May 11, 2018 • 41 mins
When 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M Hello,
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noll. 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
(00:46):
in the streets, and this this episode is based on
a very old suggestion that came in two thousand and ten.
Maybe in two thousand and 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
(01:09):
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,
(01:30):
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. Uh. In fifteen seventy five,
there was a fellow named Albert de Gandhi g O
n d I, who was a member of the Court
(01:51):
of Henry the Second. He purchased the seignori or the
lordship over this village called Versailles. Sorry perch. Yeah, he
just bought it. He bought the town, he got the signiority.
That's Italians. It doesn't matter. Okay, it's early, alright, actually
it's eleven. Yeah, it's kind of early for us. We're
(02:12):
night outs yet. And you are correct. He did have
an Italian background, which at that time came with some stereotypes.
That's right. Yeah. The French looked down on the Italians
as being sort of shifty, uh, not layabouts, but more manipulative,
kind of machiavellian creepers. I guess right, Yes, schemers. That
(02:35):
was the stereotype they were laboring under. But the Gandhi
had done quite well and was well regarded in the court.
He also clearly had some juice. You had some scratch,
he had some some cash, so he yes, he purchased
the lordship over this town about fifteen miles southwest dish
of Paris. The population was in a very bad way.
(02:58):
They were in a tailspin. They have been damaged by
the hundred years wars and the plagues and all in all, this, uh,
this series of tragedies for the village of Versailles means
it's a great bye for Albert de Gandhi. Oh absolutely,
sort of like the banks swooping in after the housing
collapse or whatever, and like, you know, just buying up
(03:18):
underwater properties and stuff, you know, quite similar, very gross.
You know, it's a good business move. Yeah, yeah, So
you know, uh, kingships change over time as they do,
as the uh the old man dies, somebody new comes
in and it's usually blood related, almost always blood related.
(03:38):
So in the early sixteen hundreds, Gandhi invited the new
King Louis the 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 can can run down some peasants bars, maybe and
(04:01):
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 it was
largely just untouched land. And these are going to be
hunting parties. This means it's not just these two fellows
on horseback with with some dogs or with some bows
(04:24):
and arrows, and they have a bunch of people who
are doing the actual work. Well they kind of watch maybe,
I don't know who knows. Who's to say, Actually they're
probably historians that will say exactly how much Louis got
down with the hunting. But either way, he loved doing it. Yeah,
he loved the place so much that in sixty three
(04:47):
he had a hunting lodge built nearby. And for him,
this was a modest, a modest structure. It 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 go hunting
(05:08):
the next day. So then eight years later Louis obtained
the senior of Versailles from the Gandhi family and began
to make enlargements to this hunting chateau um. He continued
to expand the structure until his death in sixty three,
at which time the real big player in this story
(05:29):
comes along, his son Louis the FOURT a k a.
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
(05:51):
the center. Everything else moves out from there. Right, Hence
the Sun King right as as Noel has pointed out,
And it's true, he expanded Versailles at at a massive rate,
and this is where it moved from a pretentious royal
chateau to a palace, in fact, by some measures, the
(06:14):
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 Versaillah's haunted. It is the
(06:36):
ceremony that the king had his rising and sleeping ceremony.
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
(06:57):
as they were waking up and to like with their
clothes on four of them to address them. And then
they would paid to do the same thing as they
were going to sleep. And the one thing, at least
in Louise case, that keeps popping up is the fact
that they're the actual place where they slept amid these ostentatious,
(07:19):
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. 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
(07:40):
a fancy that's what they should call it. Uh. I
think we should write to the editors and ask them
to change that fancy band. Yes, So, speaking of fancy,
though Louis was itself quite fancy. Right. He was responsible
for a lot of the trends in clothing and quaffery
(08:01):
that kind of permeated out of France and the into
the rest of Europe. Right, Yeah, Yeah, he was a
trendsetter 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
(08:25):
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
(08:45):
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 Versailles grounds, Um,
you're covering over two thousand acres and that's about eighties
seven almost eighty eight million square feet. Good gali yeah um.
