Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Unexpected Tales of the
After the mystery of what Rita Edwards saw in Walsingham, Norfolk, reader John Wynne in St Leonards-on-sea, East Sussex, was reminded of a similar famous paranormal event in France…
“The Moberly-jourdain case of 1901 citing time-travel and hauntings involved two Englishwomen, Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, who were well-respected academics on a visit to the great Palace of Versailles, outside Paris.
The pair claimed afterwards that while walking in the gardens near Petit Trianon, the manor house that had been given to Queen Marie Antoinette, they both experienced a change of mood and atmosphere, and encountered people wearing 18th-century clothes.
They later described the atmosphere as oppressive, adding: “Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless, like wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees.”
One of the figures the pair saw they claimed looked like Marie Antoinette, consort of Louis XVI.
Eventually, after returning to Paris, they each independently wrote an account of this experience and came to the conclusion that the palace was haunted.
Like Rita, they checked there wasn’t some sort of reenactment event going on, and apparently drew a blank,
though there is a theory that involves, shall we say, a rather unconventional French poet and his activities in the gardens around the same time.
However, the ladies did research the Petit Trianon and discovered that on the same date but 109 years earlier, August 10, 1792, the palace had been surrounded and the king’s guard killed.
Six weeks later, the monarchy ceased to exist.
The sleuthing pair even published a book about it called, An Adventure, in 1911, under assumed names – and it became a bestseller.”
Have you had an eerie experience or know a good ghost story? Scare us at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk