Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  After a moment or two, Edith Riedl straightened up. “I think she feels relieved now,” she said.

  We continued our inspection of the building. “This is the execution chamber,” the guide said casually, and pointed out the execution chair and sword. Then the guide, whose name is Leitner, took us to the prisoners’ well, showing us its enormous depth by dropping a lighted flare into it. It took the flare several seconds to hit bottom. “Five thousand Turks built it in thirteen years’ time,” he said.

  Mrs. Riedl stepped closer to the opening of the well, then shrank back. “Terrible,” she mumbled. “I can’t go near it.”

  I wondered how many of the murdered Turks were still earthbound in this deep shaft.

  * * *

  Outside, there was sunshine and one of those very pleasant late-summer afternoons for which southern Austria is famous.

  We passed the chapel dedicated to Rosalie, but in our hearts we knew that it had not done much good. Quite possibly our visit had done more for the tormented spirit of the ancient Burgfrau than the self-glorifying building atop the hill.

  We consulted the maps, for our next destination, Bernstein, lay some thirty miles or more to the west. We drove through the backwoods of the land, quiet little villages with nary a TV aerial in sight, and railroad tracks that hadn’t seen a train in years. It was getting cooler and darker and still no sign of Bernstein!

  I began to wonder if we had not taken a wrong turn somewhere when all of a sudden we saw the castle emerge from behind a turn in the road.

  Not as imposing as Forchtenstein, Bernstein impresses one nevertheless by its elegance and Renaissancelike appearance within a small but cultured park. There is a mine of semiprecious stones called smaragd nearby, and the downstairs houses a shop where these stones are on display. This is a kind of wild emerald, not as valuable as a real one, of course, but very pretty with its dark green color and tones.

  Bernstein castle goes back to the thirteenth century and has changed hands continuously between Austrian and Hungarian nobles. Since 1892 it has belonged to the Counts Almassy, Hungarian “magnates” or aristocrats.

  We arrived at a most inappropriate time. The Count had a number of paying guests which helped defray the expenses of maintaining the large house, and it was close to dinner time. Nevertheless, we were able to charm him into taking us to the haunted corridor.

  On November 11, 1937, Count Almassy, a tall, erect man now in his late sixties, was sitting in his library when one of his guests asked for a certain book. The library can be reached only by walking down a rather narrow, long corridor connecting it with the front portion of the building.

  “I left the library, walked down the passage with a torch—I don’t like to turn on the main lights at night—well, when I came to this passage, I saw by the light of my torch [flashlight] a female figure kneeling in front of a wooden Madonna that stands at that spot. It was placed there in 1914 by my mother when both my brothers and I were away in the war. Of course I had often heard talk of a ‘White Lady of Bernstein,’ so I realized at once that I was seeing a ghost. My first impression was that she looked like a figure cast in plaster of Paris with hard lines. She wore a Hungarian noblewoman’s dress of the fifteenth century, with a woman’s headgear and a big emerald-green stone on her forehead which threw a dim, green light around her. She had her hands folded under her left cheek.”

  “What did you do when you saw her?” I asked.

  “I had time to switch on the light in the passage,” the Count replied, “so that I had her between two lights, that of my torch and the electric light overhead. There was no possible mistake, I saw her clearly. Then just as suddenly, she vanished.”

  “What is the tradition about this ghost, Count Almassy?” I asked.

  “Well, she is supposed to be an Italian woman, Catherine Freschobaldi—of a Florentine family which still exists, in fact—mentioned in Dante’s Inferno. She married a Hungarian nobleman, Count Ujlocky, of a very old Hungarian family. Her husband was the last King of Bosnia. The family died out. He was very jealous, without any reason, and so he killed her, according to one version, by stabbing her; according to another, by walling her in. That is the story.”

  “Has anyone else seen the White Lady of Bernstein?”

  “Many people. When I was a boy, I remember every year someone or other saw her. When I was in the army, between 1910 and 1913, she was seen many, many times. In 1921 she was seen again when there were Hungarian occupation troops garrisoned at Bernstein during the shortlived Austro-Hungarian campaign of that year—and the ghostly lady chased them away! Then, of course, in 1937, as I told you, and that was the last time I saw her.”