(09:11):
And this also includes two d and thirty acres of gardens,
again massive and uh. 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,
(09:31):
you know, the era of construction, because gardens must have
been i'm gonna 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
(09:53):
has a lot of notable features. Yeah, I think we're
all big fans of the Hall of Mirrors, which has
seventeen giant mirrored arches opposite seventeen windows um. Each one
of the arches contains twenty one mirrors, which makes a
massive three and fifty seven total um as. The hall
is two point five feet long, thirty four point four
(10:16):
feet wide, and forty point four feet high. So has
this cavern, the cavern that you walk down that has
a light coming in on this on to your right.
Let's see, you're walking this way to your right, and
then on the left you've 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,
(10:39):
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 were peasants starving in the streets? Yes,
and on special occasions, while the same peasants were starving,
they would light around twenty thousand candles at nights to
(11:00):
uh have the same sort of phenomenon occur. It seems
like one of those things it's 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, and that it's about these very poor
areas around Disney World and these really kind of like
(11:21):
shoddy hotels where families rent them by the week because
otherwise they wouldn't be able to pass a credit check.
And 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
(11:42):
display and it becomes this thing you're just kind of
living in the shadow of and you sort of like
take it for Graham 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 that you know what I'm saying, Like people
that like, here's this thing that's just we're living in
its shadow, but we're never gonna understand that kind of
wealth or opulence, and it's is it depressing? Is it
(12:05):
a constant reminder or do 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 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,
(12:26):
are they hunting animals or are they hunting men? The
Greatest Game? Right right? Who was that iced tea ice cube?
One of the one of the one of the ices
I think it was t was 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,
(12:49):
Versaille has also been home to not one, not two,
not three, but five chapels, and they have a royal
opera house 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
(13:09):
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,
he had another chateau constructed inside the gardens themselves, remember
that two or thirty acres. He called it the Petite Triannon,
and it kind of mirrored the larger Triannon that existed
(13:33):
in the palace itself already, and it just 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 enough rooms to house a small
group of people. Then, when this King, Louis the fift
died of the pox in seventeen seventy four, the crown
(13:54):
mus 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. Uh,
(14:18):
And she spent a ton of her time. They're like
inside the petit trianon, 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 the revolution forced Louis the
(14:40):
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 the startling chapter in history that
I think more people should know more about. When one
of my favorite parts of it, so weird sentence to say,
(15:01):
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 right right right, the
(15:21):
Palace would never again be home to French royalty, and
in the nineteenth century 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 the other one, the Eiffel Tower, right. And
in the centuries between its construction and the modern day,
(15:44):
it's been host to numerous storied visitors and residents. Some
rumor has it never left. So is it about to
get crazy? Yes, right after this quick break, here's where
(16:04):
it gets crazy. In the past as well as in
the modern age, multiple visitors have reported otherworldly or to
their minds inexplicable phenomena at the palace. Uh. They've alleged,
to put a fine point on it, that they've seen ghost,
specifically King Louis the four and all of these these
(16:28):
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. It
was just you know, we hinted at it was thrown
(16:50):
out ideas here. Dennis Reynolds would say it was the implication.
There are other ghosts that are rumored to haunt the
grounds Marie Antoinette, of course, and then there are post
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
(17:13):
serial killer, probably not, but definitely a philandering francophile. 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
(17:34):
be very insulted to hear this. They're just the also
rans and the stories of hauntings at Versailles. When most
people mention ghost or paranormal activity in Versailles, they're thinking
of a singular, strange afternoon that occurred around a hundred
and seventeen years ago this August. Was it a wrinkle
in time a fold in death. It starts with two
(17:57):
teachers who traveled there from England on August in nineteen
o one. These two academics were Anne Moberley and Eleanor Jordaane,
and these were the principal and vice principal of St.
