Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  True, the Emperor had changed the hunting lodge into a severe monastery immediately after the tragedy: Where the bedroom once stood there is now an altar, and nuns sworn to silence walk the halls where once conviviality and laughter prevailed. In Vienna, too, in the corridor of the Imperial Castle where the stairs once led to Rudolph’s apartment, a marterl, a typically Austrian niche containing a picture of the Virgin Mary, has been placed.

  But did these formal expressions of piety do anything to calm the spirit of Mary Vetsera? Hardly. Nor was everything as quiet as the official Court powers would have liked it to be.

  The English Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, had some misgivings about the official version of the tragedy. In a letter that Edward, the Prince of Wales, wrote to his mother, Queen Victoria, we find:

  “Salisbury is sure that poor Rudolph and that unfortunate young lady were murdered.”

  But perhaps the most interesting details were supplied by the autopsy report, available many years later:

  “The gun wound of the crown prince did not go from right to left as has been officially declared and would have been natural for suicide, but from left, behind the ear toward the top of the head, where the bullet came out again. Also, other wounds were found on the body. The revolver which was found next to the bed had not belonged to the crown prince; all six shots had been fired.

  “The shotgun wound of the young lady was not found in the temple as has been claimed, but on top of the head. She, too, is said to have shown other wounds.”

  Had Count von Taaffe seized upon the right moment to make a planned suicide appear just that, while actually murdering the hesitant principals?

  We have no record of secret agents coming to Mayerling that day, but then we can’t be sure that they didn’t come, either. So confusing is this comparatively recent story that we can’t be too sure of anything, really. Certainly there was a motive to have Rudolph eliminated. Von Taaffe knew all about his dealings with Karolyi, and could not be sure that Rudolph might not accept a proffered Hungarian crown. To demand that Rudolph be restrained or jailed would not have sat well with the image-conscious Emperor. Yet the elimination of Rudolph, either as an actual traitor or as a potential future threat to von Taaffe’s concepts, was certainly an urgent matter, at that moment.

  Just as von Taaffe was aware of the Hungarian moves and had read the telegrams from Karolyi, so he knew of Rudolph’s suicide talk. Had the Karolyi move prompted him to act immediately, and, seeing that the crown prince had gone to Mayerling with Mary Vetsera, given him an idea to capitalize on what might happen at Mayerling…but to make sure it did? Rudolph’s lack of courage was well known. Von Taaffe could not be sure the crown prince would really kill himself. If Rudolph returned from Mayerling alive, it would be too late. The Hungarian defense bill had to be acted upon at once. Rebellion was in the air.

  Perhaps von Taaffe did not have to send any agents to Mayerling. Perhaps he already had an agent there. Was someone around the crown prince in von Taaffe’s employ?

  These and other tantalizing questions went through my mind in August of 1964 when I visited the old part of the Imperial Castle with my wife Catherine. I was following a slender thread: a ghostly white lady had been observed in the Amalienburg wing. Our arrival was almost comical: Nobody knew anything about ghosts and cared less. Finally, more to satisfy the curiosity of this American writer, the burghauptmann or governor of the castle summoned one of the oldest employees, who had a reputation for historical knowledge. The governor’s name was Neunteufel, or “nine devils,” and he really did have a devil of a time finding this man whose Christian name was Sonntag, or “Sunday.”

  “Is Herr Sonntag in?” he demanded on the intercom.

  Evidently the answer was disappointing, for he said,

  “Oh, Herr Sunday is not in on Friday?”

  Fortunately, however, the man was in and showed us to the area where the phenomenon had been observed.

  Immediately after the Mayerling tragedy, it seemed, a guard named Beran was on duty near the staircase leading up toward the late crown prince’s suite. It was this passage that had been so dear to Mary Vetsera, for she had had to come up this way to join her lover in his rooms. Suddenly, the guard saw a white figure advancing toward him from the stairs. It was plainly a woman, but he could not make out her features. As she got to the marterl, she vanished. Beran was not the only one who had such an unnerving experience. A Jaeger, a member of an Alpine regiment serving in the castle, also saw the figure one afternoon. And soon the servants started talking about it. Several of them had encountered the “white woman,” as they called her, in the corridor used by Mary Vetsera.

  I looked at the marterl, which is protected by an iron grillwork. Next to it is a large wooden chest pushed flush against the wall. And behind the chest I discovered a wooden door.

  “Where does this door lead to?” I asked.

  “No place,” Sonntag shrugged, “but it used to be a secret passage between the outside and Rudolph’s suite.”

  Aha! I thought. So that’s why there is a ghost here. But I could not do anything further at that moment to find out who the ghost was.

  On September 20, 1961 I returned to Vienna. This time I brought with me a Viennese lady who was a medium. Of course she knew where we were—after all, everybody in Vienna knows the Imperial Castle. But she had no idea why I took her into the oldest, least attractive part of the sprawling building, and up the stairs, finally coming to an abrupt halt at the mouth of the corridor leading toward the haunted passage.

  It was time to find out what, if anything, my friend Mrs. Edith Riedl could pick up in the atmosphere. We were quite alone, as the rooms here have long been made into small flats and let out to various people, mainly those who have had some government service and deserve a nice, low-rent apartment.

  With us were two American gentlemen who had come as observers, for there had been some discussion of a motion picture dealing with my work. This was their chance to see it in its raw state!

  “Vetsera stairs….” Mrs. Riedl suddenly mumbled. She speaks pretty good English, although here and there she mixes a German or French word in with it. Of noble Hungarian birth, she is married to a leading Austrian manufacturer and lives in a mansion, or part of one, in the suburb of Doebling.

  “She stopped very often at this place,” she continued now, “waiting, till she got the call….”

  “Where did the call come from?” I asked.

  “From below.”

  Mrs. Riedl had no knowledge of the fact that Mary Vetsera came this way and descended into Rudolph’s rooms by this staircase.

  “The Madonna wasn’t here then…but she prayed here.”

  She walked on, slowly, as if trying to follow an invisible trail. Now she stopped and pointed at the closed-off passage.

  “Stairway…that’s how she went down to Rudolph…over the roof…they met up here where the Madonna now is…and sometimes he met her part of the way up the stairs.”

  No stairs were visible to any of us at this point, but Mrs. Riedl insisted that they were in back of the door.

  “She had a private room here, somewhere in the castle,” she insisted. Officially, I discovered, no such room belonging to Mary Vetsera is recorded.

  “There were two rooms she used, one downstairs and another one farther up,” Mrs. Riedl added, getting more and more agitated. “She changed places with her maid, you see. That was in case they would be observed. In the end, they were no longer safe here, that’s when they decided to go to Mayerling. That was the end.”

  I tried to pinpoint the hub of the secret meetings within the castle.

  “Rudolph’s Jaeger….” Mrs. Riedl replied, “Bratfisch…he brought the messages and handed them to the maid…and the maid was standing here and let her know…they could not go into his rooms because his wife was there, so they must have had some place of their own….”

  We left the spot, and I followed Mrs. Riedl as she walked farther into the
maze of passages that honeycomb this oldest part of castle. Finally, she came to a halt in a passage roughly opposite where we had been before, but on the other side of the flat roof.

  “Do you feel anything here?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do,” she replied “this door…number 77… 79…poor child….”

  The corridor consisted of a number of flats, each with a number on the door, and each rented to someone whose permission we would have had to secure, should we have wished to enter. Mrs. Riedl’s excitement became steadily greater. It was as if the departed girl’s spirit was slowly but surely taking over her personality and making her relive her ancient agony all over again.

  “First she was at 77, later she changed…to 79… these two apartments must be connected….”

  Now Mrs. Riedl turned to the left and touched a window giving onto the inner courtyard. Outside the window was the flat roof Countess Larisch had mentioned in her memoirs!

  The oldest wing of the Imperial Castle, Vienna, where the apartment of the Crown prince was located

  “She same up the corridor and out this window,” the medium now explained, “something of her always comes back here, because in those days she was happiest here.”

  “How did she die?” I shot at her.

  “She wouldn’t die. She was killed.”

  “By whom?”

  “Not Rudolph.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “The political plot. He wanted to be Hungarian King. Against his father. His father knew it quite well. He took her with him to Mayerling because he was afraid to go alone; he thought with her along he might not be killed.”

  “Who actually killed them?”

  “Two officers.”

  “Did he know them?”

  “She knew them, but he didn’t. She was a witness. That’s why she had to die.”

  “Did Franz Josef have anything to do with it?”

  “He knew, but he did not send them…. Das kann ich nicht sagen!” she suddenly said in German, “I can’t say this!”

  What couldn’t she say?

  “I cannot hold the Emperor responsible…please don’t ask me….”

  Mrs. Riedl seemed very agitated, so I changed the subject. Was the spirit of Mary Vetsera present, and if so, could we speak to her through the medium?

  The stair leading up to the apartment of the Crown prince

  “She wants us to pray downstairs at that spot…” she replied, in tears now. “Someone should go to her grave….”

  I assured her that we had just come from there.

  “She hoped Rudolph would divorce his wife and make her Queen, poor child,” Mrs. Riedl said. “She comes up those stairs again and again, trying to live her life over but making it a better life….”

  We stopped in front of number 79 now. The name on the door read “Marschitz.”

  “She used to go in here,” Mrs. Riedl mumbled. “It was a hidden door. Her maid was at 75, opposite. This was her apartment.”

  At the window, we stopped once more.

  “So much has changed here,” the medium said.

  She had never been here before, and yet she knew.

  Later I discovered that the area had indeed been changed, passage across the flat roof made impossible.

  “There is something in between,” she insisted.

  A wall perhaps? No, not a wall. She almost ran back to the Madonna. There the influence, she said, was still strongest.

  “Her only sin was vanity, not being in love,” Mrs. Riedl continued. “She wishes she could undo something…she wanted to take advantage of her love, and that was wrong.”

  Suddenly, she noticed the door, as if she had not seen it before.

  “Ah, the door,” she said with renewed excitement. “That is the door I felt from the other side of the floor. There should be some connection…a secret passage so she could not be seen…waiting here for the go-ahead signal…no need to use the big door…she is drawn back here now because of the Virgin Mary…. Mary was her name also…she can pray here….”

  I asked Mrs. Riedl to try to contact the errant spirit.

  “She is aware of us,” my medium replied after a pause in which she had closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “She smiles at us and I can see her eyes and face. I see this door open now and she stands in the door. Let us pray for her release.”

  On Mrs. Riedl’s urging, we formed a circle and clasped hands around the spot. At this moment I thought I saw a slim white figure directly in front of us. The power of suggestion? “She is crying,” Mrs. Riedl said.

  We then broke circle and left. My American friends were visibly shaken by what they had witnessed, although to me it was almost routine.

  The following day, we returned to the castle. This time we had permission from the governor to open the secret door and look for the passage Mrs. Riedl had said was there. At first, the door would not yield, although two of the castle’s burly workmen went at it with heavy tools. Finally, it opened. It was evident that it had not been moved for many years, for heavy dust covered every inch of it. Quickly, we grouped ourselves around the dark, gaping hole that now confronted us. Musty, moist air greeted our nostrils. One of the workmen held up a flashlight, and in its light we could see the inside of the passage. It was about a yard wide, wide enough for one person to pass through, and paralleled the outer wall. A stairway had once led from our door down to the next lower floor—directly into Crown Prince Rudolph’s apartment. But it had been removed, leaving only traces behind. Likewise, a similar stairway had led over from the opposite side where it must have once linked up with the corridor we had earlier been in—the window Mrs. Riedl had insisted was significant in all this.

  * * *

  The castle’s governor shook his head. The secret passage was a novelty to him. But then the castle had all sorts of secrets, not the least of which were corridors and rooms that did not show on his “official” maps. Some parts of the Imperial Castle date back to the thirteenth century; others, like this one, certainly as far back as Emperor Frederick III, around 1470. The walls are enormously thick and can easily hide hollow areas.

  * * *

  I had taken a number of photographs of the area, in Mrs. Riedl’s presence. One of them showed the significant “reflections” in psychically active areas. The day of our first visit here, we had also driven out to Mayerling with the help of Dr. Beatrix Kempf of the Austrian Government Press Service, who did everything to facilitate our journey. Ghosts or no ghosts, tourists and movie producers are good business for Austria.

  At Mayerling, we had stood on the spot where the two bodies had been found on that cold January morning in 1889. I took several pictures of the exact area, now taken up by the altar and a cross hanging above it. To my surprise, one of the color pictures shows instead a whitish mass covering most of the altar rail, and an indistinct but obviously male figure standing in the right corner. When I took this exposure, nobody was standing in that spot. Could it be? My camera is double exposure proof and I have occasionally succeeded in taking psychic pictures.

  If there is a presence at Mayerling, it must be Rudolph, for Mary Vetsera surely has no emotional ties to the cold hunting lodge, where only misery was her lot. If anywhere, she would be in the secret passageway in the Vienna castle, waiting for the signal to come down to join her Rudolph, the only place where her young heart ever really was.

  I should point out that the sources used by me in my Mayerling research were only read long after our investigation, and that these are all rare books which have long been out of print.

  Like all Viennese, Mrs. Riedl certainly knew about the Mayerling tragedy in a general way. But there had been no book dealing with it in circulation at the time of our visit to the castle, nor immediately before it; the personal memoirs of Countess Maria Larisch, published back in 1913, which contained the reference to the walk across the flat roof and entry by the window, is available only in research libraries. Mrs. Riedl had not been told what our desti
nation or desire would be that hot September afternoon in 1966. Consequently, she would have had no time to study any research material even if she had wanted to—but the very suggestion of any fraud is totally out of character with this busy and well-to-do lady of society.

  Until I put the pieces together, no one else had ever thought of connecting the meager reports of a ghost in the old Amalienburg wing of the castle with Mary Vetsera’s unhappy death. Amtsrat Josef Korzer, of the governor’s staff, who had helped us so much to clear up the mystery of the secret passage, could only shake his head: So the castle had some ghosts, too. At least it gave the Viennese some competition with all those English haunts!

  The question remains unanswered: Who killed the pair, if murder it was? The medium had named two officers. Were they perhaps able to bring off their deed because they were well known to the crown prince? Had Count von Taaffe managed to pervert to his cause two of Rudolph’s good friends?

  If that is so, we must assume that the Hoyos report is nothing more than a carefully constructed alibi.

  On the last day of his life, Rudolph had gotten into an argument with his brother-in-law, Philip von Coburg. The subject was the Habsburg family dinner that night. By failing to make an appearance, Rudolph was, in fact, withdrawing from the carefully laid plans of his cousins. The young archdukes and their in-laws had intended to pressure the aging Emperor into reforming the government, which the majority of them felt could alone save the monarchy from disaster. The most important link in this palace revolution was Rudolph. In refusing to join up, was he not in fact siding with the Emperor?

  If Rudolph had been murdered, was he killed because of his pro-Hungarian leanings, or because he failed to support the family palace revolution? And if it was indeed death by his own hands, can one call such a death, caused by unbearable pressure from conditions beyond his control, a voluntary one? Is it not also murder, albeit with the prince himself as the executioner?

  There may be some speculation as to which of the three alternate events took place. But there is no longer any doubt about Mary Vetsera’s death. She did not commit suicide. She was brutally murdered, sacrificed in a cause not her own. Moreover, there is plenty of “unfinished business” to plague her and make her the restless ghost we found her to be: her last wish not granted—not buried with Rudolph, as both had desired; her personal belongings burned; her family mistreated; and her enemies triumphant.