  “I believe also that a friend of yours saw her in Africa in the Cameroons? How does this fit in?”

  Count Almassy laughed. “Well, that’s another story, that one. An Army friend of mine—I really did not know him too well, I met him in 1916, and he left Austria in 1937 and bought a farm in the Cameroons. He became a wealthy man. In 1946 he experienced a strange incident.

  “An apparition very much like the White Lady of Bernstein (although he knew nothing whatever about our ghost) appeared to him and spoke to him in Italian.

  “In 1954 he came to see me to check on the story this ghost had told him. The ghost claimed to be the famous White Lady and he decided to come to Austria to see if there was such a ghost.”

  “Remarkable,” I said. “I can only assume that the apparition in the Cameroons was a thought projection, unless, of course, your ghost is no longer bound to this castle.”

  The Count thought for a moment. “I do hope so,” he finally said. “This is a drafty old castle and Africa is so much warmer.”

  * 22

  The Secret of Mayerling

  IN A WORLD RIFE with dramatic narratives and passionate love stories, with centuries of history to pick and choose from, motion picture producers of many lands have time and again come back to Mayerling and the tragic death of Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria as a subject matter that apparently never grows stale.

  This is probably so because the romantic Mayerling story satisfies all the requirements of the traditional tear-jerker: a handsome, misunderstood prince who cannot get along too well with his stern father, the Emperor; a loving but not too demonstrative wife whom the prince neglects; a brazen young girl whose only crime is that she loves the prince—these are the characters in the story as seen through Hollywood eyes.

  To make sure nobody objects to anything as being immoral, the two lovers are shown as being truly in love with each other—but as the prince is already married, this love cannot be and he must therefore die. The Crown Princess gets her husband back, albeit dead. In the motion picture version the political differences between father and son are completely neglected, and the less-than-sterling qualities of the young Baroness Vetsera are never allowed to intrude on the perfect, idyllic romance.

  The prince goes to the Prater Park in Vienna, sees and falls in love with the young woman, secret meetings are arranged, and love is in bloom. But then the piper must be paid. Papa Franz Josef is upset, reasons of state must be considered, and commoners (to a crown prince a mere baroness is like a commoner!) do not marry the heir to the imperial throne. They could run away and chuck it all—but they don’t. In this perhaps, the movie versions come closer to the truth than they realized: Rudolph would never have run off, and Vetsera was too much in love with him to do anything against his wishes.

  Nothing is made of the Emperor’s political jealousy or the total lack of love between the crown prince and the wife that was forced upon him by his father. In the pictures, she is the wronged woman, a pillar of moral concern to the millions of married moviegoers who have paid to see this opus.

  There is apparently a never-ending attraction in the yarn about an unhappy, melancholy prince in love with a young woman who wants to die for and with him. Perhaps the thrill of so close a juxtaposition of life-creating love and life-taking death holds the secret t
o this powerful message, or perhaps it is the age-old glamor of princely intrigue and dashing romance that keeps moviegoers enthralled from generation to generation.

  But does this tell the true story of the tragedy that came to a head at the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling, or were the real secrets of Mayerling quite different?

  To seek an understanding of the unfortunately rather grim facts from which the screenwriters have spun their romantic versions, we must, first of all, look at the secret undercurrents of political life in the Austrian Empire of the 1880s.

  For decades, the military powers of the great empire had been declining, while Germany’s star had kept rising. A reactionary political system holding sway over Austria seemed out of step with the rest of Europe. A reluctance on the part of a starchy court and its government to grant any degree of self-determination to the many foreign elements in the empire’s population was clearly leading toward trouble.

  Especially there was trouble brewing with the proud Hungarians. Never reconciled to the incorporation of their kingdom into the Austrian Empire, the Magyars had openly rebelled in 1848 and done it with such force that the Austrians had to call for Russian troops to help them.

  In 1849 the revolt was quashed, and Hungary became more enslaved than ever. But the struggle that had been lost on the battlefield continued in Parliament and the corridors of the Imperial Palace. Hungary pressed for its national identity until, in 1867, the government gave in: the so-called Ausgleich, or reconciliation, acknowledged the existence of a Hungarian nation, and the Empire was changed into a dual monarchy, with separate Austrian and Hungarian parliaments, ministers, and of course languages, all under the rule of the Habsburg Emperor.

  Austro-Hungary was now a weaker, but less turbulent giant, united only around the person of its ruler, the aging Emperor Franz Josef. Still, the Hungarian magnates pursued a separatist policy, gradually driving wedges between the two halves of the Danube monarchy, while the Germanic Austrian ruling class tried everything within its power to contain the Hungarians and to keep a firm upper hand.

  By the 1880s there was no question of another armed insurrection. The Hungarians knew it would be unsuccessful, and they weren’t going to take a chance unless they were sure of positive results. But they thought they could get greater attention for Hungarian affairs, greater influence by Hungarians in the councils of state and in trade matters. The Magyars were on the march again, but without a leader.

  Then they found a sympathetic ear in the most unlikely quarter, however: Rudolph, the crown prince, who had grown up in the shadow of his illustrious father, but who was also very critical of his father’s political accomplishments, because he did not share his father’s conservative views.

  Rudolph was born in 1858, and in 1888 he was exactly thirty years old. Although he was the heir apparent and would some day take over the reins of the government, he was permitted little more than ceremonial duties. He had himself partly to blame for this situation, for he was outspoken, and had made his sympathies with the underdogs of the Empire well known. He did not hold his tongue even among friends, and soon word of his political views reached the Court. Even if his father had wanted to overlook these views, the Prime Minister, Count Eduard von Taaffe, could not. To him, an archconservative, Rudolph was clearly not “on the team,” and therefore had to be watched.

  Hoping to keep Rudolph from the center of political activity, Count von Taaffe managed to get the crown prince and the crown princess sent to Hungary, but it turned out to be a mistake after all. While residing in Budapest, Rudolph endeared himself to the Hungarian partisans, and if he had nurtured any doubts as to the justice of their cause, he had none when he returned to Vienna.

  Also, during his sojourn in Hungary, Rudolph had learned to be cautious, and it was a sober, determined man who re-entered the princely apartments of the Imperial Castle. Located on the second floor in the central portion of the palace and not very close to the Emperor’s rooms, these apartments could easily be watched from both inside the walls and from the outside, if one so desired, and Count von Taaffe desired just that.

  Perhaps the most fascinating of recent Mayerling books is a bitter denunciation of the Habsburg world and its tyranny underneath a façade of Viennese smiles. This book was written in English by Hungarian Count Carl Lonyay, whose uncle married the widowed ex-Crown Princess Stephanie. Lonyay inherited the private papers of that lady after her death, and with it a lot of hitherto secret information. He did a painstaking job of using only documented material in this book, quoting sources that still exist and can be checked, and omitting anything doubtful or no longer available, because of Franz Josef’s orders immediately after the tragedy that some very important documents pertaining to Rudolph’s last days be destroyed.

  “Rudolph was a virtual prisoner. He was kept under strict surveillance. No one could visit him unobserved. His correspondence was censored.” Thus Lonyay describes the situation after Rudolph and Stephanie returned to the old Imperial Castle.

  Under the circumstances, the Crown Prince turned more and more to the pursuit of women as a way to while away his ample free time. He even kept a diary in which each new conquest was given a rating as to standing and desirability. Although Rudolph’s passing conquests were many, his one true friend in those days was Mizzi Kaspar, an actress, whom he saw even after he had met the Baroness Vetsera.

  Mizzi was more of a confidante and mother confessor to the emotionally disturbed prince, however, than she was a mistress. Moodiness runs in the Habsburg family, and mental disease had caused the death of his mother’s cousin, Louis II of Bavaria. Thus, Rudolph’s inheritance was not healthy in any sense, and his knowledge of these facts may have contributed to his fears and brooding nature, for it is true that fear of unpleasant matters only hastens their arrival and makes them worse when they do occur, while rejection of such thoughts and a positive attitude tend to smooth their impact.

  There is a persistent hint that Rudolph’s illness was not only mental, but that he had somehow also contracted venereal disease along the highways and byways of love. In the latter years of his life he often liked the company of common people in the taverns of the suburbs, and found solace among cab drivers and folksingers.

  As Rudolph’s frustrations grew and he found himself more and more shunted away from the mainstream of political activity, he often hinted that he wished to commit suicide. Strangely, he did not expect death to end all his problems: He was not a materialist, but he had mystical beliefs in a hereafter and a deep curiosity about what he would find once he crossed the threshold.

  Perhaps this direction of his thoughts got its start after an incident during his residence in Prague some years before. At that time, the daughter of a Jewish cantor saw him pass by and immediately fell in love with the prince. Her parents sent her away from Prague, but she managed to get back and spent the night sitting underneath his windows. The next morning she had contracted pneumonia, and in short order she died. Word got to the Crown Prince and he was so touched by this that he ordered flowers put on her grave every day. Although he had conquered many women and immediately forgotten them, the attachment of the one girl he had never even met somehow turned into a romantic love for her on his part. Until he crossed paths with Mary Vetsera, this was the only true love of his life, unfulfilled, just as his ambitions were, and very much in character with his nihilistic attitudes.

  The Secret of Mayerling: The hunting lodge, now a Carmelite monastery

  Now, in the last year of life, he kept asking people to commit suicide with him so that he need not enter the new world alone. “Are you afraid of death?” he would ask anyone who might listen, even his coachmen. A classical Austrian answer, given him a day before his own death, came from the lips of his hired cab driver, Bratfisch:

  “When I was in the Army, no, I wasn’t afraid of death. I wasn’t permitted to. But now? Yes.”

  It didn’t help to put Rudolph’s mind at rest. But people who announce beforehand
their intentions to do away with themselves, seldom carry out their threat.

  “Rudolph announced his decision to commit suicide, verbally and in writing, to a number of persons. Of these, not even his father, his wife, his cousin, or the two officers on his staff ever made a serious attempt to prevent him from carrying out his plan, although it was clear for all to see that Rudolph’s state of mind gave rise to grave concern,” Lonyay reports.

  But despite this longing for death, Rudolph continued a pretty lively existence. It was on November 5, 1888 that he saw Mary Vetsera for the first time in the Freudenau, a part of the large Prater Park that was famed for its racing. She was not yet eighteen, but had led anything but a sheltered life. The daughter of the widowed Baroness Helen Vetsera had already had a love affair with a British officer in Cairo at age sixteen, and was developed beyond her years. Her mother’s family, the Baltazzis, were of “Levantine” origin, which in those days meant anything beyond the Hungarian frontiers to the east. Lonyay calls them Greeks, but Lernet-Holenia describes them as Jewish or part-Jewish. Their main claim to fame was interest in, and a knowledge of, horse breeding, and since Vienna was a horsey city, this talent opened many doors to them that would otherwise have remained closed. Helen’s husband, Victor von Vetsera, had been an interpreter at the Austrian Embassy in Constantinople, and this later enabled her to move to Vienna with her daughter Mary.

  What struck Rudolph immediately when he saw the girl was her similarity to the cantor’s daughter who had died for him in Prague. Although they had never spoken, he had once glimpsed her and did remember her face. Mary had lots to offer on her own: She was not beautiful in the strictest sense, but she appeared to be what today we call “very sexy.”

  After the initial casual meeting in the Freudenau, Mary herself wrote the prince a letter expressing a desire to meet again. Rudolph was, of course, interested, and asked his cousin, Countess von Larisch, to arrange matters for him discreetly. Marie Larisch gladly obliged her cousin, and the two met subsequently either in Prater Park or at various social functions. So far there had been no intimate relations between them. The relationship was a purely romantic one as Rudolph found himself drawn to the young woman in a way none of his other conquests had ever attracted him. It wasn’t until January 13, 1889, that the two became lovers in Countess Larisch’s apartment at the Grand Hotel.