Hugh's College in Oxford, uh 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,
(18:18):
go to Versailles if you can. And after touring the palace,
they went on search um in the nearby gardens of
the Petit Triannon, 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,
(18:39):
right They passed a deserted farmhouse, they noticed an old
plow line 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 ghosts encounters or
(19:00):
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,
(19:21):
and they asked them in the way to the Petit Treadman,
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 Um, in this shady grove, everything
was very, very still, and um, all of a sudden,
(19:43):
a repulsive, foul looking gentleman, his face pitted with smallpox,
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,
(20:06):
and when they did, they arrived at what they assumed
to be the Petit Treon, and 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,
(20:28):
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 tore the rooms.
And at that point they're encountering other human beings that
they can confirm our human beings, and the dark mood lifts,
(20:48):
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 had encountered
were dressed in garb from approximately seventeen eighty nine. They
also found that some of the buildings they had passed
(21:10):
existed in seventeen eighty nine, but not in the present day. Again,
that's nineteen o one, so from what they believed. In
what later came to be known as the mobilely Jordained incident,
they somehow they thought had traveled a hundred and twelve
years into the past, or seen things that happened a
(21:30):
hundred and twelve years ago, only to be rescued by
the tour guide who is leading that wedding party in
nineteen o one. I want to see a dramatization of this, 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.
(21:52):
Within months of their encounter again August tenth, nineteen o one,
they had 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
(22:13):
Ghost of Trianon, or of course, the moverly Jordaan incident. Uh.
Their 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
(22:39):
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 retro cognitive experience the opposite of precognition, right,
(23:05):
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 then 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,
(23:25):
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? Because even if they were
both like tripping their butts off on some sort of
(23:48):
psychedelic they're not gonna see the same thing. They might
just you know, have a weird freak out of Versailles,
but they're not going to see the same dude in
the green coat and the woman sketching with the you know,
the veil or whatever, the green scarf. Well, but what
if they did have some wine and they were walking
the grounds and then they came across something that was
(24:09):
real that they both saw that maybe they just didn't
know was happening or understand 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 is Jordan's literary executor.
(24:29):
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 hundreds garb
and even with perhaps face paint of smallpox, and they're
(24:51):
all just you know, going around in the period attire
because they're waiting for the performance. It's like backstage, that's
like Disney rules. Man, you never he 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. They were just
(25:12):
wandering about through the gardens and trying to find the
petit try and and 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 your 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,
(25:36):
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 o one. So if that
(25:57):
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. Well, here here's my theory.
Part of the wedding that was going on was the reenactment.
(26:20):
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 petitan On. I think it
was all part of one just opulent wedding party. There's
another theory. Did you hear this whendn't? This also comes
from Evans. She based on a nineteen biography of a
(26:41):
French artist named Robert de Montescue. 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 tableau vivant, in which gay Parisian
men performed the roles of both men and women, kind
of Shakespeare style, and Evans says that maybe Moberley and
(27:07):
Jordaane 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 the Petit chan and was Marian's when it either
alive hundred and twelve years ago or dead and ghost sketching,
(27:31):
Which is you know, obviously their version of ghost riding
the whip, ghost sketching the horse right exactly. There's a
there's a problem that there's no evidence indicating this artist
would have thrown an event in nine one, and ever
since her article, this theory had been reported and re
(27:53):
reported as one of the most likely explanations for the
Versailles time slip, 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
(28:16):
like a black market recreation. It's like a black bag
operation 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 we had established earlier. It's that
(28:39):
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 responsible and we're back. So another potential
(29:01):
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. Uh. If
(29:22):
it's not you know, actually physically seeing ghosts. Uh. And
this is cool. This is something that's called a folly
adieu or madness of two. Uh. And you've probably heard
this term before. I'm connected with stories of identical twins
who for some reason go insane at the same time. Um,
such as Ursula and Sabina Ericsson. I argue that they
(29:44):
didn't go mad. I still think they're like secret spies
or something. Well, this this is interesting. You often will
hear about the madness of two or it could be uh,
fallis you hear about this in terms of twins, one
twin goes crazy. There's there are a couple of cases
in the United Kingdom that involved this sort of uh,
(30:09):
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 non verbal. So if someone is indicating
that they're feeling a mood and you are sympathetic with them,
(30:33):
close with them, they're a friend, colleague, a neighbor, of
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,
(30:54):
before and after you listen to this show, where they'll
subtly mimic maybe the play spin of your arms on
the placement of your legs, or or start nodding when
they ask a question. This stuff, all this, this whole
quiverful of strange nonverbal arrows. They can affect people, whether
(31:14):
or not they're twins, And in this case, I would
I would agree that there's some sand to it, although
it does sound weird because usually if we think about
a 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,
(31:38):
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 butt about
Mobile and Jordan was that they weren't just two colleagues
who taught closely together and took vacations. According to at
(31:59):
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 Ironmonger, who wrote a critique of their
book An Adventure in her own work called Ghost of Versailles,
(32:22):
Miss Mobile and Mr Jordain and their Adventure a Critical Study.
