THE VIENNESE WHITE LADY.

Waikato Times, Volume II, Issue 104, 31 December 1872, Page 3

THE VIENNESE WHITE LADY.

TtiE delusion or trick, probably the latter —which has produced the supposed apparition, attributed to the Jesuits, of the White Lady in the Hofburgh at Vienna, rests on a superstition which seems to recur with singular pertinacity among the votaries of the supernatural in Germany. _ There is scarcely a German family of medioeval celebrity which has not its White Lady, generally appearing, like her cousin the Irish Banshee, to announce some impending calamity. The original is said to have been a certain Bertha von Rosenberg, by marriage yon Lichtenstcin, who was killed by domestic ill-usage about the middle of the fifteenth century, and " walked" ever afterwards. But the Rosenbergs intermarried with the more famous house of Hohenzollern, and the White Lady has somehow transferred her residence to the palace at Berlin. Here her appearances have been numerous and manifold, but she generally prefers a " white mourning costume, and carries a chatelaine and bunch of keys in old German fashion." White mourning was worn throughout the middle ages by the widows of the deceased sovereigns and princes. Since those times the White Lady has shown herself so repeatedly at Berlin as almost to have vulgarised her character as a phantom. And it is a rare proof of the simplicity of the old-fashioned German character that, although the superstition was turned to account, as might be expected in the neighbourhood of a court, by all sorts of mvstifiers and inventors of practical jokes, it seems to have lived on just the same. On one occasion a number of ladies were indulging in irreverent jokes respecting the white spectre, when she suddenly appeared in the midst of them ; they took to flight, she caught the last of them and inflicted on her a very unspiritual castigation. Another time she presented a colonel, who was hard up for money to pay the elector's troops, with a sum of a hundred thousand crowns, concealed behind a wall. The elector accepted the story and the loan, and the colonel's fortune was made.