White woman of amber

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The White Lady of Bernstein is a ghostly apparition at Bernstein Castle , which has been reported on repeatedly since the 19th century.

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A collection of sagas from Burgenland printed in 1931 indicates that the White Woman has been observed by Bernstein since 1859. In 1912 she allegedly showed herself at a torchlight procession by the village fire brigade in front of the lord's family and many of the villagers. It is said to have appeared shortly before the First World War , and most recently in 1921. The petite female figure with flowing hair hugs her left cheek with her clasped hands and looks sadly into space. Some claimed that they were using their hands to cover a neck wound or the handle of a stiletto sticking out of their throat. The white woman wears a kind of crown on her head, a bunch of keys on her belt, and a white veil covers her entire appearance. Apparently the white woman always asks the living with waving gestures to follow her. It should appear - mostly in the evening hours - at various points in the castle and, as it were, float over the stairs. Finally she arrives in the chapel, kneels down in prayer in front of the altar and then disappears. Sometimes she is said to have looked down into the courtyard from a hall window .

Another legend wants to explain the origin of the haunted by a murder: According to this, Bernstein Castle had a lord of the castle from the noble family of Iločki (Hungarian: Újlaki) in the 16th century . He had an Italian for his wife - which perhaps explains the ghost's small figure - and once surprised her during an affair with the secretary. He thrust a dagger into his heart while he had his unfaithful wife thrown into the fathomless well of the castle.

The authors who wrote about the White Lady von Bernstein in 1929 (see next section) did not yet have a name for her; after that, however, one seems to have been invented. In 1953 an author wrote that she was Giovanna Frescobaldi from Florence, that her husband Lorentz von Ujlak caught her with an Italian lover from her youth, whereupon she no longer appeared and was walled in alive. In even more recent traditions, the White Woman of Bernstein is called Cathalina Frescobaldi.

Investigation from 1929

In 1929 Johannes Illig from Göppingen published a serious parapsychological study on the white woman von Bernstein, for which he had obtained numerous reports and testimony. In Illig's essay there is even a photo of the White Frau von Bernstein, which is said to have been taken on April 30, 1913. According to Illig, the first reports about the white woman come from 1899/1900, in which it is said, admittedly only according to hearsay, that the white woman appeared in the castle many times during the war years of 1859, 1864 and 1866. The “crown” of the white woman is specified in the testimony collected by Illig as “ párta ”, a diadem-like Hungarian headdress. In contrast to the above-reported embellishments of the saga, Illig does not want to commit himself to a specific historical event that could have triggered the apparition of the White Woman, and neither does his eyewitness accounts say that the White woman has a neck wound or a stiletto cover with your hand or use gestures to ask the observer to follow her. A typical example is quoted from the report printed in Illig by Baroness RH, who saw the White Woman on June 16, 1912:

“It was a quarter to eleven o'clock in the evening [...] When I entered the courtyard gate, I looked to the left towards the hall, where the large stone staircase is. It was pitch black; I was just about to turn away when suddenly the staircase became very bright. [...] The light was strong yellow and completely calm. The stone railing of the central wing was illuminated and the wall was very bright all the way up. After a few seconds a figure emerged in this light. I thought it was a joke to scare me. Until then I had looked very calmly, but while I was looking at the figure and saw it clearly slowly rising from step to step, suddenly, as if from outside, I was paralyzed and the terrible feeling of seeing something supernatural [...] I had never believed in ghosts, at that moment it was like a revelation: There is! The figure was not tall and gave the impression of a young, slender, graceful being; it was clear and vivid, but still more fragrant and its gait more floating than that of a real person. The whole figure was wrapped in a fine white veil, I saw no further details. Nowhere on the figure or the wall was a shadow, everything light in light, the figure most shining. [...] At the end of the stairs the apparition disappeared or melted away. [...] "

According to Illig, the White Lady von Bernstein was a real, so-called "locally bound" spook . Illig sums up:

"One could think of a fraudulent antics or of endemic hallucinations, but not only the long observation period and the weight of the consistent testimonies coming from the most diverse people speak against it, but above all the [...] peculiarity of the secondary circumstances. If the apparition had been a disguised human figure, then it would certainly have fallen into the hands of its captors, who […] reached for it. But if it had been a light projected out of some hiding place, its appearance would not have been accompanied by a crackling noise like dragging silk clothes or a cold breeze. But it is precisely these incidental circumstances, which speak against fraudulent manipulation, that are very often observed features of the locally bound spook. "[...]" From what we are told about her, it is clear that the "white woman" is a clear and full one Cannot have sense consciousness in the human way. Because the environment, at least that which is perceptible to the senses, has no essential influence on their behavior. She behaves as if it weren't there. Although she uses the doors, stairs and corridors of the castle to get around, she also finds the altar of the house chapel to kneel down in front of it, but the people apparently do not protect them or they are to them as if they were not there. She gives no answer to questions, not even a sign, and it even happened that someone who accidentally ran into her ran through her without feeling any resistance. As one witness puts it, she appears to be “touchingly helpless”. Only if she is persecuted, or if she is otherwise unkind, e.g. B. shoots at it, it disappears either completely or for a moment. Two witnesses, one of whom was chasing her and calling in a frivolous tone, the other having bumped into her, report that she turned to look at them and stared at them - or at least the former - with a stare, but through him as it were into the void. This gives the impression that she senses certain human emotions, [...] especially those of an unsympathetic nature, in some way and reacted to them, but not like a conscious person [...]. Even when she made a gesture, as if to wave or threaten, the movement was so vague that the two witnesses in question were unable to establish with certainty what meaning it had or whether it had any meaning at all . "[...]" She lives, spun in some dream or delusion, even after shedding her material body, her instinctual and wishful life, unconcerned about her environment, kneeling down at the altar of the house chapel, wandering through the corridors and rooms, showing himself in the courtyard and behaves not like someone who has a clear knowledge of his surroundings, but like a dreamer or night walker ”.

In response to Illig's inquiries, General Josef Peter wrote a supplementary report on the White Lady von Bernstein in the same year 1929; he too assumed a real spook and referred to the book by Gyömörey: "Schloss Bernstein im Burgenland" (1927), which contains 26 reports from eyewitnesses to the spook. Unlike the more recent saga, which makes the white woman herself an Italian, Peter states that the white woman should have been a "foreigner" according to the Bernstein vernacular and her lover an Italian nobleman.

literature

  • Johannes Illig: The "White Woman" at Bernstein Castle in Burgenland , in: Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie, 4th year 1929 (= Psychic Studies, year 56), 2nd issue, p. 49-75 online here
  • Josef Peter: The white woman of Bernstein Castle in Burgenland , in: Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie, 4th year 1929 (= Psychic Studies, year 56), 8th issue, pp. 453–456 online here
  • Christof Bieberger, Alexandra Gruber, Johannes Herberstein: "Ghost castles in Austria", Ueberreuter Verlag, Vienna 2004.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Anton Mailly, Adolf Pfarr and Ernst Löger (eds.): Sagen aus dem Burgenland , Vienna and Leipzig 1931, No. 4, page 18. Quoted from [1]
  2. ^ Based on Helene Erdödy: Almost one hundred years of life memories , Zurich-Leipzig-Vienna 1929, pp. 187f. Quoted from [2]
  3. ↑ Bruno Grabinski: Spook and ghostly apparitions. 4th edition Graz 1953, pp. 334 and 364ff.
  4. ^ Renate Mackay: The middle Burgenland. The middle Burgenland. Neckenmarkt 2010, p. 105
  5. ↑ Illig, Die "Weiße Frau", pp. 59, 61–65. For the photo of the White Woman from Bernstein, cf. also Emil Mattiesen , The personal survival of death , vol. 3, 1939 (reprint Berlin – New York 1987), pp. 29–32.
  6. ↑ Illig, Die "Weiße Frau", p. 51. The wars are the Sardinian War in 1859, the German-Danish War in 1864 and the German War in 1866.
  7. ↑ Illig, The "White Woman", p. 54
  8. ↑ Illig, Die “Weiße Frau”, p. 60, cites only one report in which the neck wound and stiletto are expressly “underwritten observations”.
  9. ↑ Illig, The "White Woman", p. 54
  10. ↑ Illig, Die "Weiße Frau", p. 60
  11. ↑ Illig, Die "Weiße Frau", pp. 61f., 66, 73
  12. ↑ Josef Peter: The white woman of Bernstein Castle in Burgenland (see literature), p. 453. The book title mentioned by Peter means: W. Erwemweig: Bernstein Castle in Burgenland: Fragments from past and present . Self-published by Anton von Gyömörey. Graz 1927.
  13. ↑ Peter, The White Woman, p. 455