Wow Award for a title there, But it it gets
across exactly what it is. So Iremonger deld into the
nature of their relationship um the two women and basically
concluded that their adventure was this folly, folly, adieu and
uh and they had been so you know. She suggests
(32:46):
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 we're kind of retelling their
story that it grew and grew over time that they
(33:08):
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? Yeah,
m yeah, that's it. You know, this seems like a
little bit odd to have done in the in the
early nine Well, I don't know, Okay, So let's imagine
(33:32):
the Colosseum, the Greek Colosseum. That entire thing was based
or at least it became in the end historical re
enactments of war battles things like that. I mean, I
think this is a celebrating the past, especially victories or
something good or a previous kings. That's true. I guess
(33:52):
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 or they like you have, you know,
civil war reenactments and stuff that seems like much more
of a modern construct. But that call it sumes a
good point. It is a very good point. I I
have a life hack for everyone listening. It is relatively
(34:13):
unethical and is not particularly good. There is no recognized
statute on the amount of time that needs to elapse
between re enactments. 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 re enactment. I think
(34:36):
I think you can get away with it once. I'm
gonna 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. So don't tell anyone, folks. Everybody use it once,
and I would say, be be excruciatingly specific about the
(34:58):
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.
(35:22):
So first England Society for Psychical Research found that the teachers,
originally I 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 cookie ladies.
I was gonna throw that rut out there. They didn't
(35:43):
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 that was weird and
the footman. And they re published the story multiple times,
and each time they republished it, the story seemed to
(36:05):
expand and it caused a stur didn't 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,
(36:25):
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
(36:50):
we're prone to hallucinations. One of them overly was prone
to hallucinations, both audio and visual, since childhood. And there
is 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
(37:12):
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
toga like dress, whom she at first took to be Charlemagne,
(37:33):
but later decided it was an apparition of the Roman
emperor Constantine. So who Perhaps she actually has some form
of the second site. Maybe she truly is seeing historical
figures throughout the past, and flat 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
(37:56):
just a garden variety epiphany, something that's stays with you. Yeah,
the Stendl syndrome. It's like a reverie that you experience
that's very, um all encompassing, borderline debilitating when when you
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. Um.
(38:20):
I'm just wondering if there's a connection there, because it
seems like, you know, and I could see what you're
saying to about the second site. Surely, you know, if
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
(38:42):
weren't triggered by these breathtaking sites. You know, that's a
really good question, and I'm I'm tempted to agree. But
what this does prove is that the teachers are not
or we're not per briskly misleading folks. They weren't themselves
(39:04):
being hucksters or or trying to you know, sell a book.
They were they were, but they weren't. They weren't attempting
to purposefully 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
(39:27):
changing and expanding, right, and part of the reason why
it seems contradictory first to say, well, how could they
both believe this thing was 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.
(39:47):
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 humans 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
(40:11):
and you burned your hand or something, but that probably
happened in a very different way. We've just been a
creating 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
(40:32):
sold like gangbusters, multiple issues, multiple languages, you can go
to Versailles today 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.
(40:52):
And if you do happen to snap a picture of
any ghost, any apparition has some time slip, whatever it is,
send it to us. On Twitter your 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.
(41:15):
If you want to listen to other shows we've done,
go to stuff they don't want you to know. Dot com.
You can even find our videos there what it's crazy? Uh?
And if you don't want to do any of that
stuff and you want to still talk to us, send
us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy and
how stuff works dot com
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M Hello,
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noll. 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
(00:46):
in the streets, and this this episode is based on
a very old suggestion that came in two thousand and ten.
Maybe in two thousand and 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
(01:09):
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,
(01:30):
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. Uh. In fifteen seventy five,
there was a fellow named Albert de Gandhi g O
n d I, who was a member of the Court
(01:51):
of Henry the Second. He purchased the seignori or the
lordship over this village called Versailles. Sorry perch. Yeah, he
just bought it. He bought the town, he got the signiority.
That's Italians. It doesn't matter. Okay, it's early, alright, actually
it's eleven. Yeah, it's kind of early for us. We're
(02:12):
night outs yet. And you are correct. He did have
an Italian background, which at that time came with some stereotypes.
That's right. Yeah. The French looked down on the Italians
as being sort of shifty, uh, not layabouts, but more manipulative,
kind of machiavellian creepers. I guess right, Yes, schemers. That
(02:35):
was the stereotype they were laboring under. But the Gandhi
had done quite well and was well regarded in the court.
He also clearly had some juice. You had some scratch,
he had some some cash, so he yes, he purchased
the lordship over this town about fifteen miles southwest dish
of Paris. The population was in a very bad way.
(02:58):
They were in a tailspin. They have been damaged by
the hundred years wars and the plagues and all in all, this, uh,
this series of tragedies for the village of Versailles means
it's a great bye for Albert de Gandhi. Oh absolutely,
sort of like the banks swooping in after the housing
collapse or whatever, and like, you know, just buying up
(03:18):
underwater properties and stuff, you know, quite similar, very gross.
You know, it's a good business move. Yeah, yeah, So
you know, uh, kingships change over time as they do,
as the uh the old man dies, somebody new comes
in and it's usually blood related, almost always blood related.
(03:38):
So in the early sixteen hundreds, Gandhi invited the new
King Louis the 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 can can run down some peasants bars, maybe and
(04:01):
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 it was
largely just untouched land. And these are going to be
hunting parties. This means it's not just these two fellows
on horseback with with some dogs or with some bows
(04:24):
and arrows, and they have a bunch of people who
are doing the actual work. Well they kind of watch maybe,
I don't know who knows. Who's to say, Actually they're
probably historians that will say exactly how much Louis got
down with the hunting. But either way, he loved doing it. Yeah,
he loved the place so much that in sixty three
(04:47):
he had a hunting lodge built nearby. And for him,
this was a modest, a modest structure. It 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 go hunting
(05:08):
the next day. So then eight years later Louis obtained
the senior of Versailles from the Gandhi family and began
to make enlargements to this hunting chateau um. He continued
to expand the structure until his death in sixty three,
at which time the real big player in this story
(05:29):
comes along, his son Louis the FOURT a k a.
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
(05:51):
the center. Everything else moves out from there. Right, Hence
the Sun King right as as Noel has pointed out,
And it's true, he expanded Versailles at at a massive rate,
and this is where it moved from a pretentious royal
chateau to a palace, in fact, by some measures, the
(06:14):
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 Versaillah's haunted. It is the
(06:36):
ceremony that the king had his rising and sleeping ceremony.
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
(06:57):
as they were waking up and to like with their
clothes on four of them to address them. And then
they would paid to do the same thing as they
were going to sleep. And the one thing, at least
in Louise case, that keeps popping up is the fact
that they're the actual place where they slept amid these ostentatious,
(07:19):
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. 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
(07:40):
a fancy that's what they should call it. Uh. I
think we should write to the editors and ask them
to change that fancy band. Yes, So, speaking of fancy,
though Louis was itself quite fancy. Right. He was responsible
for a lot of the trends in clothing and quaffery
(08:01):
that kind of permeated out of France and the into
the rest of Europe. Right, Yeah, Yeah, he was a
trendsetter 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
(08:25):
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
(08:45):
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 Versailles grounds, Um,
you're covering over two thousand acres and that's about eighties
seven almost eighty eight million square feet. Good gali yeah um.
