August 10, 1977

Do Eddies Of Time Haunt The Living?

Sitting around a bonfire on a summer night telling "ghost" stories is great fun - until you move from the realm of fiction to mysterious, supernatural events that really happened.

Then, the shadows seem to move in, and creepy noises magnify in the dark.

Laugh if you will, but how do you explain the strange adventure of Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain which occurred 76 years ago this week?

These two highly regarded English school teachers were visiting in Paris during August of 1901.  On the 10th of that month they journeyed to Versailles, guide book in hand, to see the palace where King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lived in royal splendor before the revolutionaries cut off their heads.

By coincidence - or was it?  - they had chosen the anniversary date of the mob attack on Versailles in 1792 when Marie was dragged off to her tragic fate.

Does terror and violence create a disturbing eddy in the smooth flow of time that lingers for years, even centuries, to haunt succeeding generations?

It may be so, for Annie and Eleanor stepped backwards into time on that hot summer afternoon and talked with people long dead.

The teachers toured the palace in the morning, then rested in the beautiful formal garden.  Refreshed, they set out across the garden to see the Petit Trianon, a small cottage where King Louis and Marie retreated for privacy.

Annie and Eleanor missed a turn in the path and found themselves lost in the maze of hedges and flower beds.  Somewhere in their wanderings they stepped into an eddy of time still swirling unhappily on those grounds.

The sensation was that of walking in a heavy dream.  The landscape was flat like a painted picture.  There was no depth or shadows, and no breeze ruffled a leaf.

Each teacher thought she had suffered a slight fever or a touch of sunstroke, but said nothing to the other for fear of spoiling the outing.

In writing down their experience later, and separately, they found that they had seen some things exactly the same, but that each had seen some things the other had not.

Annie saw a woman shaking a white cloth out of the window of a building.  Eleanor saw some old fashioned farm implements, including a plow, lying on the grass.

They both saw two men wearing strange clothing they thought at the time were masquerade costumes.  The men had on small, tri-cornered hats and long, grayish-green coats.  They asked the men the way to the Petit Trianon.  One answered in a strange monotone that they should continue straight ahead.

Off to the right, Eleanor saw a cottage with a woman handing a jug to a young girl standing in the open doorway.  Later, Eleanor recalled that "I began to feel as though I were walking in my sleep; the heavy dreaminess was oppressive."

Finally they reached the edge of a woods where they could see a man seated near the steps of a garden gazebo.  Both ladies recalled that the man frightened them.  He was swarthy, pockmarked and wore a large hat and heavy black cloak.

Annie shuddered when she later wrote about the man in the gazebo.  "His face was most repulsive - his expression odious.  Everything suddenly looked unnatural therefore unpleasant.  Even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a tapestry.  There was no effect of light and shade.  It was all intensely still."

The teachers hastened away and encountered a young man who came toward them from around a turn in the path.  He was handsome, his hairstyle resembling "an old picture."  His face was flushed and he spoke to them excitedly in oddly accented French urging them to take a different path.

Following the young man's directions Annie and Eleanor turned across an attractive rustic bridge over a tiny ravine, and came at last to the Petit Trianon.  On the lawn before the cottage they stopped to watch an aristocratic lady sitting and sketching the scenery.  The lady wore a large white hat, and an old-fashioned green bodice above a full, short skirt.

Presently a uniformed guide emerged from the cottage and showed the teachers through the building, after which they returned to the palace without incident.

It was not until a week later that Annie and Eleanor discovered they had shared a unique, supernatural experience.  Without going into detail with each other, they first wrote down their observations and then compared notes.  They were amazed and a little frightened.

For the next nine years they researched French history to pin-point the period of their backward walk in time.

They discovered that the two men in masquerade were Swiss guards on duty that last day before the mobs arrived.  The girl in the doorway was named Marion, and she had lived with her mother on the palace grounds.  The repulsive man in the black cloak was the Comte de Vaudreuil, a Creole friend of the Queen.  And, most exciting, from the journal of Madame Eloffe, the Queen's dressmaker, the teachers learned that Marie Antoinette wore a large white hat, with green bodice and a full, short skirt while sketching on the lawn that last day.

Annie and Eleanor published their adventure, and subsequent research, in a book that was a sensation of its time.  Scholars debunked the account, pointing out that the details were historical facts - except the rustic bridge over the ravine.  No description of that feature could be found even though several contemporary drawings of the Versailles garden were available.

However, in 1912 the original architect's plan for the Versailles garden was discovered crumpled in a sealed off chimney.

Clearly shown was a rustic bridge over a tiny ravine!

Author: Lindsey Williams