The Moberly-Jourdain Incident

Since this week is the Paris Olympics, I thought I ought to do something with a Paris theme. And, since we were all treated to the gruesome sight of a decapitated Marie Antionette during the opening ceremonies, I started searching for sightings of the ghost of the infamous queen. I was surprised when I came across the Moberly-Jourdain Incident, so I thought I’d share it with you.

The Vintage News.com has an article that starts us off.

“Something weird happened to two British ladies while they were visiting Versailles, France, on 10 August 1901. Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain claim that they traveled through time and met some historical personalities.

This paranormal event happened around Petit Trianon, a small manor house on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. The chateau was built between 1762 and 1768 during the reign of Louis XV. Later, Louis XVI gave it to his 19-year-old wife, Queen Marie Antoinette.

After taking a short tour around the Palace of Versailles, Moberly and Jourdain thought it was boring and decided to take a stroll in the gardens around the castle and visit the Petit Trianon. The chateau is located in the park called Grand Trianon. When they reached the entrance of the park, it was closed.

Then, they decided to use their guidebook to find their way to Petit Trianon, and soon, they got lost. Instead of going on the main street called Allée des Deux Trianons, they entered a small alley and missed the manor house. Apparently, this was not their biggest problem. Here’s what happened next.”

Okay, insert warning music here – dun, dun, DUN!

I know you want to know what happened next, but you also might want to know a little bit about these ladies.

The Ghost in My Machine.com tells us, “In August of 1901, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were 54 and 37, respectively. Both were highly educated, well-respected academics; Moberly had been appointed principal of St. Hugh’s Hall – later St. Hugh’s College of Oxford University – in 1886, while Jourdain, who had studied at Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall, was the co-founder and headmistress of a boarding and day school for girls called Corran Collegiate School. Jourdain would later earn a doctorate from the University of Paris and become the vice principal of St. Hugh’s with Moberly at the helm.”

So, not ladies who would benefit from telling far-fetched tales.

Ranker.com continues the tale.

“As they strolled, the two women went down an empty lane, searching for the Petit Trianon and Marie Antoinette’s Hamlet. The two ended up lost in the woods, and they asked a pair of gardeners for directions. They walked past a woman and girl in a cottage, a pair of guards wearing capes, and a man at a pavilion. They spoke to a gentleman with a strange accent and were scolded away from a chapel.

The winding path took Moberly and Jourdain over a rustic bridge and through an arbor, then across a meadow with long grass. Finally, they reached a lady sitting on a terrace sketching. The entire walk struck both women as completely ordinary yet eerie. Moberly wrote that “the stillness and oppressiveness were so unnatural.” It was almost as though “we were walking in a dream.” It was only later that the women wondered if they had slipped through time.

Both women described a feeling of depression and anxiety, beginning when they wandered down the path. Moberly was shocked to learn that Jourdain didn’t see a woman sketching on the terrace, even though Moberly swore they sat only a few feet from her. After their journey, Moberly asked Jourdain, “Do you think that the Petit Trianon is haunted?”

Jourdain instantly responded, “Yes, I do.””

Being academics, both women wanted to investigate and research what happened to them in the gardens. Wikipedia.com explains,

“According to Jourdain and Moberly, neither woman mentioned the incident to the other until a week after leaving Versailles when Moberly, in a letter to her sister about their trip, started writing about the afternoon of the Versailles incident. Three months later, in Oxford, the pair said they compared their notes and decided to write separate accounts of what happened while also researching the history of the Trianon. They thought they might have seen events that took place on 10 August 1792, only six weeks before the abolition of the French monarchy, when the Tuileries palace in Paris was besieged and the king’s Swiss guards were massacred.

According to their narrative, they visited the Trianon Gardens again on several occasions but were unable to trace the path they took. Various landmarks, such as the kiosk and the bridge, were missing, and the grounds were full of people. Trying to come up with an explanation, they wondered if they had stumbled across a private party, or an event booked that day. However, they found that nothing had been booked that afternoon. Through their research, they thought they recognized the man they reportedly saw by the kiosk as the Comte de Vaudreuil, a friend of Marie Antoinette, who herself Moberly had claimed to see.

Convinced that the grounds were haunted, they decided to publish their story in a book, An Adventure (1911), under the pseudonyms of Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont. The book, containing the claim that Marie Antoinette had been encountered in 1901, caused a sensation. However, many critics did not take it seriously on the grounds of the implausibilities and inconsistencies that it contained. A review of the book by Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research suggested that the women had misinterpreted normal events that they had experienced. In 1903, an old map of the Trianon Gardens was found and showed a bridge that the two women had claimed to have crossed that had not been on any other map. The identity of the authors of An Adventure was not made public until 1931.”

If I could turn back time…

Maybe you can!

Happy Friday!!!