(09:11):
And this also includes two d and thirty acres of gardens,
again massive and uh. 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,
(09:31):
you know, the era of construction, because gardens must have
been i'm gonna 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
(09:53):
has a lot of notable features. Yeah, I think we're
all big fans of the Hall of Mirrors, which has
seventeen giant mirrored arches opposite seventeen windows um. Each one
of the arches contains twenty one mirrors, which makes a
massive three and fifty seven total um as. The hall
is two point five feet long, thirty four point four
(10:16):
feet wide, and forty point four feet high. So has
this cavern, the cavern that you walk down that has
a light coming in on this on to your right.
Let's see, you're walking this way to your right, and
then on the left you've 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,
(10:39):
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 were peasants starving in the streets? Yes,
and on special occasions, while the same peasants were starving,
they would light around twenty thousand candles at nights to
(11:00):
uh have the same sort of phenomenon occur. It seems
like one of those things it's 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, and that it's about these very poor
areas around Disney World and these really kind of like
(11:21):
shoddy hotels where families rent them by the week because
otherwise they wouldn't be able to pass a credit check.
And 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
(11:42):
display and it becomes this thing you're just kind of
living in the shadow of and you sort of like
take it for Graham 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 that you know what I'm saying, Like people
that like, here's this thing that's just we're living in
its shadow, but we're never gonna understand that kind of
wealth or opulence, and it's is it depressing? Is it
(12:05):
a constant reminder or do 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 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,
(12:26):
are they hunting animals or are they hunting men? The
Greatest Game? Right right? Who was that iced tea ice cube?
One of the one of the one of the ices
I think it was t was 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,
(12:49):
Versaille has also been home to not one, not two,
not three, but five chapels, and they have a royal
opera house 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
(13:09):
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,
he had another chateau constructed inside the gardens themselves, remember
that two or thirty acres. He called it the Petite Triannon,
and it kind of mirrored the larger Triannon that existed
(13:33):
in the palace itself already, and it just 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 enough rooms to house a small
group of people. Then, when this King, Louis the fift
died of the pox in seventeen seventy four, the crown
(13:54):
mus 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. Uh,
(14:18):
And she spent a ton of her time. They're like
inside the petit trianon, 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 the revolution forced Louis the
(14:40):
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 the startling chapter in history that
I think more people should know more about. When one
of my favorite parts of it, so weird sentence to say,
(15:01):
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 right right right, the
(15:21):
Palace would never again be home to French royalty, and
in the nineteenth century 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 the other one, the Eiffel Tower, right. And
in the centuries between its construction and the modern day,
(15:44):
it's been host to numerous storied visitors and residents. Some
rumor has it never left. So is it about to
get crazy? Yes, right after this quick break, here's where
(16:04):
it gets crazy. In the past as well as in
the modern age, multiple visitors have reported otherworldly or to
their minds inexplicable phenomena at the palace. Uh. They've alleged,
to put a fine point on it, that they've seen ghost,
specifically King Louis the four and all of these these
(16:28):
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. It
was just you know, we hinted at it was thrown
(16:50):
out ideas here. Dennis Reynolds would say it was the implication.
There are other ghosts that are rumored to haunt the
grounds Marie Antoinette, of course, and then there are post
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
(17:13):
serial killer, probably not, but definitely a philandering francophile. 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
(17:34):
be very insulted to hear this. They're just the also
rans and the stories of hauntings at Versailles. When most
people mention ghost or paranormal activity in Versailles, they're thinking
of a singular, strange afternoon that occurred around a hundred
and seventeen years ago this August. Was it a wrinkle
in time a fold in death. It starts with two
(17:57):
teachers who traveled there from England on August in nineteen
o one. These two academics were Anne Moberley and Eleanor Jordaane,
and these were the principal and vice principal of St.
Hugh's College in Oxford, uh 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,
(18:18):
go to Versailles if you can. And after touring the palace,
they went on search um in the nearby gardens of
the Petit Triannon, 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,
(18:39):
right They passed a deserted farmhouse, they noticed an old
plow line 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 ghosts encounters or
(19:00):
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,
(19:21):
and they asked them in the way to the Petit Treadman,
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 Um, in this shady grove, everything
was very, very still, and um, all of a sudden,
(19:43):
a repulsive, foul looking gentleman, his face pitted with smallpox,
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,
(20:06):
and when they did, they arrived at what they assumed
to be the Petit Treon, and 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,
(20:28):
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 tore the rooms.
And at that point they're encountering other human beings that
they can confirm our human beings, and the dark mood lifts,
(20:48):
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 had encountered
were dressed in garb from approximately seventeen eighty nine. They
also found that some of the buildings they had passed
(21:10):
existed in seventeen eighty nine, but not in the present day. Again,
that's nineteen o one, so from what they believed. In
what later came to be known as the mobilely Jordained incident,
they somehow they thought had traveled a hundred and twelve
years into the past, or seen things that happened a
(21:30):
hundred and twelve years ago, only to be rescued by
the tour guide who is leading that wedding party in
nineteen o one. I want to see a dramatization of this, 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.
(21:52):
Within months of their encounter again August tenth, nineteen o one,
they had 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
(22:13):
Ghost of Trianon, or of course, the moverly Jordaan incident. Uh.
Their 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
(22:39):
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 retro cognitive experience the opposite of precognition, right,
(23:05):
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 then 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,
(23:25):
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? Because even if they were
both like tripping their butts off on some sort of
(23:48):
psychedelic they're not gonna see the same thing. They might
just you know, have a weird freak out of Versailles,
but they're not going to see the same dude in
the green coat and the woman sketching with the you know,
the veil or whatever, the green scarf. Well, but what
if they did have some wine and they were walking
the grounds and then they came across something that was
(24:09):
real that they both saw that maybe they just didn't
know was happening or understand 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 is Jordan's literary executor.
(24:29):
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 hundreds garb
and even with perhaps face paint of smallpox, and they're
(24:51):
all just you know, going around in the period attire
because they're waiting for the performance. It's like backstage, that's
like Disney rules. Man, you never he 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. They were just
(25:12):
wandering about through the gardens and trying to find the
petit try and and 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 your 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,
(25:36):
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 o one. So if that
(25:57):
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. Well, here here's my theory.
Part of the wedding that was going on was the reenactment.
(26:20):
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 petitan On. I think it
was all part of one just opulent wedding party. There's
another theory. Did you hear this whendn't? This also comes
from Evans. She based on a nineteen biography of a
(26:41):
French artist named Robert de Montescue. 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 tableau vivant, in which gay Parisian
men performed the roles of both men and women, kind
of Shakespeare style, and Evans says that maybe Moberley and
(27:07):
Jordaane 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 the Petit chan and was Marian's when it either
alive hundred and twelve years ago or dead and ghost sketching,
(27:31):
Which is you know, obviously their version of ghost riding
the whip, ghost sketching the horse right exactly. There's a
there's a problem that there's no evidence indicating this artist
would have thrown an event in nine one, and ever
since her article, this theory had been reported and re
(27:53):
reported as one of the most likely explanations for the
Versailles time slip, 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
(28:16):
like a black market recreation. It's like a black bag
operation 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 we had established earlier. It's that
(28:39):
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 responsible and we're back. So another potential
(29:01):
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. Uh. If
(29:22):
it's not you know, actually physically seeing ghosts. Uh. And
this is cool. This is something that's called a folly
adieu or madness of two. Uh. And you've probably heard
this term before. I'm connected with stories of identical twins
who for some reason go insane at the same time. Um,
such as Ursula and Sabina Ericsson. I argue that they
(29:44):
didn't go mad. I still think they're like secret spies
or something. Well, this this is interesting. You often will
hear about the madness of two or it could be uh,
fallis you hear about this in terms of twins, one
twin goes crazy. There's there are a couple of cases
in the United Kingdom that involved this sort of uh,
(30:09):
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 non verbal. So if someone is indicating
that they're feeling a mood and you are sympathetic with them,
(30:33):
close with them, they're a friend, colleague, a neighbor, of
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,
(30:54):
before and after you listen to this show, where they'll
subtly mimic maybe the play spin of your arms on
the placement of your legs, or or start nodding when
they ask a question. This stuff, all this, this whole
quiverful of strange nonverbal arrows. They can affect people, whether
(31:14):
or not they're twins, And in this case, I would
I would agree that there's some sand to it, although
it does sound weird because usually if we think about
a 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,
(31:38):
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 butt about
Mobile and Jordan was that they weren't just two colleagues
who taught closely together and took vacations. According to at
(31:59):
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 Ironmonger, who wrote a critique of their
book An Adventure in her own work called Ghost of Versailles,
(32:22):
Miss Mobile and Mr Jordain and their Adventure a Critical Study.
Wow Award for a title there, But it it gets
across exactly what it is. So Iremonger deld into the
nature of their relationship um the two women and basically
concluded that their adventure was this folly, folly, adieu and
uh and they had been so you know. She suggests
(32:46):
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 we're kind of retelling their
story that it grew and grew over time that they
(33:08):
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? Yeah,
m yeah, that's it. You know, this seems like a
little bit odd to have done in the in the
early nine Well, I don't know, Okay, So let's imagine
(33:32):
the Colosseum, the Greek Colosseum. That entire thing was based
or at least it became in the end historical re
enactments of war battles things like that. I mean, I
think this is a celebrating the past, especially victories or
something good or a previous kings. That's true. I guess
(33:52):
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 or they like you have, you know,
civil war reenactments and stuff that seems like much more
of a modern construct. But that call it sumes a
good point. It is a very good point. I I
have a life hack for everyone listening. It is relatively
(34:13):
unethical and is not particularly good. There is no recognized
statute on the amount of time that needs to elapse
between re enactments. 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 re enactment. I think
(34:36):
I think you can get away with it once. I'm
gonna 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. So don't tell anyone, folks. Everybody use it once,
and I would say, be be excruciatingly specific about the
(34:58):
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.
(35:22):
So first England Society for Psychical Research found that the teachers,
originally I 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 cookie ladies.
I was gonna throw that rut out there. They didn't
(35:43):
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 that was weird and
the footman. And they re published the story multiple times,
and each time they republished it, the story seemed to
(36:05):
expand and it caused a stur didn't 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,
(36:25):
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
(36:50):
we're prone to hallucinations. One of them overly was prone
to hallucinations, both audio and visual, since childhood. And there
is 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
(37:12):
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
toga like dress, whom she at first took to be Charlemagne,
(37:33):
but later decided it was an apparition of the Roman
emperor Constantine. So who Perhaps she actually has some form
of the second site. Maybe she truly is seeing historical
figures throughout the past, and flat 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
(37:56):
just a garden variety epiphany, something that's stays with you. Yeah,
the Stendl syndrome. It's like a reverie that you experience
that's very, um all encompassing, borderline debilitating when when you
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. Um.
(38:20):
I'm just wondering if there's a connection there, because it
seems like, you know, and I could see what you're
saying to about the second site. Surely, you know, if
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
(38:42):
weren't triggered by these breathtaking sites. You know, that's a
really good question, and I'm I'm tempted to agree. But
what this does prove is that the teachers are not
or we're not per briskly misleading folks. They weren't themselves
(39:04):
being hucksters or or trying to you know, sell a book.
They were they were, but they weren't. They weren't attempting
to purposefully 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
(39:27):
changing and expanding, right, and part of the reason why
it seems contradictory first to say, well, how could they
both believe this thing was 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.
(39:47):
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 humans 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
(40:11):
and you burned your hand or something, but that probably
happened in a very different way. We've just been a
creating 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
(40:32):
sold like gangbusters, multiple issues, multiple languages, you can go
to Versailles today 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.
(40:52):
And if you do happen to snap a picture of
any ghost, any apparition has some time slip, whatever it is,
send it to us. On Twitter your 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.
(41:15):
If you want to listen to other shows we've done,
go to stuff they don't want you to know. Dot com.
You can even find our videos there what it's crazy? Uh?
And if you don't want to do any of that
stuff and you want to still talk to us, send
us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy and
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