciatingly specific about the time period.
Lecture people about little known facts heard the day before. So, aside from the excellent point that that there's no evidence of an historical reenactment occurring, we do know that there are factors that cast doubt on the truth of the couple's claims. That come from the skeptic side. So first, England Society for Psychical Research found that the teachers originally did not think anything was wrong. Originally they thought they just had a great afternoon touring Versailles and they got lost for a second.
These were some kookie ladies. I was gonna throw that at on out there.
They didn't think anything was strange until as much as three months later when they compared notes and one of them not both of them said hey, do you remember the thing?
Yeah, I remember the smallpox face, guy weird and the footman.
And they republished the story multiple times, and each time they republished it, the story.
Seemed to expand and it caused a stir, didn't it.
It absolutely did, because you know, Versailles already has this iconic image. People want to see mystery. They know great historical events transpired, So this sounds like a likely candidate for something extraordinary to occur. The author of this study for the Society, a guy named W. H. Salter, pointed out that the embellished versions of the tale published in later editions were also written much later than the couple had originally claimed, maybe as long as five years afterwards. Only after they have made several return trips to Versailles.
And there's another thing here. Both of the authors of the original tale were prone to hallucinations. One of them, Moverlely, was prone to hallucinations both audio and vision since childhood. And there's a person here writing Terry Castle that says quote as a child, she had heard the words pinnacled reality. As she stared at the spires of Winchester Cathedral. She had seen two strange birds with dazzling white feathers and immense wings fly over the cathedral into the west. In Cambridge in nineteen thirteen, she saw a procession of medieval monks, and at the Louver in nineteen fourteen she saw a man six or seven feet high in a crown and togelike dress, whom she at first took to be Charlemagne, but later decided it was an apparition of the Roman emperor Constantine. So wough, perhaps she actually has some form of the second site. Maybe she truly is seeing historical figures throughout the past and all that circle has opened up to her.
What's that syndrome you have where you get overcome with great works of art?
You're talking about not just a garden variety epiphany, something that stays with you.
Yeah, the Stendell syndrome, it's like a reverie that you experience that's very all encompassing, borderline debilitating when you are in the presence of great art. I just think it's really fascinating, Matt, that all of these times that she had these hallucinations, she was either at some sort of historic site or an amazing art museum. I'm just wondering if there's a connection there, because it seems like, you know, and I could see what you're saying too about the second site. Surely you know, at these these historic locations where you know, many many events have occurred and historic figures have trod upon these hallowed grounds. You know, I could see that as being a potential thing too. But I'm wondering if her hallucinations weren't triggered by these breathtaking sites.
You know, that's a really good question, and I'm tempted to agree. But what this does prove is that the teach are not or were not purposely misleading folks. They weren't themselves being hucksters or trying to sell a book. Yeah, they were selling a book there, right, they were, but they weren't. They weren't attempting to purposely mislead people, which I think is a huge difference, because it sounds as if they genuinely believed in the veracity of their story, despite the fact that it was changing and expanding, right, And part of the reason why it seems contradictory first to say, well, how could they both believe this thing is true and expand upon it at the same time. The fact of the matter is that memory is tricky, deceitful, treacherous, and.
Will betray you.
Every time you remember something, you're just remembering the last time you remembered it, which we've mentioned on this show before. That's why as human's age, earlier memories take on this strange feeling, Right, with this encapsulated tone. You might remember just a snapshot from a time when you were four and you burned your hand or something, but that probably happened in a very different way. You've just been accreting these new interpretations of it. So at this point there is no proof of ghostly activity in Versailles. However, the two teachers captured the public imagination, and this book sold like gangbusters. Multiple issues multiple languages. You can go to Versailles to day and if you wish attempt to take the path that they took. You will likely not see Mary Antoinette, but if you do, please let us know.
And if you do happen to snap a picture of any ghost, any apparition as some time time, slip, whatever it is, send it to us. On Twitter, we are conspiracy stuff, and on Facebook we are the same. You can find our Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy. Post a picture there. Maybe if you just go on a trip, tell everybody in that community about it. I'm sure people will want to talk about this. We want to talk about it too, if you want to listen to it. And that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
