e seen some account of an
apparition said to have been seen recently in the royal palace at Berlin,
and known under the name of the "White Lady." M. Minutoli, lately chief
of the Police at Berlin, has been amusing himself by looking up the
history of this visitant from the unknown world, and has published a
variety of curious particulars respecting her, drawn in a measure from
documents preserved in the royal archives, as well as from old-time
chronicles and dissertations, Latin and German middle age doggerel, and
the records of jurists, historians and theologists. Several persons are
designated in the early history of the family of Hohenzollern as that
unquiet soul who for some three hundred years has performed the functions
of palace-ghost. Many writers agree that she was a Countess named
Orlamuende, Beatrice, or Cunigunde, and that she was desperately in love
with Count Albert of Nuremberg, and was led by her passion to a crime
which is the cause of her subsequent ghostly disquiet. Mr. Minutoli
proves that this lady cannot be the same that alarms the palace with her
untimely visitations. The accounts of the White Lady ascend to 1486, and
she was first seen at Baireuth. Subsequently two ghosts were heard of,
one white and one black. They were several times boldly interrogated and
interesting discoveries arrived at. In 1540, Count Albert the Warrior
laid in wait for the apparition, seized it with his powerful arm and
flung it head over heels down into the castle court-yard. The next
morning the chancellor, Christopher Hass, was found there with his neck
broken, and upon his person a dagger and a letter proving him to have had
treasonable designs. Notwithstanding the spirit has several times been
thus compromised, it has maintained itself to the present day. It was
first seen in Berlin January 1, 1598, eight days before the death of the
Prince Royal John George. When the French invasion took place, it
returned to Baireuth and was patriotic enough to take up its abode in the
new chateau which had never been occupied before the arrival of the
French officer. Even Napoleon called the place _ce maudit chateau_, on
account of its mysterious inhabitant, and had to give up his lodgings
to the ghost. He stopped in the chateau on his way to Russia but when he
returned next year he avoided passing the night there. With regard to the
last appearance at the palace at Berlin just before the late attempt on
the life of the king, and wh