On the other hand, their personal researches in the archives of France have brought to light so many confirmatory facts that both Miss Morison and Miss Lamont are firmly persuaded that the Trianon, its environment, and its people were once exactly as they appeared to them; and that in very truth they saw the place as it looked, not at the time they first visited it, but in the closing years of the French Monarchy, more than a century before.
That historic German ghost, the White Lady of the Hohenzollerns, would likewise seem to have more than a legendary basis. Her mission, apparently, is to announce the death of some member of the Hohenzollern family, and her most frequent haunting-place is the royal palace at Berlin. She was seen as early as 1628, and since the time of Frederick the Great her appearance has been regularly chronicled on the eve of the death of the King of Prussia.
For the matter of that, there are not a few families whose ancestral homes, according to tradition, are haunted by death-announcing ghosts. This is particularly the case with certain distinguished British families. Two white owls perching on the roof of the family mansion are taken as a sure omen of death in the Arundel of Wardour family. The Yorkshire Middletons, a Catholic family, are said to be warned of approaching death by the apparition of a Benedictine nun. Equally noteworthy as a spectral messenger of tragedy is the so-called Drummer of Cortachy Castle, a Scottish ghost that haunts the ancient stronghold of the Ogilvys, Earls of Airlie, but is in evidence only when an Ogilvy is about to die.
The story goes that, hundreds of years ago, when the Scots were little better than barbarians, a Highland chieftain sent a drummer to Cortachy Castle with a message that was not at all to the liking of the Ogilvy of that time. As an appropriate token of his displeasure, he seized the luckless drummer, stuffed him into his drum—he must have been a very small drummer, and have carried a very big drum—and hurled him from the topmost battlements of the castle, breaking his neck.
Just before he was tossed off, the drummer threatened to make a ghost of himself, and haunt the Ogilvys forevermore. He has been, it would seem, as good as his word. Every once in a while ghostly drumming is heard at Cortachy Castle, and always the death of an Ogilvy follows. An especially impressive account of one instance of this peculiar and most unpleasant haunting has been left by a Miss Dalrymple, who happened to be a guest at Cortachy during Christmas week of 1844.
It was her first visit to the Castle, and she was entirely unaware of the existence of the family ghost. On the evening of her arrival, while dressing for dinner, she was startled by hearing under her window music like the muffled beating of a drum. She looked out, but could see nothing, and presently the drumming died away. For the time she thought no more of it, but at dinner she turned to her host, the Earl of Airlie, and asked:
“My lord, who is your drummer?”
His lordship made no reply, Lady Airlie became exceedingly pale, and several of the company, all of whom had heard the question, looked embarrassed. Realizing that she had made a slip of some sort, Miss Dalrymple quickly changed the subject, but after dinner, naturally feeling somewhat curious, she brought it up with one of the younger members of the family, and was answered:
“What! Have you never heard of the Drummer of Cortachy?”